Six Figures

The OSPI website is a fun place, depending on what kind of fun you’re looking for. It’s not Spitzerish fun; it’s not even Disneyland fun. It’s more like that sense of fun you feel when you open the dishwasher and see that it’s already been run so the dishes are clean and you can use those dishes for a few days and then worry about loading it again at some point in the future, and if you get lucky your wife or mother-in-law might do it!

Anyhow, poking around the site a few weeks back I came across this spreadsheet (Historical Comparison of Statewide School District Personnel Annualized Average Base Salaries) looking at trends in teacher pay in Washington State. It’s complete for teachers, administrators, and classified staff back to 1973-1974, and the patterns are pretty interesting.

• In the 1973-1974 school year there were about 32,700 teachers who made an average salary of $11,295. In 2007-2008 there are 54,000 teachers making an average of almost $50k a year.
  
  
• In 1973 there were 1,200 “central administrators” (I’m assuming that means superintendents; the page I have doesn’t define) making $19,540 a year. In 2007 there were 1,174 administrators making an average of $101,475.
  
  
• “Wait a minute,” I can hear you thinking, “there are less central administrators now than there were 35 years ago? That can’t be right!” I agree, given the rise of special ed directors, assistant superintendents, and the like, though I’d posit that the fact that there’s less school districts now than there were then could be an influence.
  
  
• Unit administrators (the principals) make an average of $92,103 a year, up from $17,368 in 1973.

Hooray for numbers!

The Joys of Leadership

In Hoquiam, the School Board's terrible evaluation of the school Superintendent made for a great newspaper article over the weekend.

The evaluation said the superintendent has a “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude, accused him of not respecting women in the workplace, described him as a micro-manager and said his leadership style is the equivalent of “Do what I say, not what I do.”

“There is no defending the negative issues presented in this evaluation,” it states. “Unfortunately, I think that these situations had a direct correlation on at least two board members and one business manager leaving,” one School Board member wrote.

And in another case of an internal matter getting out and getting messy, Burlington-Edison High School will soon be looking for a new principal after the Superintendent drove off the old one:

The disclosure came amid signs of conflict between VanderVeen and district Superintendent Rick Jones that emerged at a faculty and staff meeting at the high school Wednesday morning.

At the meeting, teachers report Jones as having said that VanderVeen had only one year left at the school because she refused to take a different job within the school district.

Jones initially denied that he had put a one-year timeline on VanderVeen’s tenure at the high school. But this morning, after hearing several teachers’ account of the meeting, he sent an email to staff members at the high school acknowledging the comment.

“I misspoke and I apologize for the confusion I caused,” Jones wrote in the email. “It was not my intent or that of the school board to quantify the time Beth would be at the school.”

“I totally had not intended for that to be the message,” Jones told the Skagit Valley Herald this morning. “In the emotion of things, I didn’t choose my words as appropriately as I should have.”

Elsewhere, Tacoma is narrowing down the field in its search for a new superintendent. Read the article, and also check out the surprisingly nice candidate profiles that the News Tribune did. A note to the field: this is pat on the back they use to find a place to put the knife.

Finally, there's the Aberdeen High School principal who was a leader on Friday, went home for the night, and turned in his letter of resignation on Saturday. When someone doesn't finish the year like that, you can assume there's a lot of inner turmoil going on.