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EDITORIAL
Gold diggers, apply here
(Published May 17, 2004)

It’s time for a reality check.

How much is a school superintendent worth?

Start with the recollection that the District’s last permanent superintendent, Paul L. Vance, was one of the city’s highest paid officials at a salary of $175,000 a year. And consider the demanding performance that D.C. residents expect from the city’s school board members, who are paid only $15,000 a year.

Published reports during the past week said that city officials may have already offered $350,000 a year to one applicant as part of a bidding war for his services. Mayor Anthony A. Williams says that his aides are seeking a legal way – perhaps through a blind trust – to use money solicited from wealthy individuals and corporations to help pay as much as $600,000 a year in salary, bonuses and other perks to a new superintendent for D.C. Public Schools.

Not surprisingly, many D.C. residents have reacted with a mixture of disbelief and outrage that such lavish compensation would even be contemplated for a single public official – especially coming right after news that more than 557 school-based employees, including 285 teachers, will lose their jobs in June due to a lack of money to pay them.

Mayor Williams – who has insisted on inserting himself into the process of hiring a new superintendent, despite the law giving that authority solely to the D.C. Board of Education – claims that luring a good superintendent to the District requires lots of money. He told a gathering of local journalists May 13 that the out-of-town applicants themselves, rather than city officials who are interviewing them, have put those high salary demands on the table.

If that’s the case, city officials need to take a deep breath and reconsider the hiring process they have concocted. They should stop seeking a messiah, a process that likely will lead only to failed expectations and prolong the community’s deep disappointment in its schools. They should also consider that other, better-qualified candidates for the job might have applied had they known that D.C. officials were willing to double the last superintendent’s salary.

But what kind of person would even accept $350,000 a year from a government to run its schools when that same government cannot afford to ensure that thousands of needy students enrolled in those schools are adequately fed?

Officials should be looking for someone whose commitment to this community and its children is both real and deep, rather than a commodity that must be bought. Sadly, it appears that city officials may be tacitly accepting that being a gold digger "qualifies" individuals to run the District’s schools.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator