Public School Salaries, Just the Facts

by John Mackenzie, Christina School District Board of Education (June 7, 2006)


A recent Wilmington News-Journal article by Cecilia Le suggests that the Christina School District has too many "highly paid" administrators on its payroll. The data used in the article were obtained via FOIA request to the Delaware Department of Education. Cecilia was kind enough to send me the entire data file, which includes names and salaries of every employee in every Delaware public school, including Vo-Tech and charter schools. The News-Journal has published these data online as well.

Figures 1 and 2 compare the distribution of Christina employee salaries against distributions of employee salaries in the Brandywine, Colonial, Red Clay and New Castle County Vo-Tech districts. I sorted each district's employees by salary, highest to lowest, and plotted these by percentile. Figure 1 shows the complete salary distributions of the five districts. Across the entire graph, Christina's salary distribution is generally lowest or second-lowest of the five districts, while the New Castle County Vo-Tech District's salary distribution is significantly higher than the rest.



Figure 2 compares the distributions of the top 10 percent of salaries in each of the five districts--primarly administrative salaries. Again, Christina's adminstrative salary distribution is generally lowest or second-lowest, and the New Castle County Vo-Tech's administrative salary distribution is higher than the rest. The drift of the News-Journal article was that Christina was using local funds to hire too many senior administrators or pay them inflated salaries. The data clearly disprove this.


Christina is Delaware's largest school district, with 19,236 students enrolled as of September 2005. Red Clay has 15,729 students; Brandywine has 10,577 students; Colonial has 10,476 students and New Castle County Vo-Tech has 3,492 students. Christina's larger aggregate payroll also includes staffing of the Sterck and Brennan schools which serve deaf and autistic children from all districts.

These data make it clear that Christina does not have disproportionately high administrative salaries or disproportionate numbers of highly-paid administrators. Overall, the average salary in Christina ($45,061) is lower than the average salaries in Brandywine ($46,087), Colonial ($45,553), Red Clay ($47,190) and New Castle County Vo-Tech ($53,596). Christina's current deficit is clearly not caused by salary inflation.

The huge majority of public education jobs in Delaware are allocated based on the state's unit-count formula, i.e., in proportion to September 30th student counts. The major part of most salaries derives from Division I state funding. Districts may use local funds to augment salaries for state-authorized positions (subject to collective bargaining agreements), and to hire additional teachers or other staff beyond what is authorized under the state's unit-count system. Christina's deficit is largely due to additional teacher hires on purely local funds.

Caveats

DOE calculated the salary data by multiplying May 12, 2006 pays by pay periods per year. Some individual pays included one-time payments (e.g., EPER) that caused these salaries to be overstated. I analyzed the DOE data exactly as provided; I did not account for the departures of five of Christina's 20 highest-paid administrators since May.

It is worth noting that Delaware's vo-tech districts enjoy significant funding advantages: vo-tech school boards can raise local taxes for capital construction or operations without local referendum, and vo-tech unit counts are calculated one teaching unit per 90 pupil hours/day (e.g., <15 students) versus one teaching unit per 20 students in other public schools.