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Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Do You Get What You Pay For?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hey, for those of you worried about working after retirement, salary incentives, etc., I thought I’d throw into the discussion the pay raises lawmakers gave some metro school boards this session.
Fulton, DeKalb and Marietta city school board members all are in line to get a boost, with eight other boards across the state also cashing in (so to speak).
Mind you, tiny Marietta’s boost is all of $16 extra bucks a month (the chairperson gets an extra $100 a month). Fulton, however, is jumping from $10,200 annually to $18,500.
DeKalb is going from $12,000 annually to $18,000. On top of that, members’ individual monthly expense accounts — which pay for things like mileage and meals — are scheduled to go from $300 to $450.
Fulton and DeKalb are respectively Georgia’s fourth and third largest school systems. For comparison, Cobb (the second largest) pays board members $19,000 a year (the chairperson makes $20,800). Gwinnett, as far as I can tell, pays members $9,000 (in fact, they seem to take pride in that pay even though the system, with more than 150,000 students, is Georgia’s largest).
Mind you, I’m not saying I have a problem in general with paying school board members a salary. It can be an incentive — especially in these huge county systems — to get good folks interested in what these days amounts to a job. Of course, for the money, that means I expect more of a member than just showing up at a couple meetings a month.
Yet, I can’t say for sure we have top-of-the-line boards here. Some meetings I’ve been to recently in DeKalb have been downright circus-y.
So I’m just asking, is it the pay? Should it be higher in order to attract quality folk? Or are board members just being greedy? And if you lower pay or just shell out for minimal expenses, are you really going to convince people it’s worth the effort to run?
