Reveal school chief pay sooner
Syosset schools Superintendant Carole Hankin, seen at a June 6 school board meeting, is the highest paid superintendent in New York State. Credit: Jason Andrew, 2011
Last June, the Syosset school board quietly awarded its superintendent a 4.7 percent raise -- not bad amid hard times.
But the superintendent is Carole Hankin, the highest paid in the entire state, and the raise brought her total compensation to a remarkable $541,454. Syosset, it should be noted, has 6,600 pupils.
Bad enough that her base pay of $405,244 is roughly twice as much as the U.S. secretary of education, the state education commissioner or the New York City schools chancellor get paid. And while Syosset's chief got a raise, both the new state commissioner and the new city chancellor accepted lower salaries than their predecessors in deference to tight budgets.
There's nothing new in high pay for Hankin, who was singled out by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo as an example of wasteful school spending. What's troubling here is how the raise was handled.
The Syosset school board didn't approve it until last June, after voters had already cast ballots in the school budget election and past the deadline for the data to make the website run by the state Department of Education. Thus, the raise only recently became widely known.
If school boards are going to hand out this kind of money -- and it's hard to see why they should -- they need to find a way to disclose it in time for school elections in May so that taxpayers know what's going on. Syosset is not alone in this. Many school districts wait until June to approve superintendent contracts. The rationale is that school boards want to know what their budget is (which hinges on the election outcome) before they approve a contract. They also prefer to settle with their unions first without having executive raises become a pretext for teachers to demand more money.
Clearly some more timely public disclosure is warranted. Even the New York State Council of School Superintendents says it supports advance Internet publication of superintendent contracts and collective bargaining agreements.
Of course, if school boards would stop paying administrators so much in the first place, perhaps they wouldn't be so shy about publicizing raises. In Syosset, for instance, it's hard to believe Hankin would have quit in a huff absent another $18,376. Then again, her contract is emblematic of the growth in school spending across the state in recent years, growth that school boards will have to rein in once New York caps annual property-tax increases (as the legislature and governor have agreed to do). Spending per pupil in New York rose 31 percent in the five years ended with the 2008-9 school year.
In February Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo sensibly called for a cap on superintendent pay at a maximum of $175,000 a year. At the time, at least 107 Long Island superintendents would have been over the proposed limit. The Senate sponsor of such cap legislation, Charles J. Fuschillo (R-Merrick), last week called Hankin's raise "both incomprehensible and unconscionable."
We can't tell whether taxpayers agree because they weren't told about it in time -- and they should be, not just in Syosset, but every time a district negotiates a new contract with its administrators.
