The Progressive Links Teacher Suicide to Wisconsin Budget Cuts

posted at 2:31 pm on March 18, 2011 by Mike Antonucci

From Matthew Rothschild’s latest piece in The Progressive:

In the days after Betts’s death, two members of the school district contacted The Progressive about her death, calling it a suicide and saying it was connected, at least in part, to the policies that Walker has proposed. He has demanded that public workers, including teachers, contribute a significant amount of their salaries to health care and pensions. And in his budget, he proposed taking $900 million out of the public schools, imposing a freeze on property taxes so local governments can’t chip in more for education, and allowing any student, regardless of income, to go to a private school with a taxpayer subsidy.

“She was definitely very distraught about it,” said one of her co-workers, who requested anonymity. “She was feeling a lot of stress about the legislation that was going through.”

“She was concerned about the cuts teachers would have to take,” said another, who also requested anonymity. This co-worker added that Betts’s colleagues acknowledged her anguish about the governor’s policies in their discussions after her death.

…Walker’s policies are placing a heavy strain on teachers, says Steve Cupery, the director of the Lakewood UniServ Council, the teachers’ union in Watertown. 

“There’s a lot of stress, especially among older teachers,” he says. “They’re concerned about being targeted. And there’s the stress associated with the potential loss of benefits, which could amount to a substantial cut in pay.”

Cupery adds that teachers are worried about class sizes going up, increased workloads, and not being able to “develop curriculum material around the individual needs of students.”

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