RH Jones: Letter to ORTA

From RH Jones, January 9, 2011

To ORTA officials, STRS officials and all:

For ORTA’s “Write Us a Letter” mentioned in the Winter Quarterly 2010, Vol. 63 No. 1, as a Life Member I am sending them the following letter:

Early on in my retirement, my OH STRS issued a very much needed and welcomed yearly inflation-fighting 13th check. Along with myself, I was also covered by HC/Rx for my wife, and this insurance coverage had very low medical co-pay. (All this was as promised to me before I made the decision to retire from a life-long career of teaching).

Consequently, I could volunteer for a public duty that required me to use my car on average of twice per week and at a total of 12-hours of my time per week. I traveled around Summit County often hauling a carload of people. This duty saved the government from having the expense to hire persons and a vehicle to do this job.

I continued this volunteering until such time as my STRS started, perhaps illegally, to renege on my promised HC/Rx. Of course, this is not all my STRS’s fault; the OH Legislature shares blame. In order to keep up with hyperinflated HC/Rx costs, their failure to properly back funding for the STRS with Ad Hoc increases and increases in employer contributions, there is not space in this letter to enumerate all their shortcomings. In order to insure future OH prosperity, maintaining a sound STRS is part of educating all of the next generation. If you think it is too expensive, try ignorance.

Unfortunately my ORTA is also part of the problem in this aspect: In this Quarterly Page 6, as part of their ORTA Legislative Guidelines For 2011 they say: “…and to maintain a COLA.” Fellow ORTA members, this could mean a percent as low as 1%. We currently receive a 3% non-compounded COLA. To leave out mention of maintaining the receipt of our present simply calculated 3% COLA, is evasive, and sends the STRS officials and the legislators the message that ORTA will willingly accept a COLA cut.

I strongly oppose this milquetoast approach to our Legislative Guidelines. My STRS retirement gross income is reported to me yesterday by our STRS to be almost $700 less, now in the year 2011, than last year! And there are those politicians who want to cut us even more, and are so uninformed as to think we are staying up with inflation? Au contraire, each year we lose ground. Further cuts will only add to the already negative aspects of teaching that seems to be growing. The Beacon reported on 01/06/2011 that two educators were shot in Omaha, Neb. The assistant principal died and the principal was wounded. Need I say more?

My ORTA also quotes outgoing Atty Gen Cordray as saying: “alternate voices -- not necessarily opposing voices”. This letter is not meant to be a “crybaby” approach but a notification to the ORTA officials and membership to an alternate, and I think better approach to keeping and improving on our retirement system. Ohio will be the better for it, educationally and economically.

Finally, I must say that it is certainly not economical for the Ohio treasury to have to pay for services that were once done for free to the government by retired teacher volunteers whose gross income has been lowered to the point that volunteering, for them, is now out of the question.

Robert H. Jones, an ORTA Life Member & SummitCRTA Legislative CMTE Member