Schuylerville School Superintendent

Schuylerville School Sign

It’s ridiculous that the Schuylerville School system pays its superintendent $169,487 per year plus $71,537 in benefits. It’s a small district with 1,862 students. It has one elementary school and one junior-senior high school. I hope that whoever negotiates the salary and benefits for the new superintendent thinks long and hard about the taxpayers in the Village of Schuylerville, Village of Victory, Town of Saratoga, Town of Easton, Town of Greenwich and the Town of Northumberland who have to pay the bills. I wonder how many taxpayers in the area actually know how much the superintendent is paid?

A Daily Gazette newspaper article on March 26, 2009, said that the outgoing superintendent, Leon Reed, “was listed as having  the largest compensation package of any public school superintendent in a survey of 91 school districts in an 11-county area, according to a Business Review report in September.” You can read the entire Daily Gazette article here.

You can go to the University of the State of New York’s State Education Department website (NYSED) and compare salaries of school superintendents across the state. It’s too bad the report doesn’t tell you the size of the school district.

Read an article by the chairman of the NYS Commission on Property Tax Relief, Thomas Suozzi. This article originally appeared in the Saratogian in January. It’s called, “Streamline Education Through Consolidation.”  It recommends consolidating the administration of small districts with less than 1000 students.  It’s well worth reading and it will take you less than ten minutes.

The actual report that the article references says: “Require consolidation of school districts with fewer than 1,000 students and grant the Commissioner of Education discretionary authority to order consolidation of school districts with fewer than 2,000 pupils to achieve economies of scale and to increase educational opportunities through expanded course offerings.”

It’s your money. Take some time and read the report by the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief. It explains in detail the 32 recommendations mentioned in Thomas Suozzi’s article above.

You can also read an earlier post that I wrote called, “Why Are Property Taxes in New York So High?”

The times, they are a changin’. There must be a more cost efficient way to give our children an excellent education.

I would like to know what you think. Leave a comment or send me an email.