(Lori Piotrowski) – With all the talk recently of “shared sacrifice” when it comes to balancing Nevada’s budget woes, one would presume that everything in the public budget has been pruned to the bone, and that, GASP, there isn’t anywhere else that can be cut without hitting vitally important organs or skeletal mass. The School Board President and the Union Representative keep telling us that the teachers already bear the brunt of the cuts and their salaries should go untouched. Let’s go with that premise and see what we might be able to do to preserve their pay.
Maybe we could start with the top administrative position within a school, the principal. The Clark County School District employs 120 elementary school principals who are paid $100,000 or more in base salary, and 30 middle school and 40 high school principals paid the same. But, hey, these people are in a school every day, so we'll give them credit for that and look elsewhere.
What about the central office employees who are paid so well that their salaries would water the mouths of even the highest compensated private sector supervisors? What is a K-12 Teacher Development Coordinator III and why does the CCSD needs 23 of these? I ask because the average salary for this coveted central office position is $86,297, with the highest salary at $96,388 and the lowest at $73,244.
CCSD lists 20 positions under the job title “Licensed Personnel Project Facilitator K-12.” Who are these people, and why should we be paying them salaries up to $86,000? Plus, can anyone out there decipher what a “K-12 Teacher Development Director II” is, or why we need six at an average salary of $101,716? These, after all, are men and women who spend NO time with students, but have been deemed “vital” to the CCSD. Sort of like the four secretaries who “service” one administrator at the Sahara marble palace are “vital” to the CCSD’s existence.
Rather than making a serious attempt at dieting (which most physicians argue is necessary for good health), the CCSD’s administrative team prefers to hack away at the bone mass, tendons, and vital organs with a meat cleaver. And the public wonders why education suffers so in southern Nevada.
(Thanks to Transparent Nevada for salary figures. – Ed.)
