Aug 7, 2005
(updated Aug 8, 2005)

"Suitable" School Salaries in Shawnee Mission School District:
$53,002 Median Teacher Salary.  
Is $222,483 plus 7% raise in salary enough for Superintendent?

• Lawrence Journal-World, Sept 2, School administrators get raises of at least 5 percent.  Superintendent still negotiating but currently paid $132,483, plus, ...
• Dodge City Globe, Sept 3, Wasteful spending of taxpayers' money.
  Superintendent paid $117,656 plus $7,200 for car allowance, plus, ...
• Lawrence Journal-World, Sept 16, KU Chancellor now paid $307,000

[Note:  Much of this information was presented in "Open Forum" at the Shawnee Mission School Board Meeting on August 8.] 

The Kansas City Star on July 27 reported "Shawnee Mission declared an impasse in talks last week".  

Last week, the district declared an impasse in contract negotiations with teachers though local NEA negotiators said they believed the two sides could reach an agreement with continued talks. . . .

Teachers rejected a district offer that would have increased base salaries by 6 percent and added two days to the calendar that were removed when teachers agreed to their 2004-2005 contract. When combined with step increases related to years of service, the district offer could have resulted in a 7.11 percent salary increase for some teachers.  . . .

The board approved a 7.11 percent raise for administrators, psychologists and classified personnel on Monday.  In addition, it approved 7.11 percent raises for Kaplan and her cabinet. Their new base salaries for the 2005-2006 school year are:

• Kaplan, $190,370.  [Meadowlark note:  see details near bottom for additional benefits]
• Robert DiPierro, deputy superintendent, $153,348.
• Gene Johnson, associate superintendent, $123,786
• Bill Frick, associate superintendent, $116,784
• Gillian Williams, associate superintendent, $110,181.

So what else is known about salaries in the Shawnee Mission School District?

The Kansas State Department of Education provides a PDF file showing salary information by county and school district for the 2004-2005 school year for all of Kansas:

www.ksde.org/leaf/reports_and_publications/salary_reports
/teachers/2004-2005_teachers_salary.pdf 

(Note if that link doesn't work, try here instead.)

This PDF reports the following Johnson County Teacher Averages ("Contracted Salaries" are  full-time equivalent salaries, including supplemental salaries and board paid fringe benefits) with Shawnee Mission the high-point in the state:

• Shawnee Mission     $54,014

• Blue Valley              $52,348

• Olathe                      $46,940

The Meadowlark obtain the individual teacher salaries for the above JoCo school districts, which are assumed to be on the same basis as above, for some further analysis.  Only the Shawnee Mission data are included in the analysis below.  

Shown below is a summary by category for the 2004-2005 compensations:

Source:  Kansas Legislative Research data analyzed by the Meadowlark.  Includes only “classified” staff.  Administrative staff members, like Tim Rooney, manager of budget and finance, who earns at least $99,321, are not included in the above analysis.

What does the USD 512 salary information look like graphically?  What if you took all the 2074 salaries and sorted then in order?  

Notes:

• 2074 salaries are included in the graphic above.  The very low values are likely part-time teachers, or teachers that only taught part of the year.

• Most of the categories do not "jump out" in the graphic, or appear in bands, above since the salaries for the various groups are intermixed.

• The extremely sharp rise in the slope of the line for Assistant Superintendents and the Superintendent above the Principals is a bit puzzling.  These USD 512 executive salaries do not appear to be consistent with salaries of other government executives in U.S. Federal and Kansas government service.

How do the salaries vary within a group?

Notes:

• This is a "box plot" (sometimes called a "box-and-whisker" plot) where the box shows the range for 50% of the data (the interquartile range, or IQR).  The horizontal line, often in the middle of the box, shows the location of the median value.  Outliers, which are statistically too high or too low, are shown as circles.   The low values are likely for part-time or part-year workers.

• Values inside parentheses show the number of salaries in that category.

• The groups are ordered by increasing median salary.

Sources of supplemental information used in the above two diagrams (the green lines and text):

• U.S. Federal Executive Salaries:  2005-Ex Schedule with some interpretation from How Much is Enough for Presidential Appointees?

