To the Editor: In the West Milford school district, a teacher with three years of experience earns $43,650. A custodian with three years experience earns $44,975. Huh? Why so much? Well, a few years ago the custodians earned about the same as the cafeteria workers. Then the school board started to hire their relatives. Imagine your union is negotiating a new contract and across the bargaining table sits your mother! The board members are careful to abstain on particular votes that affect their relatives, but somehow the jobs and the raises always pass. Do you think this is another case of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back” as school board member Greg Bailey so aptly put it? Meanwhile, our elementary classes get bigger and bigger. We have 24, 25, even 27 children in kindergarten, first and second grades. The larger the size of the class, the less time each child gets and the more children fall behind. So what is the solution? Well, we could hire an outside firm to handle the janitorial services. An outside firm would pay their workers about $23,000 a year, which is the average salary in for custodians in New Jersey and is about half of what we are paying. We should be able to save several hundred thousand dollars a year. The problem is the current board will never do that. They are the ones who approved those crazy salaries. They don’t want to fire their own relatives. It’s time to put the children first. It’s time for a new school board. Barbara Carter Hewitt