Task force on consolidation eyes school administrator costs

Cape Henlopen School District Superintendent Robert Fulton is the fourth highest paid superintendent in the state, two recent reports show.

Fulton, who has a master's degree, was hired as superintendent in 2012 for a salary with compensation of about $140,000, according to information provided by the Office of Management and Budget. A year later he was making about $155,000 in total compensation. Since then, his salary and compensation has increased by about $4,000 each year with an $8,000 increase from 2015 to 2016. In 2017, Fulton made $177,336 in total compensation – a raise of more than $37,000 or 25 percent over five years.

In a comparison of superintendent salaries by Kevin Ohlandt on his Exceptional Delaware blog, Fulton is the fourth highest paid superintendent in Delaware behind superintendents in Brandywine, New Castle County Vo-Tech and Christina. Using salaries alone obtained from the individual school districts, Ohlandt said Brandywine Superintendent Mark Holodick earns $199,677, NCCO Vo-Tech Superintendent Victoria Gehrt earns $190,331 and Christina Superintendent Richard Gregg earns $180,000.

Cape Henlopen school board President Andy Lewis said Fulton's raises are based on a standard annual increase of about 2 percent with multipliers for 12-month employee and superintendent used by school districts throughout the state.

“There's nothing special in his contract,” Lewis said. “He's working off the same tables and multipliers as everyone else.”

The $8,000 increase Fulton earned in the 2015-16 school year came because the district grew by 400 students, and Fulton earned a salary bump from the state because of the increase, Lewis said.

Six-figure salaries add up

Besides superintendent salaries, Ohlandt examined the number of administrators throughout the state making $100,000 or more.

Cape spends about $3.5 million a year for salaries over $100,000. By factoring only salaries over $100,000, Ohlandt said Cape's per student cost for administrators is $651, but the highest per student cost in Delaware goes to New Castle County Vo-Tech at $966. Polytech comes in second at $908, while Sussex Tech is $746 per student.

“Cape doesn’t have as many schools, and their student count is significantly lower than, say, Caesar Rodney. Yet they have more administrators with less students and less buildings,” Ohlandt said. “This is, in large part, due to the fact that the taxpayers are more willing to pass referendums which establish local funding for school districts.”

On March 20, Cape Henlopen voters overwhelming approved a referendum raising taxes to pay $21 million locally for a $55 million building project. The state will pay the remaining $34 million for an addition to Cape High, a new middle school and operating expenses, such as salaries, that go along with opening a new school.

Lewis said district administrators have rolling two-year contracts that the board renews every year.

“Since I've been on the board we've never renegotiated a contract,” Lewis said.

If there were an issue with an administrator's performance, he said, the board would not renew the contract in June or July when all the other administrators’ rolling contracts are approved. Instead, Lewis said, the administrator would be notified about their performance and given the opportunity to improve before the contract ends in December. If performance was not improved in the six-months leading up to December, he said, the contract would not be renewed and employment would terminate at the end of the school year.

District consolidation discussed

The number of administrators a school receives is determined by a state formula based in part on the number students enrolled. A formula using years of service, college degrees and post-graduate education is used to determine salaries for educators and administrators.

Atnre Alleyne, executive director of DelawareCAN, recently produced an interactive tool to explore Delaware education salaries.

“The national conversation and local conversation about teacher's salaries prompted me to put it together,” Alleyne said.

DelawareCAN's salary tool at https://delawarecan-data.shinyapps.io/de_teacher_salary_dashboard uses blue dots to represent teacher salaries, red dots for administrators and green for Department of Education positions. Viewers can click on one district or compare a few or all districts in the state. The site also gives salary information by school.

Comparing school districts across the state, teacher salaries largely range from $50,000 to $100,000. Administrators mostly fall between $100,000 and $150,000 with about 20 making more than $150,000.

Alleyne said he hopes the salary information prompts people to think about how Delaware is spending its $1.4 billion in education dollars.

“You certainly have a lot of people making a lot of money,” he said. “I certainly don't begrudge anyone making money, but is the overhead or the way we structure things producing outcomes?”

As a former Delaware Department of Education employee, Alleyne said he is all too familiar with the number of meetings held by officials to talk about problems in public schools. It's a process he calls adulting, meaning too many adults sitting around talking about problems and not enough action in the classroom.

Alleyne said education salary costs have been discussed by a task force on school district consolidation which has been meeting throughout the year to examine whether consolidating administrative positions could save money.

A DelawareCAN representative serves on the task force while Ohlandt regularly attends the meetings as a member of the public. The group is expected to release a report in May.

Alleyne said he has not yet received any feedback from his site, but it is a tool that officials could use to see how many transportation supervisors work in Sussex County, and whether the amount spent on salaries is justified.

Ohlandt said the biggest response from his salary research came from Indian River School District salaries.

“My guess is someone posted it on Facebook, and it caught wind due to the not-so-long-ago problems with the district,” he said, adding he found Indian River salaries to be low and the district fiscally conservative.

In 2017, Superintendent Mark Steele made about $150,000 in salary and compensation for a district of more than 10,000 students – twice the size of Cape Henlopen School District.