18 Valley Stream teachers take retirement incentive
Valley Stream schools will be losing hundreds of years of teaching experience next June, as 18 teachers will be taking advantage of a retirement incentive being offered this year.
As part of the new Valley Stream Teachers Association contract that was settled in June, teachers who submitted their retirement letter by Oct. 15 were eligible for a one-time payout of $1,000 per year of service, up to 30 years.
Five teachers from District 13 took the incentive. From the Wheeler Avenue School, third-grade teacher Connie Lavin and first-grade teacher Lois Waxman will be retiring. Willow Road’s retirees include sixth-grade teacher Richard Faso and third-grade teacher Susan McKenna. Carole Hawkins, a fifth-grade teacher at the James A. Dever School, is the other retiree.
The five teachers total 141 years of service to the district. Hawkins leads the group with 45 years in the district, and will be the only teacher to receive the maximum $30,000 payout. The other four teachers have between 21 and 26 years in District 13.
There are two retirees in District 24. Patricia Horowitz, a district art teacher, and Beth Becker, a sixth-grade teacher at Brooklyn Avenue School, will end their careers in education next June.
Horowitz has been with the district since 1970, so she will receive the full payout. Becker started working for District 24 in 1986.
Four teachers from the Central High School District are retiring including VSTA president Richard Hermann, an English teacher at Central High School. He has worked for the district for 51 years and has spent 38 years as union head.
But he isn’t even the longest tenured teacher in the district. Louise Scanlon, a math teacher at North High School, has been teaching there for 54 years, when the building first opened. Stephanie Ginsberg, a health teacher at Memorial Junior High, is retiring after 42 years and Pasquale Alessi, a North High science teacher, will leave in June after 21 years.
Hermann, Scanlon and Ginsberg will receive the maximum $30,000 payout.
District 30 has the most retirees, seven. Five are from Shaw Avenue School including kindergarten teachers Mela Golfo and Mary Reinhard, second-grade teacher Judith Post, fifth-grade teacher Susan Stiefel and ESL teacher Linda Alonso. Joanne Lufrano, a district math specialist, and Sharon Schulman, a district speech therapist, are also retiring.
Post, with 47 years in the district and Stiefel, with 38, will get the full $30,000. The other five teachers have between 10 and 29 years working in District 30. Superintendent Dr. Elaine Kanas, who said school officials are still calculating the total cost of the payout for the seven teachers, said the district will benefit financially through lower personnel costs next year. “You will be replacing them with teachers lower on the salary scale,” she said of the retirees.
Teachers who are leaving through the incentive can not revoke their retirement letter.
Hermann said he didn’t expect that nearly 20 teachers from the four districts would retire at the end of this school year. His prediction was about a quarter of that. However, he said, a combination of the one-time incentive and the new teacher evaluation system being implemented, likely led to the higher number of retirements. “It just seemed like it would be the right time for a lot of people,” he said.
