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If I understand matters correctly, Denver's
public-school teachers are upset about not getting a pay
raise. To persuade the school board to reconsider its
decision, the union has adopted a Rock the Board
campaign.
Come Tuesday, a scheduled planning day before classes start on Wednesday, teachers will take time to wrap and mail a rock to each of the five school board members who voted for the current budget.
Just what school board members are supposed to do with these rocks has not been announced, but this will be a major enterprise.
In the interest of educational research, I went out to the alley and grabbed a fist-sized cobble, which seemed a convenient size for making a statement. It looked metamorphic -- granite with some pegmatite intrusion -- but I didn't pursue that since the issue is educational politics, not geology or pet rocks.
It took about 10 minutes to find a suitable box, pack the rock, seal the box and affix a mailing label. So for five rocks, we could allow 50 minutes, and with the usual coffee break (breaking rocks might be sweat-shop labor, but mailing them ought to be civilized employment), there's an hour per mailing.
The Denver teachers' union boasts 4,000 members, so
Rock the Board
will consume 4,000 person-hours. Say
a teacher makes $35,000 a year, for 36 weeks of 40 hours.
That makes teacher time worth $24.30 an hour, and thus the
labor cost of the rock campaign comes to $97,200.
There's enough for three more teachers right there, or a few dozen computers, or some new textbooks. But if Denver teachers have time to spare, they're going to use it productively -- to mail rocks to school board members.
However, that's only part of the expense. My pet rock weighed 14 ounces. Doubtless there are cheaper postal rates, but the teachers want to get their message across before Sept. 30, the last date the board can change the budget, so they'll have to send the rocks by priority mail, which is $2.90 for anything up to two pounds.
For 20,000 rocks -- five from each of 4,000 teachers -- that's $58,000 in postage, along with tape, labels, and the like. They have money to waste on this, and they're underpaid?
Now we're up to about $160,000 for a project that will not educate a single child, and will, in fact, take away from time that's supposed to go toward preparing to educate children.
With a little more figuring, we can find even more callous stupidity. My boxed rock weighed a pound, so 20,000 would weigh 10 tons. The average rock might travel 10 miles, giving us 100 unnecessary ton-miles to create more air pollution.
Once delivered, the rocks and their wrappings would probably go to the trash, and thereby produce more volume in metropolitan landfills, hastening the day that they will have to close because they're full.
Obviously, the teachers' union should be required to file an environmental impact statement. If a few collectors want to mail rocks back and forth, that's one thing, but this extensive use of rocks as political statement is a serious matter with significant possibilities for environmental degradation.
And just what statement does this mass mailing make?
The school board must already be quite aware of the union's stand, so that can't be why the teachers plan to mail rocks. Getting a board member to change his vote requires either persuasion or threats. For persuasion, a reasoned letter works better than an unscribed rock, assuming you know how to write a letter. If you're going to use a rock for a threat, why not just heave it, rather than go to the trouble and expense of mailing?
Go figure. I can't divine what the rocks are supposed to
signify. The papal visit inspired me to look into the
Bible, but all I could find there was What man is there
of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a
stone?
Denver teachers want bread and they're sending stones, so that doesn't fit either. Maybe it's a pop quiz, and they'll give the answer after school starts.
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