Al Tomasso was stunned when told how much top-scale teachers in his district ultimately will earn under their latest contract.
"$145,000?" said Tomasso, a real estate appraiser and longtime Mount Sinai resident. "I really think that's absurd for 10 months' work."
In the nearby Three Village district, taxpayer activists have questions of their own regarding a teacher contract that includes individual raises exceeding 8 or 9 percent.
That contract, like Mount Sinai's, was signed in the months after Albany officials began warning at the end of 2007 that a weakening economy would require school districts and other government entities to tighten their belts.
"It should have been clear to anybody that the state was going over a cliff," said one Three Village district resident, Graham Kerby of Setauket. He's active in Long Islanders for Educational Reform, a regional taxpayer group.
Teacher contracts are in the public spotlight, as school districts struggle to balance budgets. In both Mount Sinai and Three Village, district officials note that the most recent contractual raises are slightly smaller than those awarded in previous contracts - though still well above those granted in private industry.
Teacher representatives insist, meanwhile, that they are well aware of the need to keep school spending and taxes under control. Mitchell Wolman, president of Mount Sinai's teachers union, said his organization agreed to $300,000 in cost savings under a previous contract, when the district faced prior financial troubles.
"I think unions sometimes get a bad rap from people who don't understand that," Wolman said.
Some fiscal experts think school boards should try to renegotiate teacher contracts, with the country now well into a deep recession.
Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director of the Citizens Budget Commission, an Albany-based nonpartisan watchdog group, acknowledges the difficulty of doing this. But she adds that school boards can make a convincing case to local residents, increasingly caught in their own financial squeeze, so that they might put pressure on the unions.
"There are going to be more taxpayer revolts ahead, if boards don't do this," Lynam said.
