School District cuts teacher transit benefit as part of budget constrictions

With all the cuts the School District of Philadelphia is making, the TransitCheck program isn’t the biggest or most impactful.

But a teacher wonders whether better promotion — and more usage — could have spared the program that allowed teachers to allocate money from their paychecks to their transit commuting costs before taxes.
Samuel Reed, in his commentary for the Public School Notebook, ponders whether more teachers would have taken advantage of the program had they even known it existed. Stats from the School District Employee Benefit office indicate only about 200 teachers used TransitCheck.

Employees at 440 will maintain their transit benefits; teachers lost theirs as part of their Philadelphia Federation of Teachers contract.