Priorities In Action
By Mitch Berg
The Minneapolis public school district expects to realize a savings of about $11 million when it completes his layoff of about 100 administrative staff from its headquarters building.
The district’s line is the savings are going to go back to the classroom – including potentially allowing the middle and high schools to add an extra hour onto their curricula.
Those of us who live in the conservative, real world know what this actually means – but i’ll break it down for the rest of the audience:
Now that they’re forced to cut administrators, they can focus more money on education.
See the priorities?
Minneapolis has been systematically shorting students, their classrooms, and the curricula to keep their administrative payrolls fat and happy. Now that declining enrollments have the district in trouble, the piper needs to be paid.
This has to be at least as much the case in St. Paul, where the district headquarters building, in the Stalinesque fortress at 360 Colborne St., is more stuffed with deadwood than Lake of the Woods after the big windstorm.
March 25th, 2015 at 9:02 am
100? Good start.
March 25th, 2015 at 10:00 am
Cutting 100 staff saves them $11 million? Even including benefits and the occasional company car, that’s a bunch of people paid pretty well.
March 25th, 2015 at 10:21 am
So the average fired administrator took home $110K total package.
The average MPS teacher makes $56K in salary according to salary.com, and if they have the same benefit packages as public schools nationally that make their total compensation worth $79K.
I guess MPS values administrators much more than teachers. No surprise there.
March 25th, 2015 at 6:47 pm
nerdbert; I would add that they get that generous comp plan working for only 7 months out of the year. My neighbors, who have school age children, showed me all of the days that there are no school during the regular school year. Counting the holiday and spring breaks, the annual joke known as MEA conferences (read teacher vacations), teachers get over 40 days off during the school year. That doesn’t account the snow or extreme cold days, either.
As for administrators, just look at the number of admin staff employed by any state university. Last year, the U of M had 112 people in HR alone! And people wonder why tuition and books cost so much.
March 25th, 2015 at 10:04 pm
hoss, when I started teaching at a major Midwest university there was 1 administrator for every 12 professors. When I left a decade later the ratio was 1:1.5. I don’t even want to know what it is now.
April 9th, 2015 at 12:01 pm
[…] as we’ve seen with the recent layoffs in Minneapolis, it’s interesting that the districts are so loaded up on useless administrative mouths to […]