Chris Krug is Back and Huntley Teachers Are His Target This Sunday

I searched for the Northwest Herald’s Chris Krug’s column online last Sunday and was disappointed. I guess he and his family were on vacation. Maybe at a water park. (Reading old NW Heralds at my in-laws’ house on Sunday, I see that Krug did write a column for last Sunday.)

This Sunday, Krug follows up on his colleague Dan McCaleb’s Saturday column calling for an end to legal authority for teachers to strike.

Jack Franks, who is a union Democrat, offered these comments to McCaleb:

“I respectfully disagree, because the teachers are put in a very awkward situation because the state is not doing what it needs to do.

“If the state would pay [teacher] pension and insurance uniformly across the state, that would take away 99 percent of what teachers and school boards fight about.”

Franks has a point.

Some have said this strike is really all about the Illinois Education Association’s wanting no teacher to have to pay anything toward their retirement.

Sort of a “No Teacher Left Behind” approach.

The state union wants state taxpayers to pay the state share of teacher pensions and local taxpayers to pay the teachers’ share.

Franks says he supports a countywide school district. That would remove any possibility of local control.

During this rainy weekend, Krug, having perhaps learned from Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama, avoids using any pig analogies.

While he avoids that pitfall, this week he is more bitingly satirical than usual.

He start out,

“If someone offered you a 5.3 percent raise this morning, you’d take it.

“You’d be as happy as a kid in a puddle.”

Then, gets better:

“…we are living at a time when a 5.3-percent raise can be found only in online alternative reality communities, stories about olden times, or in today’s public education sector.”

I guess he is talking about all the comments by teachers below the “we are going to strike” article the night the Huntley Education Association official delivered the written notice of Monday’s strike.

I did not see a reporter from the NW Herald at this fairly important meeting, probably a function of declining times for the industry as a whole.

The rest of Krug’s column are worth reading. Join the teachers who undoubtedly will comment on the piece.

I have a couple of questions, the first four spurred by the title of Krug’s column:

Will the Huntley teachers’ strike morph from a news story into a reality TV show?

If so, what will be the plot?

Will it follow the teacher replacement story line suggested earlier by the NW Herald?

What will be the reaction to such a strategy?

And, finally,

Do you think Northwest Herald employees got a 5.4% raise during these trying times for newspapers?

= = = = =
Chris Krug is seen on top. (And, yes, I used the redeye function.) Below are Huntley teachers walking out of last Thursday’s meeting. More photos here. Huntley Homecoming pictures here. Huntley District 158 School Superintendent John Burkey as seen on TV at the bottom.


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