Record Number of Florida School Employees Earn $100,000 in 2010
by Education Action GroupFlorida’s Marion County school district drew national headlines last summer when it announced that it was switching to a four-day school week as a way to save money.
Other school officials took a more conventional route by laying off teachers and cutting student programs, all the while blaming Gov. Rick Scott for underfunding Florida’s public schools.
Now comes a report that finds 946 school employees in the Sunshine State earned at least $100,000 in 2010. That’s up 818 percent from 2005, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability.
The foundation also finds the percentage of non-school employees who earn at least six-figures has increased by only 7 percent during that same period.
“You don’t have to be great in math to figure out that something is wrong with these school salaries,” Tarren Bragdon, Foundation for Government Accountability CEO, told the Sunshine State News.
“During these five years, you have flat student enrollment, the biggest recession since the Great Depression and skyrocketing six-figure salaries – that adds up to a raw deal for Florida parents and taxpayers,” Bragdon said.
The average salary for a Florida teacher is about $47,000, which means administrators and superintendents receive the majority of those hefty paydays.
Tea Party leader Patricia Sullivan summed it up best: “It appears the servant is now the master, and the children get the crumbs.”
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34 Comments
Oh and there is also this.
http://www.bostonherald.com/projects/buybacks/ear...
Below is a complete list of the $32.7 million the City of Boston spent over the past five years — from 2003 to 2007 — buying back unused sick time and vacation days from city employees.
How many of you proles get to bank unused SICK TIME?
"………Record Number of Florida School Employees Earn $100,000 in 2010…."
They are doing this,…….. "for the children"
There needs to be a link between tax revenues and government expenditures.
I bet all private schools have a link between revenue and expenditures.
Anyone beleive we are getting our money's worth? Must be nice to have a monopoly. I love it the way regressives tralk about the evils of monopoly all the while ignoring what our gov't has become.
"It's for the children!" It sure is… THEIR CHILDREN not the communities.
Are the people who report on this stuff as it is happening completely uniformed? Do they do any background investigation like looking at budgets and contracts? This should have been news a year ago;
Public schools are union sinkholes.
Only if the tax revenue is tied to economic growth or some other indicator which protects the taxpayers.
I think it is unethical. It is supposed to be a safety net, not a perq.
For the children
It is always about children. Then the money must follow child into homeschooling. Where real competition will give us real education for the children.
Obama's union stimulus in action…!!!
For their own children. How else can they afford private and prep schools?
Same as CA state employees. Record number of $150k earners.
Answer….."Virtual Academy" "Charter School(s)" "Home School".
Public school…… wasteful, corrupt, dangerous, incompetent and becoming very close to insignificant. A child well guided, can gain more of an education by abstaining from the UNION owned ideological use of political indoctrination education and stick to the masterful tried and true education that centers on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic…..
To our retired parents on fixed incomes in FL….are you reading this? Don't you think it is time to fire some people?
The reason for this is Unions. UNIONS MUST BE BANNED, if we are ever going to our labor markets working again. This will also serve to cut off the funding for democrats campaigns, so we can kill two birds with one stone. When are the republican candidates going to bring up this topic?
Everyone wants to be paid what they see as fair, but there needs to be balance. These contracts just don’t work. You see public sector compensation continuing to rise as compensation falters in the private sector (http://bit.ly/pn5weF). During a recession that’s a recipe for disaster. Of course schools are going to have to move to layoffs. There’s only so much flexibly a budget can have in times like these. It helps no one to have a few teachers with extremely top-heavy contracts while schools are hamstrung with inability to have more teachers.
This will only continue unless teachers and politicians actually accept some responsibility and try to address this issue in way that isn’t beholden to more taxes.
Public schools charge the gov't more per student than many/most private schools charge individual families for tuition. With these outrageously high salaries, it begins to look like a pyramid scheme: those at the top get rich and those at the bottom of the chain (the students) get the shaft.
