It's absolutely an issue, and has been for a while. I've had to replace my filters every 3 weeks over the last decade. It's why they started replacing all of the water mains last year.

>You realize in mass teacher contracts go for multiple years and automatically extend if no new contract is ratified, so there isn’t a period when teachers aren’t cover by a contract right?

It's a little more nuanced than that. While the contract between the union and the district lasts for multiple years, individual teacher's contracts are year to year. One of the guarantees of professional status (aka tenure) is that the district has to offer you a contract for the next school year. This is why non professional status teachers (who haven't finished 3 years employment) can be non-renewed at the end of each year without reason.

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>One example could be an arbitration process. No new contract by x date? Forced arbitration run by the state.

And you've just struck on the reason for pushing the bill allowing for strikes. Ask for the ability to strike, settle for forced arbitration. No district would willingly add it to their existing contracts (since it cedes power that they currently "have"), so you backdoor the state into requiring it as a compromise.

Yep. Right around the time of the 2008 recession, a handful of school committees got it in their head (on the advice of their legal counsel) that the fact that teacher strikes are illegal means that they could refuse to negotiate in good faith. It has since expanded to being a statewide issue.

>However, a teacher for example, is given their summer pay as a lump sum at the end of the year instead of being distributed through their working hours. In practice this means that teachers who leave before the school year's end lose 25% of their yearly pay. This would be similar to if you quit your job, 25% of your pay was held as a punishment. No private employer would get away with this.

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Umm... not even close. The pay you get is for 185 work days. If you leave during the year, you will be paid for the number of days you worked. If the amount you were paid doesn't cover all of the days you worked, the difference will be added to your last check.

The "summer pay" you speak of is the district paying out the balance owed on your contract if you decided (or the district required) your pay to be split into 26 checks instead of 21. The only reason why it's doled out in a balloon payment is because the year-to-year contracts expire on June 30 (before the start of the next fiscal year on July 1), so they can't have any remaining obligations on their books.

>If it is a safety issue, call OSHA. There is no need for a union.

Fun fact, public schools are not subject to OSHA regulation unless they're vocational schools. (I learned about this one during my laboratory safety training)

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>If it is about compensation, put forth legislation to fund a pay raise. There is no need for a union.

The contracts are between the unions and the municipality, since they are municipal employees. The state just can't pass legislation saying "hey Boston, you need to give your teachers a 4% raise this year.

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>A public employee using the government boot to step on the necks of the taxpayers until they get better individual compensation is a selfish tactic.

And the school committees and select boards refusing to negotiate in good faith (or at all, recently) because the employees can't strike is perfectly ok in your eyes, though?

The entire point of a labor demonstration IS to cause an inconvenience. If there is no inconvenience, there is no possibility for change to occur in those situations.

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>If government is going to change the law to permit teachers to strike, it should only be during the summer

Are you really suggesting that they strike during a period in which they aren't under contract? That's like striking from a bagel shop that you haven't worked at in years...

Doing as you suggest will 100% get that teacher fired for cause.

I know that they're only asking to raise paraprofessional salary from $22k to $27k, but they really deserve double it. As someone who has spent the last 15 years teaching, they are an absolutely indispensable resource that do amazing work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter_boxes_in_schools_hoax

Technically, you have 10 years after getting your initial license, since you can extend your initial license once by request. If you got a preliminary license first, you could delay the master's degree by as much as 15 years.

Edit: To be even more technical, if you go the route of Master Teacher certification through Pearson, you'll never need a master's degree... though I hope you like staying on the Bachelor's / Bachelor's +15 step 5 pay scale for eternity.

You can definitely teach full-time environmental science (my school of about 1,000 students has 2 full time environmental teachers), but there is no environmental science MTEL you could take for licensure. You would need to take either the bio or chem MTEL to get your science license.

While you should probably go for whichever subject you're better at, keep in mind that bio, by far, has the most applicants for any open job. Chem is much, much harder to find someone for. The last time we were hiring for a chem teacher, there were just two licensed teachers who applied. The last bio position we hired for had over 30 licensed applicants.

In their defense, the East Longmeadow rotary is the second worst rotary design I've ever seen (the worst being the old Kelley Square in Worcester). It's less a rotary than it is a random amalgamation of streets that come together in a trapezoidal shape.