Some teachers were working at poverty level. Others could be fired because they were pregnant and unmarried, or they were gay. And students were sitting on the floor without any desks.

Those are some of the charges made by teachers’ union officials since Gov. Rick Snyder took office and transformed the face of public education in Michigan.

But those charges and more were either untrue or highly unlikely to occur in what has turned into a two-year rhetoric campaign by teachers and the unions.

Michigan Education Association Spokesman Doug Pratt told MLive that the MEA has been targeted by the Republican Party that "doesn't value public education and the middle class..."

Union leaders and some teachers, however, have made a series of comments that have warranted a closer look.

In May 2010, Warren Education Association Executive Director Jennifer Miller was quoted at a MEA rally by a newspaper saying that there were “kids on the floor without any desks.” After Miller’s comments were published, School Board Member Brendan Wagner and Brian Walmsley, the district’s chief economic officer, said they both were not aware of that happening in the district.

Ric Hogerheide, an MEA UniServe Director, claimed that first-year teachers in the Lansing School District were paid below the poverty line. A first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree earned $35,741 in 2009-10. That teacher would be below the U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty level if the teacher had a family of eight.

In March 2011, the MEA sent a letter asking its members to give it the authority to call for a “work stoppage.” Teacher strikes in Michigan are illegal.

When Snyder’s cuts were released, the MEA exaggerated their costs by almost twice as much. The MEA’s Renaye Baker sent an email to union members claiming Snyder’s cuts were at $700-per pupil. Snyder had proposed a $300 per-pupil reduction and extended another $170 per-pupil cut made last year that federal dollars made up.

Michael Van Beek, education policy director for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said that Baker probably included increased mandatory pension contributions into that $700-per-pupil figure, something Snyder had nothing to do with.

Some teachers wrote to the newspapers to criticize Gov. Snyder on his budget cuts.

Krista Weber, an elementary teacher at Hemmeter Elementary School in the Saginaw Township School District wrote to the Saginaw News and complained she put her “master’s degree to work dusting and vacuuming” her own room.

She said in the letter she took out a home equity loan to finance her “continuing education.”

State Representative George Darany would like to give every Michigan resident making $100,000 or less a state subsidy to help cover the cost of gas.

Darany, a Democrat from Dearborn, introduced House Bill 5476 in March. According to Michigan Votes, the bill would “give individuals with annual incomes below $50,000 a per-vehicle fuel subsidy of $100, payable in the form of a ‘refundable’ state income tax credit. A $75 per vehicle subsidy could be claimed by those with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000, and a $50 per vehicle subsidy for incomes between $75,000 and $100,000.”

Gas paid by their fellow taxpayers is sure to be popular among residents angry as prices rise to more than $4 a gallon. However, Darany left out one important fact: How much it will cost?

Darany’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on how much the bill would cost.

James Hohman, fiscal policy analyst with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, used U.S. Census Bureau data and the state’s latest individual income tax report for income distribution to come up with a cost estimate of $304 million.

“That is a major cost to the state,” Hohman said. “That is about as much money as we turn over to the community colleges every year.”

Jack McHugh, legislative analyst for the Mackinac Center, said until such bills give a cost and how they will be paid, they shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

McHugh said such bills pop up all the time and are bipartisan.

“The fact that the bill makes no attempt to identify a funding source exposes it as an unserious act of pure political pandering,” McHugh said in an email.