Come on. We know it's all for the children. That's what the unions tell us, and we can surely believe those very folks who literally work their fingers to the bone teaching, motivating, and inspiring our youth to excel in their studies so that upon graduation they are prepared to enter the workforce as productive members of society. Really? Not so much after seeing The video with Juan Williams regarding Chicago schools and discovering our graduates rank something like 34th internationally.
$47,000 dollar salary isn't bad for 9 months work or less. That's $5,222.22 dollars per month. And, if they work summer sessions, they earn more. Betcha there are thousands of folks who would jump at the chance to have one of those positions.
"The average salary for a Florida teacher is about $47,000, which means administrators and superintendents receive the majority of those hefty paydays."
I think that is the elephant in the room, that no one is talking about. I think the "overpaid teachers" argument isn't a productive one. First, I don't think people mind paying the people who actually instruct their children a really good wage. Its a very important job. But in many districts, administration is reaching or has past a 1 to 1 ratio to teachers.
The unions use the teachers every time they want more money they claim it's for the teachers, to help the kids etc etc… but then when they get more money it too often goes to administrators (also part of teachers unions).
Then when their ideological opponents argue against increased spending, their automatically seen as attacking teachers.
From a strategy standpoint, the argument should shift from overpaid teachers to overpaid administrators.
Plus from a policy standpoint, its the real problem.
Aside from superintendents and upper management, the teachers should be the highest paid job in a school system, and there is no need for 1 paper pusher for every instructor.
One of the arguments is, many of the paper pushers are paid for directly with grants for those specific positions. So if they eliminate them, that money won't be relocated to teachers, so might as well get what you can get.
What's sick time?
Public schools are union sTinkholes.
Public sector union jobs are the only jobs I can think of where the boss — in this case the government — is motivated to pay the employee more because it's someone else's money and because the employee will then turn around and use his or her vote to take more money from taxpayers and give it to the boss.
Think about it: If people had no choice but to keep buying from McDonalds, and McDonalds employees could vote to keep raising prices and give that extra cash to their managers, we'd have $50/hr. burger flippers.
And the campaign cash receivers sit down at the bargaining table with the campaign cash gives. The tax payers are excluded. Once upon a time it was illegal.
Would FDR be a fan of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker?
As FDR pointed out, "All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress."
Best of the Day!
Why else would they be possibly doing what they are doing?
You can't put a price on a good education… /sarc
Well, as long as taxes are a percentage of something we should be okay. % of income, %of property value, % of sales receipts, etc.
Our nations schools and colleges are being destroyed by these people — it's not the teachers bloating the cost but the schools adminstrators. The ugly truth is nobody ever targets them and they are our nation's problem.
School administrators — the bureacrats– are the WORST mini-politicians in the world. They teach nothing, make nothing, bilk the students and parents while spending all their time going to dinners with your other crooked two bit politicians who are also in the business of smearing around other people's money for their careers. Every other year these dirty politicians and dirty school bureacrats raise their own salaries and you pay.
If we don't get rid of this new and expanding bloated bureacrat class our educational system will never recover.
One school principal and a secretary or two is all there should be. Worked when we were number one in education, works in private schools. Clean house, just totally get rid of all these hundred-thousand dollar public school thieves now.
Our education would improve overnight. The administrative class are also all liberals who can't even speak grammatically even though they have "doctorates" from somewhere. They are the ones pushing real subjects out of the schools for liberal fantasies that don't work and now under their watch our kids can't even WRITE or do simple math by age 18.
Next time a union thug claims its about the students somebody please slap him across the face with a printout of this article. If you can print it on a 2×4 that would be ideal. We need to repeal No Child Left Behind, close the Department of Education, end forced unionization for teachers, and give control back to teachers, not administrators who have never set foot in a classroom.
Yep.
So it is ok to pay CEO's multi-million dollar bonuses, but when teacher get good money for once it is a crime. I see how this works….
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