The following opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my school or school district.

In response to the Sun Journal editorial (April 28), “Wisdom among the wildness,” I recall the words of Stephen Vincent Benet: “We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.” The Appropriations Committee the newspaper lauded used their power to thwart the will of both houses of the Legislature. So now the bill is dead.

This is how LD 1693 would have affected me personally:

I have been teaching for 24 years and I’m 51. If I had the deal that applies to teachers hired before 1984, and I retired this year, I would receive 9 (years) x 2 (percent) penalty = 18 percent deduction from my pension.

But, since I was hired in 1984, I would lose 11 (years) x 6 percent = 66 percent of my pension.

If LD 1693 had passed, I would lose 11 x 3 percent = 33 percent of my pension: half of what I would now lose, but still almost twice the penalty I was originally promised.

Yet this bill was called “An Act to Restore Equity to the Maine State Retirement System,” clearly a misnomer, but it still would have been a welcomed improvement to a grave injustice.

Please remember that MSRS is all state employees have. We do not get Social Security, and any money that we pay in, doing non-teaching jobs, is wasted, no matter how many quarters we accumulate. We pay in, but we don’t get it back. I would even get my wife’s Social Security benefits decreased if she were to die before me.

So I am depending on my state retirement, and it’s been robbed three times by three different governors, including Gov. John Baldacci. The fact it’s so vulnerable means so is my future, and the future of education in Maine.

Restoring my retirement is not, as the editorial said, of “marginal public benefit, at best.” The benefit to Maine would have been attracting more and better teachers to the profession, resulting in a better education for our children.

Locking in teachers, so they cannot afford to retire when they are ready, is not smart educational policy. Not only does it subject students to some who are teaching only because they have to, it also retains the very teachers who cost taxpayers the most because they earn the highest wages.

Fiscal wisdom would be encouraging older teachers to retire.

These are some of the reasons that LD 1693 was passed by the House and the Senate, before it was shot down by the Appropriations Committee.

The Sun Journal is backing the wrong horse.

James Siragusa, Stow