School Year 2024 Annual Salary Data
And an update out of the Dekalb
One thing I take pride in is maintaining datasets for the community that take public documents, such as board meeting minutes or required state filings and format them in a non-PDF format so they are sortable. Below is the update to this year’s annual compensation report.
Annual Administrative Salaries SY22-24 - District Annual Compensation Report which is a digitized version of this documents available in the September Board meeting.
This report contains school years 2022, 2023, and 2024 for comparison. In the past, I included teacher data but I’ve excluded it this year because it’s governed by the collective bargaining agreement, so there is not much to see. The data is organized by the tabs on the bottom. I’ve broken it out into three tabs: Administrative employees, IMRF employees1, and Principals.
I only consider “Total Compensation” which is full salary plus benefits.
It’s hard to compare totals year-over-year with this data this year, because individuals can move between categories. This comes out to about $2,854 per pupil (assuming 6000 kids) on administrative compensation packages alone. This is far above the state and national averages, which consider full administrative costs and average less than $600 per pupil.
P-Card Bills
In other news and a win that (I believe) this blog is responsible for, the District has begun monthly reporting on the “P-Card” - the District’s Purchasing Mastercard. For example, here is their June 2023 report. If useful, I might start digitizing these reports into a spreadsheet like I do with salaries and other bills.
This data is how I found stories such as, District 65's Free Lunch Program for Administrators.
News Out of DeKalb
For those who may remember my story on the CREATE65 Teacher Residency program, a familiar name has cropped up in Georgia: Frontier Consulting.
If you’ll recall, District 65 paid Frontier $300,000 over several years out of the COVID Relief ESSER funds to run training sessions for the CREATE65 residents. Residents reported to me that Frontier did provide these lessons and they were of acceptable quality.
Frontier followed Dr. Horton down to Dekalb, which will be the fourth time they’ve worked with Dr. Horton on a residency program2 and the third time they’ve received a no-bid contract for work.3
In District 65, Frontier was paid approximately $120,000 a year for seven days a month of instruction.
These are the folks who work for the District but are covered under the IMRF - Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund - so folks such as maintenance people, IT folks, etc.
Wendell Phillips Academy in CPS, East St Louis, Evanston, and now Dekalb.
Surely, at this point, instruction for teacher residency programs is something that is standardized enough to receive bidded contracts?
So much work goes into making this information public. I only wish more Evanston residents would read it. Only in education can jargon replace standard English. In any other field you would have to clearly explain what a person is actually providing for the compensation