Millinocket reality

In an angry, inacucrate letter to the editor (BDN, April 11), John DiCentes was hateful toward Millinocket career educators and harmful to his town’s best interests.

School committee information on a school reorganization plan driving today’s referendum was labeled “propaganda” while the $18,00 engineering studies on which it was based were reported to be “approximately at the $100,000 mark.”

DiCentes reported superintendent earnings of “$73,000,” teacher and principal “wages ranging from $40,000 to $67,000,” and janitor pay from “$37,000 to $43,000 a year.” In an effort to distort he, at best, confused and combined wages and benefits.

Millinocket teacher wages and benefits were said to be “some of the highest in the state, if not the nation.” The sorry reality is that Millinocekt’s B.A. base salary of $18,775 is 160th, its B.A. top salary of $31,825 is 144th, its M.A. base salary of $21,975 is 99th, and its M.A. top salary of $35,025 stands 121st among 176 Maine school districts. Comparing national teacher salaries, Maine is 32nd of 50 states — last in New England.

As a former union leader in Millinocket’s mill, DiCentes must have attended union-sponsored training sessions. His writings and public positions suggest he understood aggression, jealousy and greed but surely flunked brotherhood and sisterhood. We are left to think he never met a public employee he liked and finds them unworthy of dignity and respect for their labor.

Comfortingly, we should know DiCentes’ radical statements are neither representative of nor respected by the union movement or general public. Charles Sanders Principal, Town councilor, Past president Maine Teachers Association Millinocket