Eight Feet Deep

 The non-profit news site Texas Tri­bune appar­ently has unleashed a data-based inves­ti­ga­tion that has a lot of jaws flap­ping in the Lone Star State.

 Headed by for­mer Texas Monthly editor-in-everything, New Yorker Evan Smith, the Tri­bune has an easy-to-use data grab­ber on which you can find the salaries of your local school super­in­ten­dent or any in the rest of Texas. Hats off to the Tribune’s Matt Stiles and Brian Thevenot for an enlight­en­ing report.

 The infor­ma­tion unleashed espe­cially has many a neck red­den­ing down here in Beau­mont where it is lit­tle or no sur­prise that our some­times con­tro­ver­sial Beau­mont ISD Super­in­ten­dent Dr. Car­roll Thomas is the state’s high­est paid school executive.

 Thomas makes a very com­fort­able $324,212 per year. I would say what is most inter­est­ing about his salary is that it is earned for over­see­ing a dis­trict with 13,309 stu­dents.  The top four highest-paid supes fol­low­ing Thomas all have salaries in the 300 grand range. They over­see Fort Worth ISD (79,285 enroll­ment), Dal­las ISD (157,352), Alief (45,230), and Hous­ton (200,225 students).

 It seems much is made from other media using the Tri­bune’s infor­ma­tion of “per-student” fig­ures, the amount of dol­lars in salary per stu­dent, of each school leader. Maybe I am miss­ing it, but I have yet to find much real sig­nif­i­cance in those fig­ures other than in the “Gee Whiz” fac­tor. The fact is a num­ber of schools with smaller enroll­ments some­times pay fairly hand­some salaries to super­in­ten­dents which would tend to skew the per-student num­ber. Super­in­ten­dent Fer­nando Castillo runs the Pro­greso ISD in the Rio Grande Valley’s Hidalgo County. The dis­trict has an enroll­ment of  2, 150 and Fer­nando draws a salary of $208,566. Thus, Castillo has a $97-per stu­dent fig­ure while Daniel King who is super­in­ten­dent of Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD in the same county “earns” $7 per stu­dent with his enroll­ment of 30,618.

 A total of 214 super­in­ten­dents who run schools rang­ing from 500–2,500 stu­dents are paid salaries rang­ing from the high $99,000s to more than $46,000. Those are actu­ally some of the lower paid supes in the state.

 While some of the salaries seem out of whack, espe­cially when look­ing at enroll­ment, they also have to be seen in con­text. Texas has what I con­sider to be an inequitable school aca­d­e­mic grad­ing sys­tem. On the other hand, there are a lot of things I would do dif­fer­ent if I was the King of Texas.

 Socioe­co­nom­ics also have to be fig­ured into a rat­ing a school in the state’s “account­abil­ity sys­tem.” Thus, a superintendent’s abil­ity in ensur­ing that a school has a tol­er­a­ble rat­ing many times has to be seen through the lens of the racial and eco­nomic make up of a district’s stu­dents. For instance, Beaumont’s Thomas heads a school with a major­ity minor­ity pop­u­la­tion that has improved its grade from “Aca­d­e­m­i­cally Accept­able” to “Rec­og­nized.” The lat­ter is the sec­ond high­est of six account­abil­ity rat­ings the state pulled out of its a** uses.

 Of course, Thomas has detrac­tors who accuse him of every­thing from crony­ism to worse.

 I should be more involved and aware of our local school sys­tem. But I have no kids in school. I am more wor­ried about the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, city gov­ern­ment and state gov­ern­ment, in that order. So I will leave it to those who sup­port Thomas, racists who hate him because he is black, or those who have any­where from a mod­icum of sense to bril­liance who do not think Thomas is doing a good job but aren’t likely to lynch him.

 This I will say. There are a whole group of pro­fes­sions with peo­ple who make very tidy sums of money because they have dif­fi­cult jobs that are very often looked at by the pub­lic with a keen eye and scru­ti­nized by an elected board of offi­cials of whom  every deci­sion is a polit­i­cal one. This group include school superintendents, high school foot­ball coaches (I sus­pect some in Texas make more money than super­in­ten­dents), city man­agers and police and fire chiefs in urban areas.

 Is Car­roll Thomas worth the sum of money he is paid and which makes him the high­est paid school chief in Texas? I don’t know. I think, hon­estly, the only way to say is to look at his record once he is replaced. But I know I wouldn’t want his job. I wouldn’t want the job of Beau­mont West Brook head coach Craig Stump. Nor would I want the jobs of the Beau­mont fire chief Anne Huff and police chief Frank Cof­fin. I wouldn’t mind if Beaumont’s city man­ager got a better-paying job else­where. But that’s another story for another time.