Teachers in Buffalo Get Plastic Surgery as a Perk — but Maybe Not for Long
Talk about a job perk: Teachers in the Buffalo, N.Y., school district have a rider in their contract that includes free cosmetic surgery with no copay. You read that right. Now the Buffalo School Board is trying to surgically remove that rider. On Wednesday, the school board voted 6 to 3 to eliminate it entirely, according to the Buffalo News.
The plastic surgery perk has actually been around since the 1970s, when the practice wasn’t as commonplace as it is now. It was originally intended to cover reconstructive surgery on patients who sustained serious injuries, such as car accidents or burns, according to the Atlantic. But as the plastic surgery industry has boomed, so has the number of teachers seeking cosmetic treatments — and the costs. According to the Atlantic, usage of the perk has tripled in recent years, and by 2009, about 500 employees were seeking free cosmetic surgery under the rider.
The reason the rider has stuck around for so long is because it’s tied to an old contract that would need to be renegotiated — a point of contention between the teachers union and the school board. The Buffalo Teachers Federation’s last contract expired back in 2004, but state legislature allows the city’s teachers to continue working under the rules of the previous contract — which includes the plastic surgery rider — until a new one can be hammered out, reports the Atlantic. And therein lies the issue.
“The urgency of negotiating a new contract isn’t really there,” Amber Dixon, interim superintendent for Buffalo’s schools, told the Atlantic back in 2012. “You get to keep your benefits. You get to keep your cosmetic rider. You get to keep your 2.5 percent step increase. It makes getting back to the table difficult.”
But cutting the rider alone would save the board about $5 million — that’s enough to payroll 100 new teachers, according to an estimate by the Atlantic. So the school board decided to go ahead and do some nip-and-tuck surgery on the contract by eliminating the rider without negotiating with the teachers union. But doing so may have just landed them in a lawsuit. “They think they can just rip something out of the contract without negotiating,” Buffalo Teachers Federation president Phil Rumore told WGRZ News. “That’s a slap in the face to teachers.”
However, Buffalo School Board member Larry Quinn points out that the schools need more teachers — not plastic surgery. “The skin peel treatments, breast enhancements, eyelid work, tummy tucks, while we have 32,000 kids in poverty who need smaller classrooms, who need tremendous resources — to me it’s a moral issue,” he told WGRZ News.
Let’s keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
