A Mystery District 65 Special Board Meeting Tonight

And a story about how administrative costs go 📈

I’m back! I still have some academic publication deadlines in the next two weeks, so you may not hear a ton from me until November. If you’re interested in the science of corrosion (my day job), feel free to email me and I’ll talk your ear off.

Anyway, tonight there is a District 65 Board meeting with a pretty small agenda. I don’t know the background, but it looks like they may be evaluating responses for the RFP for the Consultant to do the “Structural Deficit Reduction Plan.”

Mary Gavin over at the Roundtable did a great write up on the document, you should read her story: Here in Evanston: A scary document.

Anyway, here’s the agenda:

I want to write about what I think is one of the biggest issues facing District 65, and school Districts more broadly, including the big mess in CPS.

Administrative Compensation

While I was on break, I had about 10 people share this image with me. It was put together by a conservative talking head, so take with a grain of salt.

I don’t know how reliable that data is, but we do have some reliable local data.

Every year, District 65 is required to publish a list of teacher and employee compensation packages. You can view the raw data for this year (here and here), or my data compiled into a spreadsheet that goes back to 2022. The educator data is public as well, but that’s less interesting since it is governed by their (now expired) collective bargaining agreement.

One set of numbers you can look at is total administrative compensation packages¹, excluding principals and assistant principals. I’ve included the last 4 years and 2015-16 for reference (raw 2015-16 data here and here)

The administrator reports are broken out based on which pension fund they contribute to - the TRS system or the Municipal System. You can see that even since 2021-22, the packages alone have increased around 40%. If you look back 9 years, to the 2015-16 school year, total administrative comp packages have increased 174%. There are more administrators, we pay them more and they have more expensive benefits.

You may say, Tom you’re being unfair - the cost of things like healthcare has gone up significantly and that’s out of our control. Therefore, if we can look at base cash salaries alone, you’ll see a total increase closer to 150% compared to a baseline of 2015-16.

So that twitter chart wasn’t far off. 😬

For example, in 2015-16, there were 5 non-principal administrators making over $150,000 per year and today there are 10. They also seem to juggle people between pension funds - I don’t know why that is - please comment if you know.

An Example from 2022: Substitutes

So you might ask - what’s going on?

Here’s a good example: in September 2022, the Roundtable reported on two stories:

• District 65 board discusses new security measures (June 2022)

• District 65 rolls out new security initiatives (September 2022)

In these stories, they detail a financial transaction: District 65 would terminate their relationship with ESS, a vendor that finds substitute teachers for the District. In exchange, the District would build that skill in-house and use all the savings to build out an 18 person security team and hire 4 software vendors. According to the Roundtable;

Additionally, the district is proposing 16 new building concierge positions to monitor main entrances, a manager and assistant manager of prevention and special response and an assistant superintendent of operations. 

The Board at the time seemed lukewarm to the idea but OK’ed it anyway.

Did this save the District money? We can do the math. The contract with ESS wasn’t cheap - in fiscal year 2021-22, it cost around $1.6 million bucks.

And here is my approximation of the District’s replacement, which includes 5 salaried positions and 16 hourly positions.

It’s hard to say if the impact on the bottom line - these are comp packages and security software alone and don’t include all the other expenses that go along with adding more employees. For instance, the security team had a whole range of expenses from shiny new $50,000 SUVs to consultants, such as Asset Protection Specialist, LLC - a company owned by one of Dr. Horton’s former business partners.²

This is a very clear example where the District tacked on a million bucks in administrative headcount alone.³ Is it worth it? Hard to say - I’ve had multiple educators write to me to complain that when they request a substitute, they just don’t get one anymore, which seems like a problem.

Feel free to comment.

1. Total Compensation is defined as salary, pension contributions, health insurance, a housing allowance, a vehicle allowance, a clothing allowance, bonuses, loans, vacation days granted, and sick days granted.

2. Stay tuned on this story involving the cars, I am working on a story - its a real wild ride (pardon the pun)

3. It is worth noting that Dr. Turner’s sister was hired to run the department that replaced ESS and was in charge of guest educators and finding substitutes. According to the public reports her total comp has increased very generously since Dr. Turner became Superintendent.

SY 2022-23 $104,956.19 ($104,956.19 Salary)

SY 2023-24 $128,425.39 ($114,842.89 Salary)

SY 2024-25 $149,479.02 ($119,371.68 Salary)