Today's story gave us the base salary and other compensation for eight local superintendents, including Jack Dale, superintendent of Fairfax County. Dale will make $292,000 in base salary this year, plus a $62,000 retirement contribution. He runs an agency responsible for educating 165,000 students with 13,090 teachers and 26,778 total staff members with a budget over $2 billion. Just down the road from Dale and Fairfax County schools is George Mason University. Its president, Alan G. Merten, made $642,500 ($) in total compensation in 2006-7 including a car and a house. Merten's school educates 30,000 students a year and has a $750 million budget. Who's better paid, Dale or Merten?
The Examiner piece also provides its own rebuttal. It lists eight local superintendent salaries, and all earn total compensation packages between $250 and $350,000. Eight separate school boards determined the appropriate compensation level for their chief executive, and they all offered salaries in this range. This suggests the salaries were market-based.
The story today wasn't an isolated incident. The New York Times ran a piece last week along the exact same lines. It chronicled the severance package of Barbara Trzeszkowski, employed in Keansburg, New Jersey for 38.5 years, first as a long-time teacher and then as superintendent. Keansburg is known as an "Abbott district," so-called for its eligibility for state funds targeting extremely needy schools. Buried in the article mainly critical of her financial windfall was this quote:
Joe Hazeldine, who was chairman of the Keansburg school board and a member of the personnel committee at the time Ms. Trzeszkowski’s most recent contract was negotiated, defended it recently from his home in North Carolina. He said Ms. Trzeszkowski was “worth every single penny she earned, if not more.”
“She’s a remarkable administrator,” Mr. Hazeldine said. “She took Keansburg from the bottom of the Abbott districts to the top. Our college acceptance rate quadrupled. We had kids going to Ivy League schools. That doesn’t just happen. How do you put a price on that?
In education, apparently, we must.
1 comment:
What a nice quote from Mr. Hazeldine. But I wonder how impartial can you be if you currently have or had in the past relatives working for the Keansburg Board of Education?
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