Suzanne Laird to STRS Board: You should be outraged

Suzanne Laird's speech to the STRS Board April 20, 2023

Good Morning, Members of MY Board:

Month after month, year after year, we stakeholders have made the effort to attend these Board meetings. Some of the colleagues seated behind me have driven in from all over the state for 20 years. I, myself, have attended for more than 8 years, often speaking during public participation, to no avail. 

Rather than waste my valuable time writing another speech you will ignore, I turned to ChatGPT. Perhaps you've heard of it. 

For years, we've been begging you to act as fiduciaries for the educators of Ohio. Maybe you don't understand. One of the cool features of ChatGPT is that you can ask it to define terms on a second grade level.

"A fiduciary is a person who has been given a special job to take care of something very important for someone else."

And every time you ask ChatGPT, it spits out the same answer.

Kinda like the new social media guy, hired by STRS. On the Facebook page, he spits out the same answer, time after time.

He says Auditor Keith Faber did not find any fraud. ChapGPT says, "fraud is when someone lies or tricks another person to get something they want; or saying something that's not true to get people to do what you want."

Kinda like using teachers to make videos for STRS but never mentioning how much those teachers are losing every month by contributing 14 percent of their salaries or going without a COLA.

This Board should be outraged, not at me, for using second grade definitions to get my point across, but that another employee was hired while teachers are being asked to do more with less. Especially an employee who earns $200,000 for a job that could be accomplished by an AI bot.

You should be outraged that you cannot perform your fiduciary duties when you don't know all the fees.

You should be outraged that you were tricked into awarding all those raises and bonuses before they revealed the true amount of losses last year.

Quote: "A fiduciary is like being a really trustworthy helper who is responsible for making sure everything is safe."

Are you, my elected and appointed Board members, fiduciaries or AI bots?