How much should a community pay the superintendent of a public school district?
Back in November, the board here in our overly-large school district voted unanimously to extend the contract of our super and raise her salary by $40,000+.
The contract approved at Thursday’s meeting retains Reid through June 2028 at an annual salary of $424,146 and an annual $12,000 car allowance. Her initial contract, originally set to last through June 2026, included a salary of $380,000 plus the car allowance. Reid also received annual cost of living salary adjustments like other Fairfax school system employees, a provision continued in the new agreement.
Don’t forget medical and other benefits (which are still relatively good around here) that are part of the package for most positions. So she will receive around $450,000 annually.
Is that an appropriate amount to pay a superintendent?
Considering the “division serves more than 180,000 students across nearly 200 schools”, with around 30,000 employees and a budget of something like 3-1/2 billion dollars, maybe it is.
She certainly has a big, complex job, although in a district the size of Fairfax, the superintendent’s role is largely political, not educational.
Most of her time is taken up with lobbying for more funding, managing a pretty large bureaucracy, and keeping many, many different constituencies, inside and outside the organization, as happy as possible. Plus lots of public relations, of course.1
The most valuable supervisors I had in my working life were those who were skilled at removing barriers so the rest of us could more easily help the people we served. For the first half of my career that was the kids, and for the second half the educators in schools who worked with kids.
If the superintendent is doing that for everyone in our overly-large school district, she deserves every penny.
The image is a detail from one of those “nearly 200” school buildings in the district. Considering I probably visited 80% of them during my time in the system, I’m surprised at how few photos I took along the way.
1. When I worked in Fairfax, the golden rule was “Stay out of the Post”. Then as now, the paper really only wanted to cover education issues when they produced headlines, usually bad ones. You didn’t want to be the person who caused them.