• Kansas Supreme Court Info:  KTN Press Release, 6/9/2005

• Kansas Elected Officials:  http://www.kssos.org/forms/communication/legis.pdf  (p. 17)

• JoCo Commissioner info:  http://www.jocoelection.org/Filing/Filing-County.htm 

• Overland Park City Manger Info :  Kansas City Star, 8/25/2004

What do other Kansas salaries look like?  The Lawrence Journal-World published a table of Kansas salaries in 2003 for 50 specific jobs (see bottom of article).  That chart shows the average salary of a Kansas chief executive as $109,054 and the average salary of a Kansas surgeon as $145,100.

How has the superintendent's salary varied by year?

Notes:

• Salaries and total compensation values for the superintendent could not be found in all years in news accounts.  (See table below)

• Salaries for teachers for the same range of years was often not published in the newspapers.  Values were reported in a few of the years, but the basis changed sometimes from new teachers, to 4-year teachers, to 26-year with PhD teachers.  Without a common basis, a similar curve for teachers was not possible.

^*Annuities are an annual tax-sheltered annuity, and an annual insurance annuity.

A 7.1% raise from $177,750 would result in the given 2005-2006 salary. So the 2004-2005 salary was likely the same as in 2003-2004.  Assuming the values for annuities and car hadn't changed, the 2004-2005 figures would be ($177,750 salary) + ($10,000 + $18,700 annuities) + ($9,000 car) + ($7,033 unexplained) = $222,483, which is the value given by legislative research.

An educated guess on total 2005-2006 compensation:
($190,370 salary) + ($10,000 + $18,700 annuities) + ($9,000 car) + ($7,033 unexplained) = $235,103.

The Shawnee Mission superintendent salary is not considered "unusual" by many schools boards and superintendents.  Consider the following:

• The Oceanside, California school district is offering a $185,000 salary (competitive and negotiable) to a successful superintendent candidate.  Hurry, the deadline for submissions is August 11.  (link may be stale)

• A "broke" Minneapolis school district shells out $215,602+ for their first-year superintendent

• St. Louis schools will pay $250,000 plus benefits to their new superintendent, who only made $163,500+$35,000 in Philadelphia.

• Pittsburgh, PA schools in their "Choosing Our Next Superintendent" paper talk about offering a salary range from $120,000 to $325,000 (see. p. 19)

In Wisconsin, state law is blatantly ignored giving larger salary increases to superintendents than teachers:  School chief's pay outpaces teachers' (registration required):

Pay for most school superintendents in metropolitan Milwaukee has risen faster than average teacher salaries ... despite a state law that links pay for the two.  ...

Critics say the increases are out of line with the fiscal realities facing revenue-capped districts.

School boards routinely give their superintendents and other administrators the maximum they can under the law, despite what taxpayers can pay ...

Another factor that influences salaries is the wealth of the community in which they work ... People who make more money might be willing to pay a school superintendent more, and they also have to offer enough so the school leader can afford to live in their community ...

Apparently, affluent Shawnee Mission likes to pay more too for a Superintendent.  But our Superintendent is smart enough to know that her taxes are cheaper in Missouri, and hasn't lived in Johnson County for several years.  She now lives in Belton, MO.

Is this Feb 12, 2005 quote about Kansas schools?

While ... state K-12 education standards are among the highest in the nation, state funding for education ranks near the bottom.

``If we want to be a Third World state, we are on the right path,'' ... [a] ...School District Superintendent ... said ..., as she and three dozen other superintendents called on state lawmakers to stop ignoring their constitutional responsibility to fully fund basic education in schools.

No, this is from King County in the State of Washington in their King County Journal!  School superintendents in other states are waging similar battles against their states for "suitable" or "constitutional" funding.  This is perhaps the most incredible quote from that article:

Superintendents said it is not their responsibility to advise lawmakers on specific cuts to make to free up more funding for education and demanded the Legislature find solutions to the problem of education funding.

...

If the state remains unwilling to make an ``up-front investment'' in education, superintendents said, the impacts will be more high school dropouts, an uneducated work force, and more people in our jails and prisons.

Are "government" and "economics" topics that school superintendents should ignore? 

Future Meadowlark articles are planned to look at similar data in the Blue Valley and Olathe districts.

K a n s a s M e a d o w l a r k @ g m a i l . c o m