Congratulations! You're "Teacher of the Year"!!!

Sorry about having to lay you off:

Lake Parsippany Elementary School’s newest Teacher of the Year is facing unemployment.

Jill Mills, a librarian whom the district honored last night as the school’s top educator, has been laid off because of budget cuts.

“It’s a shame,” Parsippany schools Superintendent LeRoy Seitz said. “It would be great to find a way to get her back.”

Mills, a 43-year-old Florham Park resident, is one of five media specialists who were cut in the 2010-2011 budget.

That spending plan called for the layoffs of more than 30 faculty members, including the media specialists. The district employs about 750 teachers, with roughly 15 of them being librarians, Seitz said.

Mills’s layoff announcement came just before she was honored not only by her school, but also the Lakeland Hills Family YMCA, which serves 10 towns in northeast Morris County.

The YMCA on May 26 named her the top K-8 educator in a region that stretches from Denville to Lincoln Park.

“If nothing else, it’s great for my self esteem,” Mills said of the awards. “It’s also heartbreaking.”

Mills had been with the district for three years -- not long enough to become tenured.

That meant she was one of the faculty members who were most vulnerable to layoffs, Seitz said.

The hedge fund managers will argue that this is the problem with tenure and seniority, that it requires the last in folks get laid off first.

I say baloney.

The problem is the hedge fund managers and the rest of their crooked ilk.

They barely pay any taxes.

Nor do many American companies which use offshore tax havens to refrain from paying a fair share of the tax burden.

Even the ones who got bailed out by the American taxpayer in '09.

So this issue isn't about tenure or seniority - it's about the greedy top 5% (and especially the top 1%) increasing their wealth astronomically over the last two decades while barely paying anything in taxes.

It is - as my friend NYC Educator always says - about making sure Steve Forbes tax bill remains low.

In New Jersey, it is about Governor Christie refusing to raise taxes on people making over $1 million a year even as he forces massive layoffs and budget cuts to schools, fire personnel, police, etc.