elpasospeak

The El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) has been using a firm named Proact Search recently.

Proact brought us our new superintendent and just the other day two new associate superintendents.

It appears that Proact was hired by the old school board, the one that was neutered by the Texas Education Agency.

Now the new superintendent is using the firm that got him his job to find his senior staff.  Is there anything wrong with that?  Probably not, but it sure looks like payback.

I decided to look into the search firm and found a blog article about the Chicago Public Schools.

Sounds familiar

From the article:

Without fanfare, CPS board members recently approved a three-year, no-bid $20 million contract to provide extensive professional development for principals and network chiefs in what is being dubbed the Chicago Leadership Academy.

The size and the circumstances surrounding the contract have raised eyebrows among some outside observers. The contract with Wilmette-based Supes Academy is by far the largest no-bid contract awarded in at least the past three years, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis of board documents. In addition, CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett worked for the company as a coach up until the time she came on board at CPS as a consultant.

In addition, Byrd-Bennett is listed as a senior associate for a superintendent search firm called PROACT Search, in documents dated August 2012—four months after taking the position with CPS. PROACT is run by the same individuals who lead Supes: Gary Solomon, the executive director, and Thomas Vranas, the president.

Restoring public confidence is one of the things that new management is supposed to do, and this does not look good.  I guess time will tell.

We deserve better

Brutus

Looking further into the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) employment practices, I wanted to see how their teacher salaries compared to the salaries of the administrators.

EPISD publishes a set schedule explaining how much money new teachers are paid.  By the way, teachers that have been working for the district since before 2008 are paid slightly differently.

Teachers

A new teacher with five years of teaching experience is paid $46,536.82 this year.  Teachers with a master’s degree receive $1,000 more and those with a doctorate get another $1,000 more ($2,000 total).  I believe that the contract requires the teacher to work 187 days, making their work year 9 months. That works out to $249.00 a day for the teacher without an advanced degree.

We know that good teachers spend time at home grading papers and preparing for class.  Some teachers dig into their own pockets to buy supplies and materials for their classes.

Administrators

A budget analyst must have a bachelor’s and five years of experience to start.  They get paid a minimum of $248.85 and top out at $353.17 daily.  The job requires 227 days of work, yielding between $56,488.95 and $80,169.59 per year.

An instructional applications analyst provides “training to campus personnel and offering technical support in the use of hardware and software on campus”.  They must have a bachelor’s, a teaching certificate, and two years of teaching experience.  This is a 227 day job that pays $230.43 a day to start and tops out at $326.79 daily, yielding between $52,307.61 and $74,181.33 for the employee.

You get the idea.

Upside down

Unfortunately the job categories at EPISD reward good teachers by promoting them out of the classroom.  If you were a young teacher that needed money to support a family which would you pick — $46.5 thousand a year to teach in the classroom, or $52.3 thousand a year to teach other teachers how to use their computers?

By the way, in case you think that the situation gets better as the teacher gets more experience, a classroom teacher with a master’s and 30 years of teaching experience tops out at $60,269.65 per year.

We deserve better

Brutus

Our El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) board of managers has shown us again that they make up the rules as they go.

In June they passed a board policy that did not allow the superintendent to hire or fire his most senior staff (the  cabinet).

Then when they decided to hire a new superintendent they evidently wrote something different into his contract.

Do as I say, not as I do

The Texas Association of School Boards stepped in and suggested that the district might want to keep their policies and their contracts consistent.

The latest board action changed their policy to require the superintendent to notify the board before he makes any public announcements about changes to his cabinet.  He evidently can hire and fire at will.

Telling us what he thinks

The president of the board was quoted in the El Paso Times:

“We have to have our policies aligned with contractual obligations we’ve entered into with the superintendent,” he said. “It’s perfunctory. It’s not material, it’s perfunctory.”

If the definition of perfunctory is “carried out with a minimum of effort or reflection”, I would certainly have to agree with the board president.

Existing policies evidently deserve minimum reflection from this group.

By the way, how can the district be “independent” when the State of Texas has engineered a coup and replaced our elected school board with an appointed one?

We deserve better

Brutus