Across the Hudson River, a New York school district is also suffering the side effects of its unused sick leave payouts.

LoHud.com reports that employees of Yonkers Public Schools can get paid for 300 days of unused sick and vacation time, a policy that allowed one district employee to receive a $92,325 payout in 2010.

The story was a big embarrassment for the cash-strapped district last summer, when it announced that 187 employees were being laid off, in addition to the 250 who were retiring. The district ended up cutting $41 million from its budget, laying off 90 teachers and cutting advanced placement classes and electives such as drama, music, cooking and industrial arts, according to the New York Times.

It’s clear that Yonkers schools’ expensive union perks ended up hurting students’ overall education.

Still, the financial shenanigans aren’t finished.

A new report from city Inspector General Dan Schorr finds that some Yonkers teachers have been exceeding the district’s $15,000 cap on overtime earnings, mainly because the district’s overtime policy does not jibe with its teachers’ contract.

For instance, the $15,000 cap does not apply to earnings from athletic coaching or summer work.

According to the inspector general’s report, at least one school employee – “Teacher A” – earned $31,730 in overtime pay in 2008, in part by getting paid $97 per hour to teach summer school, almost twice the $49.87 hourly rate stipulated in the teachers’ contract.

Superintendent Bernard Pierorazio explained that the district is contractually obligated to pay unionized teachers 1/200th of their salary for working a non-school day, and summer school occurs outside a teacher’s normal 10-month work year.

LoHud.com reports the “investigation comes in response to anonymous complaints from people claiming to be laid-off teachers, alleging that their still-employed colleagues are taking advantage of the system in tough times.”

Yonkers Public Schools lays off teachers based on seniority. That means some of the district’s most senior teachers are cleaning up while their young, less-senior colleagues are getting laid off.

For years, Weston developer Roy Rogers planted gardens designed to lure butterflies to Broward schools, using volunteer labor and donated supplies. His generosity and commitment to teaching kids about nature drew plaudits as did his signature act: placing a butterfly on the tip of a delighted child’s nose.

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Beginning in 2004, however, the gardens and Rogers’ services were no longer free. The district began paying for them.

Ultimately, over the next four years, Rogers’ firm collected more than $394,000 from the school system, mostly for butterfly gardens but also to aid a school in the hunt for grant funding.

Rogers could have been paid more had the district not run into towering deficits. A three-year contract he agreed to in 2007 was worth up to $1 million.

“I sure didn’t get to the $1 million mark!” Rogers said in a recent interview.

The gardens have their defenders, but are dismissed as a “ridiculous,” unnecessary luxury by Broward County PTA Council President Bernie Kemp.

“I don’t agree with it. I don’t support it,” Kemp said, noting that many parents would question why the district would agree to spend up to seven figures to attract butterflies when their children’s schools might have more immediate needs, such as replacing old computers or fire sprinklers.

Though there has been no suggestion that anything unethical or illegal was involved in the creation of the gardens, a statewide grand jury investigating the misuse of public funds within the school system has requested detailed records on the agreement with Rogers and payments to him, documents show.

Rogers, 74, said he welcomes the review.

“I’d like to know they took a look at it and found there wasn’t cronyism or enrichment,” Rogers said, stressing that he has not been implicated in any wrongdoing or questioned by authorities.

The scrutiny, however, could turn awkward for Rogers, who also chairs the Florida Commission on Ethics. The statewide panel is empowered by law to mete out penalties to public servants who do not adhere to official standards of conduct.

Read the whole thing here. Wait…the butterfly guy ALSO chairs the state’s Commission on Ethics? Yeah, it is ‘only’ a million bucks, but the system has faced severe cash shortages and has been forced to layoff teachers. Decisions like this one might go a long way to explain those cash shortages.

This lady is not afraid of a major challenge, as evidenced by her latest brawl with the AFT.

Rhee is courageously targeting the sacred cow of teachers unions – tenure. It’s the system that pretty much guarantees a teacher a job for life, if he or she can make it through the first few years. It doesn’t matter if they go on to become good, mediocre or bad teachers. With tenure, they are pretty much protected until retirement.

But Rhee understands that such a system can no longer be tolerated in Washington D.C. schools, which have a dropout rate of nearly 40 percent. She knows that the school district must have the power to sift through the teaching staff, keep the good ones, work with the middle-of-the-roaders, and get rid of the bad apples.

She also understands that it has to work both ways. She’s willing to develop a compensation system that would offer teachers much higher pay, in exchange for the union abandoning, or at least reforming, the concept of tenure.

