By April 2021 the District had spent $506,000 of the $18 million bond on excavation and backfill for City Gym. The limestone rock was similar to that seen on this page. Apparently the District did not care about the community enough to address the obvious question of where the stormwater was to go from atop this limestone hill. By this point they certainly had sufficient evidence that the rock was impermeable. Why did no one care?
One thing the Public Information Act can be used for is to view public employee employment contracts. I have obtained a number of contracts through the years, and more recently I requested and received a copy of Superintendent Moore’s contract. Here it is.
Here’s something to consider. At $115,000 annually, her salary is only just above the median for rural superintendents, according to this recent TASB survey. That survey concluded that for school districts with less than 500 students (ICISD is in this camp) the median salary was $112,466. However, the median salary reported for districts statewide who participated (72% of all districts) was $150,000. Keep in mind that measuring salary against a median metric is not necessarily the best way to approach this issue, but the median data was all that was reported by TASB.
I’ve publicly gone on record supporting higher teacher salaries and opposing school vouchers. My critics will find it difficult, therefore, to assume that I am anti-ICISD on everything solely because they are flooding my property.
I’ll go one step further here.
Her starting pay was too low.
Consistent with my opinion that ICISD teachers are paid too little, our community should not be paying superintendents near the median for rural districts. She’s only a few months into her contract, so my views are necessarily without regard to her performance. That said, my rationale for paying teachers better is the same as my rationale for paying, in this case, starting superintendents better - if the Board wants the next candidate for the job to be superior to the last, it is going to have to be prepared to progressively graduate up to urban campus pay.
Anecdotally, my personal experience with 6A and 1A superintendents makes me pause to consider whether TASB’s distinction in its survey between large and small districts is a valid distinction. There’s room to consider Ann Richard’s great quote, “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” There’s no doubt in my mind that rural district superintendents are doing the same job as urban superintendents, with the main exception being that rural superintendents are doing it with far fewer staff resources. In other words, that less than 500 student metric is one of convenience for TASB, and it likely does not accurately reflect the similarities between rural and urban school district superintendent jobs.
And, though I didn’t flesh this out on my teacher salary post, if the District wants to retain good teachers they have to pay them well. The same goes for superintendents. The TASB survey points out that the average stay for a superintendent is 3 years. Superintendent Moore’s contract is for three years. If the Board is going to consider keeping her, there’s no doubt they will have to consider aggressively upping their ante. (One reason for investing in higher starting pay for key positions like the superintendent is that retention can yield substantial dividends for the district’s overall growth and sustained excellence. Excellence. There's that word again.)
Evaluating a public employee’s worth and salary from the sidelines like I am doing here is difficult, at best. All the discussion regarding her initial pay was done in closed session, so the public is privy to nothing about the Board’s judgements. (TASB's survey data came out a few months after she was hired.) Those deliberations, or some part of them, need to be public. This call for more transparent discussions regarding salary deliberations in closed sessions highlights the need for public accountability and involvement in determining public employee compensation, as it directly affects the community’s values and priorities.
My larger point, as I’ve said in other posts, is that budgets are statements of community values. Our values flow with the money. Community and opportunity I believe in part are created by excellent pay…for both teachers and superintendents.
Superintendent Moore needs to earn her salary, so I’m not excusing performance. But, that analysis comes later. Even so, there is good reason to believe she was started on the low end of the pay scale. Our community needs to do better.
Noticeably absent from the TASB survey is data addressing the differences in pay between male and female superintendents. I suspect that having that data might help further flesh out some wage bias that might be timely addressed at ICISD at this moment in its history. For the first time in my memory, and probably for the first time in its 114 year history, the school district is being led simultaneously by a female superintendent and female school board president (Maegin Carlile).
This board, thankfully, can no longer be called an “ol boys club”, as I have heard it described in the recent past.
This change in leadership is consistent with a community where there are more women than ever in government leadership roles. Here’s a list of the current women leaders in the county and their offices, not in any particular order:
County Judge: Molly Criner
District and County Clerk: Shirley Graham-Miles
Tax Assessor-Collector: Joyce Gray
County Treasurer: Carolyn Huelster
Justice of the Peace: Donna Smith
District Attorney: Allison Palmer
District Court Judge: Carmen Dusek
Third Court of Appeals, Chief Justice: Darlene Byrne
I consider this kind of diversity of leadership a good thing. The community is properly aligning with a larger societal acceptance of women as leaders. I'm glad for that.
Copyright 2023 G Noelke