General

QOD: Millburn Superintendent Quits to Avoid Salary Cap

November 20, 2014

Laura Waters

James Crisfield, superintendent of Millburn Public Schools (Essex County), explains to John Mooney that he is resigning and taking a job in Wissahickon School District in Montgomery County, Pa. to avoid a $50,000 salary cut next year when his contract expires and N.J’s superintendent salary caps kick in.

Q: You are not the first in Essex County to leave the state, at least in part due to the caps.
I know of a number of vacancies now. I know Livingston has an interim superintendent, South Orange-Maplewood is also looking. I find it impossible to believe someone would not have figured out this effect when they put it in. And if a reasonable person could predict this, why then would they do it?
Q: How many in Millburn would make more than you if you stayed and took the pay cut?
Maybe five. And also the effect is that the cap is cutting way back on the pool of people who are interested in becoming district leaders. Why would you move from principal or maybe assistant superintendent and incur the added time and responsibility, and with a pay cut? That’s not a natural outcome.

For my take, see here and here.

Laura Waters

1 Comment

Unknown, November 20, 2014 @ 3:05 pm Reply

I have an answer to the salary cap problem. One that can be drawn from lessons from CMO operated charter schools. CMOs like Uncommon Schools in particular (KIPP/TEAM fails to report their data on their IRS 990s) have “administrators” paid above the NJ district admin cap level (over $200k), including middle level operational managers assigned specifically to NJ charters. These individuals appear as compensated by the non-profit CMO, but do not appear as NJ district employees in the state personnel data files (as do superintendents, etc.), despite the fact that their salaries are largely supported by the public expense of the management fees (and yes, plenty of additional philanthropy).

So, what's the lesson here? New Jersey supts simply need to form a “non-profit” district management company, like a charter CMO. They can then convince local boards of education to not have a superintendent and instead, contract that management company, paying an annual management fee (as do charters) to the management company (let's call it a DMO – district management organization).

Under the umbrella of the DMO, the managers assigned to oversee individual districts could be paid whatever rate the DMO board of directors sets, assuming it collects high enough management fees, which it could with local school board approvals, as a contracted service. These assigned district managers would nolonger be district employees. They would be DMO employees. Their compensation could certainly be (unofficially)agreed upon by individual local boards of education, but the officially approved expense would be the management fee to the DMO, not the salary of the DMO assigned manager (uh… superintendent).

Now, this will add some expense – the overhead of the DMO – as it does in charters (most charter to district spending comparisons totally miss the redundant additional layers of charter management expense which are kept on a separate set of books and may not be fully covered by the management fees).

This approach would have the added benefit for superintendents and their DMO of shielding many of their activities and finances from public disclosure (as it does in privately governed/operated charters).

So indeed there are some lessons to be learned from the charter sector!