And Roxbury wasn’t alone in its misplaced generosity: Average pay raises for New Jersey teachers last year were nearly 5 percent.

How has the teachers union said thank you? By telling school districts to eat chalk when asked to reopen contracts and renegotiate temporary relief for taxpayers.

This week, the governor called for a one-year pay freeze for teachers, and the New Jersey School Boards Association immediately announced its support. The Star-Ledger has called for a pay freeze for teachers and all public employees to help drowning taxpayers catch their breath.

But the teachers union doesn’t believe its members should share the pain. When asked why not, the New Jersey Education Association’s defiant president Barbara Keshishian told a Star-Ledger editorial board recently, “Because we have negotiated contracts.”

In Roxbury, union and nonunion administrators have agreed to salary freezes. Bus drivers and food service employees, too. Everyone is pitching in. Except the teachers.

If the NJEA has its way, teachers will watch friends and colleagues get laid off, class sizes increased and extracurricular programs eliminated — rather than reopen sacrosanct contracts and accept a pay freeze. Remember, these are the same teachers who chanted, “Think of the kids!” during their protest of the governor’s proposed funding cuts. Local union chapters should think of the kids (and the suffering taxpayers), defy their militant state leadership and agree to a pay freeze. It’s the right thing to do.

As many of you know, Chris Christie is literally writing the fiscal sanity playbook for the entire Country as we speak. His common-sense reforms are both long overdue and unimpeachable in their reasonableness. The only, I repeat, only people who are complaining are the bloodsuckers in the Teachers Union hierarchy.

Note that this is not a personal indictment on teachers but rather a denunciation of the most selfish people on Earth: Union bosses.

Everybody is taking a haircut in New Jersey, to use Wysocki’s apt phraseology. The Star Ledger, New Jersey’s answer to the New York Times, is the one calling for the pay freeze which should give you an idea about how the vast majority of those of us here in the swamp are jumping in with Christie headfirst.

It should be telling to everyone reading this that the only entity opposing Christie’s budget is the teachers union.

Ask yourself why and just know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it has absolutely nothing to do with educating children.

And on that note, I’ll give our Governor the last word:

The union’s resistance to givebacks is motivated by self-interest, not out of concern for students, the governor asserted.

“The real question is, who’s for the kids, and who’s for their raises?” said Christie. “This isn’t about the kids. Let’s dispense with that portion of the argument. Don’t let them tell you that ever again while they’re reaching into your pockets.”

Russ