Questions about the superintendent's raise

Question: In follow up to our Superintendent being given a $10,000 salary increase within the 2011/2012 budget. There are always more than two ways of looking at things. Our Superintendent has publicized his pay freeze for the last two years, we appreciate his willingness to do so, but I can say that as a tax payer I did not agree to give our Superintendent a pay increase in the third year which is over the typical cost of living increase; more than double. In addition to that we cannot mislead tax payers by telling them our Superintendent is one of the lowest paid Superintendents in NY State. The average NY teacher and administrative salaries are averaged using all of NY State salaries, NY City salaries included, and upstate NY cannot compete with downstate salaries. In upstate NY a $100,000+ salary is an extremely handsome salary for a Superintendent, and with that our current Superintendent is fairly new to the position and school Superintendents do not come out of the gate making $200,000 per year. Lastly, one important point which continues to be missed. To live and work in upstate NY, especially being successfully employed in the township you were raised in, in beautiful/safe Broadalbin, this in and of itself is a benefit which is priceless. These are public funds being paid to our Superintendent and from this tax payer's perspective there is no rhyme or reason to how we are calculating pay increases for our Superintendent; a $10,000 number is thrown out there and our BOE accepts it. In the spirit of a democracy I would appreciate the other side of this story being posted on Plain Talk.


Answer: The increase in the Superintendent's salary was not a cost of living increase. It was an attempt to bring our superintendent into a position approaching parity with his peers.

In sharp contrast to a misleading statement, I can prove that our superintendent is one of the lowest paid in the state. Whether indexed by median household income, the percentage of families living in poverty, or by cost per pupil (salary/enrollment) B-P pays less than almost every district in NY. When these indexes are taken together, B-P gets a better bargain than 98 percent of all districts in the state and better than 94 percent of schools in our area.

All this and Broadalbin-Perth has the highest graduation rate of the HFM-BOCES districts.

Please come to the next BOE meeting April 25th at 6:45PM at the high school media center and I'll show you the data. If you'd like to have the data files themselves please contact the Board at bpboe@bpcsd.org and I will email them to you. If you have other measures which are more valid then please offer them and I'm certain the board would be interested.

Here are the sources for the data I used:

• From The National Center for Education Statistics School District Demographic System, "American Community Survey": http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/acs09/acsdownload.aspx
• From The New York State Dept. of Education, "New York State School Administrator Salary Disclosure": http://www.p12.nysed.gov/mgtserv/admincomp/
• From The New York State Dept. of Education, "The New York State School Report Card": http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/reportcard/
• From The Empire Center for NY State Policy, "SeeThroughNY": http://www.seethroughny.net/BenchmarkingNY/tabid/98/Default.aspx

As for the intangible benefits of being employed in a position of prestige in the town of one's youth I submit to you that this is a subjective measure (one may plausibly argue that there are an equal number of disadvantages). In any case this is not something considered by the board as compensation during contract discussions.
-answered by Ed Szumowski, Board of Education Vice President