You Get What You Pay
For

I’ve always been cheap. I don’t mean thrifty. Thrifty people shop at outlet stores. I shop at rummage sales.

Many years ago, I bought myself a nice three-piece suit at the Dublin Community Church rummage sale. It was black: a little funereal, but it fit me like it had been tailored. And you couldn’t beat the price: two dollars.

I planned to wear it to my sister’s wedding, but I knew I’d have to keep its provenance secret. My mother, who is the Inspector General of family fashions, would never abide me showing up at a wedding in a two-dollar suit.

When we got there, and she was sitting down in the basement with me, watching my boys play ping-pong, she asked if I had bought a suit. Of course, I assured her, and left it at that.

‘He got a great deal on it,’ Danny, who must have been about nine, declared.

‘Yeah. Two bucks!’ six-year-old Joel added helpfully.

At least it was a nice dark wool suit originally from Brooks Brothers.

Earlier in my tightwad career, I bought a lurid green corduroy suit made in some Eastern European nation. May, whose Yankee family is thrifty but knows quality, groaned when she saw it.

She’s tried to teach me the importance of buying good stuff that will last, with mixed results. I spend more money on good shoes now, for example, though I still wear them too long. But when I needed a new watch recently, I bought it at a discount store for ten dollars. It lost about ten minutes a day, and went through batteries at a reckless clip. I probably invested thirty dollars in batteries before she put a stop to it by buying me a decent watch.

The point is, you get what you pay for. And it applies to teachers as well as watches. Next week, the citizens of the ConVal school district will go to their polling places and vote on a new school budget, which does not include a pay raise for teachers. The pay raise -- a three-year deal -- is a separate warrant article. This gives voters the opportunity to support education but not educators, which is a little like rooting for the Red Sox but not their players.

The deal wasn’t popular with a lot of teachers, but we backed it for a number of reasons, one of which is that if it passes, we won’t have to go through the grinding tedium of negotiations again for three years. We won’t have to come back year after year, porridge bowl in hand, like Oliver Twist, and ask for more.

It wears you down. Money isn’t everything, but in this society, it’s how we keep score. Money equals respect, and a lot of what gets said about teachers in budget hearings, in letters to the editor, and at the post office at this time of year is not respectful.

In the past five months, three people on the ConVal staff have quietly asked me to write letters of reference for them. These are three of the best educators I’ve ever met, real stars, and they’re looking for other places to work. This only confirms something I learned during my years managing people at Yankee Publishing -- it’s not your low-to-middling performers who leave when money gets tight. It’s your best. And when the best people leave, the decline in the quality of the product drops suddenly. It takes a long time to get it back to where it was.

You can save money on the watch, but you’ll spend more on the batteries. And you’ll never be quite sure what time it is.