The El Paso school district is seeking to refute the charge by a former school board president that district administrators’ salaries are too high.
In an e-mail letter Monday to various members of the El Paso school district’s administration, trustees and news outlets, former school board president Dan Wever cited Texas Education Agency figures that showed the district’s central office administrators were paid well above the state average.
Salaries for the El Paso district’s central office administrators’ averaged $101,101 last year while the state average was $83,529. (Download a Word document showing comparative TEA data below)
The school district’s response came quickly and proved that delving into the Texas Education Agency’s financial data comparing one school district with another can be tricky business.
“We are one of the largest districts in the state of Texas,” district spokeswoman Berenice Zubia said, adding the EPISD ranks ninth with more than 62,000 students. “When people compare us to the average, there are 1,100 school districts in Texas, so we are going to be above average.”
The large majority of the state’s school districts are small compared with El Paso, some with only a few hundred students.
Zubia and the school district’s associate superintendent for human resources, Robert Almanzan, said it would only be fair to compare districts with more than 50,000 students.
Almanzan said that the average pay for central office administrators in the Ysleta and Socorro school districts are comparable to El Paso’s even though those districts have fewer than 50,000 students.
The average top administrators’ pay in Ysleta, which has about 45,000 students, is $100,135. In Socorro, with about 40,000 students, it is $93,091.
While El Paso is the state’s ninth largest school district, it was third in average pay for central administrators. The highest, San Antonio’s North East district, paid an average of $138,066 the second highest, the Houston area’s Fort Bend district, paid $107,444.
“The important part of the comparison is our test scores,” Almanzan said. “Clearly, Mr. Wever wants to emphasize that this is a negative for the El Paso school district.
“But the ability to pay teachers and staff above the state average allows us to recruit better teachers and better staff.”
The result, he said, has been increasing scores on standardized state test scores.
“The district doesn’t see this as a negative or something to be defensive about,” Almanzan said.
Critics of the El Paso school district have accused it of being top heavy with highly paid administrators for years.
Almanzan said the district is looking to settle the question with a consultant’s study being performed by the Texas Association of School Boards.
“They’re in the middle of looking at how we pay and what we pay, and they will give us advice on what we need to work on and stay one,” Almanzan said. “They will survey where we are compared to districts like ourselves.
“In our initial conversations with them, they are telling us we are above the median and are comparable to districts that look like us, so I am not surprised that our pay for teachers and administrators is above average.”
Zubia said the El Paso school district’s 22 top administrators represent 0.3 percent of the school districts total administrative staff – a percentage that is tied with three other districts for the second lowest among the state’s 12 largest districts.
Newspaper Tree incorrectly reported Tuesday that the number of top administrators whose salaries averaged was 71 last year while the correct number was 22.
Zubia said that number represents 0.3 percent of the school districts total administrative staff – a percentage that is tied with three other districts for the second lowest among the state’s 12 largest districts.
Dallas may be paying its top administrators less on average, at $79,364, she said, but there are 11 times as many administrators at that level in the Dallas school district.
And in the Dallas district, the number of top administrators is 1.6 percent of the district’s total administrative staff, or fives the percentage in the El Paso district.
Wever, in response to the challenge to his numbers, said the El Paso school district’s administration has long been hard if not impossible to pin down on financial matters that school trustees have been largely ignoring.
He contends that the 0.3 percent figure for top administrators is bogus.
“The school districts don’t classify their administrators the same way, and there’s no rule that says they have to,” Wever said.
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To reach David Crowder, write to dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or call (915) 351-0605, ext. 30
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