Despite a $5 billion deficit, ongoing service cuts and talk of possible layoffs, municipal agencies continue wasting precious tax dollars.

The latest example of fiscal mismanagement is the Board of Education's plan to hire more than 1,000 teachers to monitor students attending the federally funded summer breakfast and lunch programs. Instead of using School Aides and Supervising Aides, who perform that job during the regular school year and earn $12.33 and $15.75 an hour, the BOE plans on paying the teachers $33.18 an hour to do the same work.

The union analyzed the costs and found that teachers would get paid $6,105,120 for the four-hour, 46-day food program compared to $2,268,720 for School Aides or $2,899,840 for Supervising Aides.
In total, using the teachers will result in overspending of between $3.2 and $3.8 million.

"This is crazy," said Veronica Montgomery-Costa, president of DC 37 and of NYC Board of Education Employees Local 372, which represents the Aides. "This doesn't make sense when the city has a $5 billion deficit. Teachers don't have any special knowledge of cafeteria duty. Our people are trained for this."