We have no problem with that at all. Teachers are extremely important in our society, and good ones deserve to be paid like the vital professionals they are. While schools throughout the nation are struggling with their budgets, we’re sure that most would be happy to find the money to increase teacher salaries, if only they had to power to pick and choose what teachers to keep.

Rhee has already backed up her words with action. Earlier this year she hired more than 900 new teachers for the district, then weeks later laid off 266, citing budget constraints. But the layoffs weren’t limited to the recent hires. She made cuts based on ability, not seniority, a move that drove the AFT into court to challenge Rhee’s decision.

According to the Wall Street Journal, AFT President Randi Weingarten said Rhee “has so poisoned the environment that I am not sure that we can ever get back to a good situation here.”

That’s where you’re dead wrong, Ms. Weingarten. Rhee’s “poison” is exactly the proper remedy to get D.C. schools back on track, and restore public confidence in the district.

Families aren’t interested in a teacher’s longevity, Ms. Weingarten. They want to know if that teacher can manage to help their children reach their potential, and if not, then he or she no longer belongs in a classroom.

Washington state is listed as the third-highest job-generating state, according to www.recovery.gov, which records the number of jobs created or saved as 34,517.13. The problem is that at least 24,000 of those jobs were not really in jeopardy.

You read that correctly.

Washington’s main adviser on stimulus projects, Jill Satran, told the Tacoma News Tribune that state officials used a portion of the stimulus dollars to fund the paychecks of 24,000 teachers who were already under contract to finish out the school year. Without the stimulus money, the state would have had to pick up the tab anyway.

Cuts would have occurred elsewhere, but the job losses resulting from those cuts are not easily quantifiable, Satran said. “It would not likely have come from those teachers,” she said.

The spokeswoman for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board—the one that unilaterally amended the Recovery Act to extend the reporting deadline mandated by law—said that the board had issued “guidelines” for calculating jobs created, but had not made any effort to fact-check the job numbers they’ve received. She called Washington’s choice to include 24,000 teachers in its job count “a state political issue.”

The Board’s job, as its members see it, is simply to post what was reported to them.

Even White House officials acknowledge that states and localities have made various reporting errors, noting that there are no consistent standards for recipients to determine a “saved” job versus a “created” job.

But what the Board posts on Recovery.gov is cited by newspapers and media outlets all over the country. Remember that next time you read about jobs saved or created by stimulus dollars.

The truth is that measuring the success of the stimulus program is generally defined by its proponents as the number of jobs created; yet this number is barely quantifiable by recipients, let alone verifiable by independent sources. (Not to mention the fact that governments can’t create jobs; they can only transfer wealth).

Last week alone, I single-handedly created 25,000 jobs and boosted GDP by .05%. All it cost me was four fainting goats, a rooster and an hour of voodoo incantations. Don’t believe me? Prove me wrong.

For all of the government’s efforts to show Americans how politicians are abusing, er, using their dollars, the reported job numbers are turning out to be fanciful creations of bureaucratic imagination—like asking fat people to self-report the amount of calories they eat in a day. Yeah, that’s going to be accurate.

The event was billed as the “Rally for Respect.” If the AFT wants respect, we respectfully submit the following suggestions:

Number one – Stop threatening people. During the rally, an unidentified male speaker was clearly heard on the video threatening D.C. school Chancellor Michelle Rhee. “Michelle Rhee had better watch her back,” the large, angry man chanted into the microphone. That clearly sounds like a physical threat, typically used by street gangs. His next few words were not clear, but then he added something about “She’s going down.”

Perhaps Ms. Rhee would be wise to contact D.C. police. Union thugs may very well have her on their target list. How disturbing.

Number two – Stop opposing every reform proposal that comes along. The American people, including our president and education secretary, are demanding more school choices for students and more accountability from teachers. This is a national movement that’s gaining momentum by the day. Only the unions are standing in the way. If you want respect, start acting like education professionals and stop opposing efforts to improve educational opportunities for our kids.

Number three – Stop calling for an end to the valuable D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher initiative that allows children to escape horrible schools in your city.

Number four – Drop your ridiculous lawsuit that’s attempting to block teacher layoffs in D.C. Public schools are broke and cuts have to be made somewhere. If you want to save some jobs, adjust your wage and benefit demands, so there will be more money to keep a few more teachers working.

In the meantime, don’t be surprised at the lack of respect your organization is getting from the public these days. You stand for a time that has passed, when public schools were employee-based, not student-based. The American public will not accept that any longer. Join us as we search for ways to make our schools better, or just get out of the way.