A mistake was made in the paycheck of a fourth-grade teacher in Greene – for 14 years.

When Nancy Flick joined SAD 52 in 1990, she didn’t check to see if the amount she was offered for a salary jibed with the school’s pay schedule. Turns out, she has been undercompensated for her level of education. Now, she is seeking back pay.

SAD 52 should find the money to make things right.

There’s blame on both parties for the error. Flick should have checked her contract against the school system’s pay scale. She didn’t, and it has cost her about $500 a year.

But the school system also should have confirmed the pay and has had 14 years worth of budgets to find the mistake. It went unnoticed.

The contract SAD 52 has signed with its teachers limits liability for such mistakes to 30 days. So instead of nearly $7,000, Flick received a check for $169.

We don’t believe, and neither does Flick, that she was cheated out of pay on purpose. And she recognizes her own role in the mistake.

Students learn as much from the example that adults set as they do from books and blackboards. Society constantly preaches a theme of taking responsibility and doing the right thing, even when it’s difficult.

SAD 52 should follow the same advice. By no means, does it seem, is the district required to fix this mistake with Flick. There is, however, an ethical obligation.

Finding the money could speak volumes to students. It’s a lesson that would serve them well: We should always try to do the right thing and be accountable for our actions, even when there’s a price to be paid.


Double talk


Democrats running for a chance to take on President Bush are trying to have it both ways. They can’t.

Exhaustive detail work by the Washington Post and the New York Times over the weekend points out the hypocrisy of some candidates’ populist claims.

Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards both attack the special interests that they say have corrupted Washington, but neither turns down checks from big-business CEOs, trial lawyers and the like. And all the candidates rely on some of the very Washington insiders they attack on the campaign trail.

Even former Gov. Howard Dean and retired Gen. Wesley Clark are in the game. While they rely less on big donors than Kerry and Edwards, they’ve hooked their wagons to the well-connected political players and insiders. Clark himself was a registered lobbyist before tossing his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination.

Of course, President Bush and his fund-raising juggernaut are also guilty of kowtowing to special interests. And a majority of his money comes from donors able to write checks for $2,000, the legal limit. But he’s not running as a populist.

In American politics, it’s impossible to raise the millions necessary to run a national campaign without getting tangled up in the web of big-money donors. And it takes professionals to run a large organization.

But a word of caution: When Democrats attack “influence peddlers” and corporate scoundrels, they might be talking about some of their own friends.
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