I understand that you have a degree that is more advanced than mine. I understand that your job requires more scrutiny than I would ever want in my life. I even understand that after many years of faithful service to a district you would want to make more than the average teacher does.
What I don’t understand, however, is why, in the face of economic troubles, teacher salary shortages, the inability to hire enough teachers to adequately staff programs that you allowed to be started, not to mention nearly the 256 million dollar cut from the state budget, you would continue to be paid an exceedingly impressive salary when you could take a marginal pay cut and hire several teachers.
Now, you might say, “I deserve this salary because I lead a life that leads to questions and letters like yours. Additionally, I have several advanced degrees, and run an entire school district.” Here is my conundrum. I planned to become a teacher from a very early age, seventh grade to be exact. Even then, I knew that teachers do not make a lot of money. Schools are not a business, and I do not understand how, when we follow no other part of the business model, why we would choose to pay our top executives an outrageous salary when we don’t even give our teachers substantial raises for valuable service in the classroom. Because that is what we are supposed to consider the most important job: those who actually educate our students. Quite frankly, I don’t understand why we have so many people in a district who don’t teach. Or maybe people in our district who failed at teaching, so they became the bosses of those who do.
I think that you would gain the respect of your teachers if you discarded the excess people in administration. Do we really need so many people, when our students are suffering in classrooms that can contain more than 40 students? While I can also understand that you want to maintain a salary equal to that of your peers, so that your Superintendent is a worthy candidate, I wish that it didn’t look like you became a superintendent to make more money. Quite frankly, I would love to make as much money as the people that I graduated from college with, but I chose to be a teacher, instead of an accountant. Surely you chose education for the same reasons.
I have heard many teachers talking about how they are becoming administrators so they can make more money. Where did they miss the memo that teachers don’t make much money, and people who get into education for the money are greedy assholes? I’ve lived through superintendents who embezzled money, who used their position to hire their friends, selected poor educational tools because they received gifts, not to mention receiving a salary that was equal to four and a half teachers. Dallas ISD’s Hinojosa makes a salary that would pay for almost seven teachers with Master’s degrees and three years experience (read: me). If we cut the salaries of every Superintendent who makes more than $100,000, we could cut a lot of reasoning from that plan to fire teachers. While you could say we wouldn’t want a superintendent who didn’t want that kind of money, because it might call into question whether they they would really be a good candidate for the job. I think that a superintendent who thinks that their salary is more important than the quality and salaries of the teachers and students in their care isn’t a superintendent that I would want to have. In fact, if you were to offer me a superintendent's job right now in my district, I would happily cut more than 200K and still make twice as much as I do right now.
Here’s another question: why do you have so many dollars in surplus yet refuse to spend it on hiring the teachers that we need? If you would like to know specifically what I would like for you to do spend that money on in my district, it would be to fix the walls in our classrooms that are crumbling from all the water leaks, and hire the requisite special education teachers so that our “inclusion” classes would really be inclusion rather than the kind that require quotation marks. Having enough teachers to adequately teach the students that we have is sort of your job, right?
Sincerely,
A Young Teacher
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