Dan Soucek, Painting Lipstick on His Pig

The suddenly uninterested state Senator Dan Soucek sent out an email  last September praising himself and his side of the General Assembly for the budget the Republicans passed, and he made the best of some lousy policy by misrepresenting what actually happened.

Soucek wrote, "The budget boosts early-career teacher pay to from $33,000 to $35,000 per year and provides experienced-based step increases to teachers, assistant principals, principals, State Highway Patrol troopers, clerks and magistrates."

Ah, "experienced-based step increases." What Soucek didn't bother to explain: Those step increases are banded together into groups of five years, so no salary increase at all for four years and then a band (step) increase, followed by four more years of no increase, etc.

Soucek wrote, "The [budget] agreement funds all teacher assistant positions supported in last year’s budget...."

That's a bit of fast footwork. What Soucek didn't mention: Although we have the same funding level for teaching assistants statewide, we also have a changed formula (class-size-to-TA ratios) resulting in a loss of TA funding for Watauga for the same number of classrooms. Watauga County Schools will have to borrow from Peter (elsewhere in the school budget) to pay Paul (all the existing TAs that didn't already retire out of disgust with the way Soucek and his buddies in Raleigh have behaved toward public education).