School Employee Salaries

Newsday has been running articles recently about what many people already knew: school compensation costs are very high on Long Island. 

With a nod and good credit to John Hildebrand and Newsday, in addition to pensions (which are nonnegotiable), employee health care costs, average school employee compensation on Long Island is reported to be $73,417, compared to $54,792 state-wide (outside of New York City, but including Long Island).  

Today's front page story blasts the fact that the ten highest paid school administrators in the state are on Long Island, earning between $353,000 and half a million dollars.

Wow. The point of this blog post is the absence of an exclamation point (!) after that word, "wow". Time for some critical thinking....

Not one dime of salaries or other monetary perks is paid to any school employee without having been approved by the Board of Education.  Your school board has agreed to every cost item except pensions that make up school employee compensation. They agree to pay, they put it in their school budget, and you do the following three things:

1. You pass the school budget 99 percent of the time.
2. You re-elect the members of your school board 99 percent of the time.
3. You write checks to pay your school taxes, 100 percent of the time.

Is the problem us?  Are you the problem? No you are not.

Are the people you elect and re-elect to the school board the problem?  I could say yes, and that would not be incorrect.  But they are only the proximate cause, the closest to the problem; they are not the "root cause".

Are the employees and their unions the problem? No, and I will take all the heat anyone wants to give me on this. If you think the unions can pay themselves or their members one red cent, guess again. It goes right back to the school boards who agree to what the unions (and non-union administrators) request from them.

So, what is the root cause of this financially unsustainable school compensation mess? It is the basic system of school governance that is at fault. 

This system puts lay people, like myself, on school boards and let's them negotiate contracts worth tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. Those same lay school board members then cobble together budgets than can run to hundreds of millions of dollars, the sky is the limit!

The solution? The only reason we have 124 small school districts on Long Island controlled by about 700 lay school board members, is to perpetuate the elusive notion of "Local Control", a notion which is both mythical and costly to maintain in its illusion of being somehow beneficial to both the taxpayers and the children of every school district.

We do not have local control of our schools, and never will again. So let's stop trying to kid ourselves.

The solution is consolidation, a reduction in the number (124) of controlling "boards of education" and the establishment of a very small number (14) of professional, paid boards who are financially and legally qualified to set education policy and to budget and spend education dollars responsibly. 

The number, 14, I believe to be the best number of surviving administrative districts in Nassau County. This would represent an approximate consolidation of four existing school districts into each new administrative district. These districts would function like the big five cities school systems, would be subject to a real 2 percent tax cap, and would not have their budgets subject to popular vote. 

As is presently the case with village, town, county and state governments, the only voting in these new school administrative districts would be for the seven board members in each district when their staggered terms expire.

Or, we can sit here dreaming of local control and spending our tax dollars like there is no tomorrow.

If anyone has further interest in the concept of consolidating 54 Nassau County school districts into 14 Administrative Districts, respond here, or contact me at chriswendt117@gmail.com