Baker’s Dozen
The superintendent is proposing cuts to the classrooms but she continues to add administrators at the central office. She could easily make central office cuts without affecting students.
The following positions could be eliminated because they’re unnecessary; or they duplicate the duties and responsibilities of other positions, or the work could be absorbed by other central office staff:
- Advisor to the Superintendent $130,000
- Advisor to the Superintendent (.5 FTE) $57,520
- Deputy Superintendent $130,000
- Deputy Superintendent $130,000
- Chief of Staff $115,000 (See update note below)
- Director-Special Projects (.5 FTE) $57,200
- Executive Director of Systems (.8 FTE) $90,000
- Director-Administrator Hiring/Performance Management $112,500
- Director-Government Relations $89,434 (minimum)
- Director-Strategic Partnerships $110,000
- Broad Fellow-Special Assistant $90,000
- Broad Fellow-HS Reform $90,000
- Director-Compliance $100,000 (this is an estimate based on the title and the experience of the staff member in the position)
Cutting those 13 positions would save the district $1,301,654 annually in wages alone. Add the cost of benefits for those positions and you could save another $.5 million each year.
Note: I’ve seen two different figures for the 09/10 Chief of Staff salary. The salary listed above is the lowest figure.
29 comments
And isn’t the “Director of Government Relations” a brand-new position anyway? What exactly was the rationale for cutting the bilingual EA’s? Did it have something to do with all the civil rights complaints that have been filed against the district over the past several years?
Carrie, do we know what the proposed classroom cuts might be, and how deep? I’d though that the superintendent had talked about being in a good position, financially, due to things that had been done in prior years and the passage of 66 & 67.
Matt, I’m referring to cutting bilingual educational assistants. The district wants to cut 23 bilingual EAs and replace them with 12 ESL teachers. The problem is that PPS can’t seem to find bilingual ESL teachers. The bilingual teachers end up teaching in the immersion programs. The plan to cut 23 EAs means classrooms will go without assistants.
Zarwen, the second to last most recent civil rights complaint was filed by an ESL parent liaison at Marshall. He complained that Marshall was using Rosetta Stone rather than teachers to teach students English. I agree that teachers should be teaching the students but I don’t think it’s necessary or wise to cut bilingual EAs to fund the teacher positions. District administrators will do it though becasue they don’t expect to get much resistance from that employee group.
The central office is bloated. The KPMG audit done in 1998 (http://www.pps.k12.or.us/files/board/comp_per_audit.pdf) recommended changing the PPS central office structure to reduce management layers. (See p. 70 for their recommended org chart) They also recommended that central office roles and responsibilities be clarified. If PPS job descriptions were still available you’d see that many of the central office positions list the same duties. That could be why there isn’t any accountability. PPS continued lack of oversight of the use of Title I funds is a good example of that happening. Everyone is responsible for everything.
The district’s decision to rent hotel space for administrator meetings is another example of waste. Why can’t the meetings be held in PPS facilities? Are the administrators afraid of being poisoned by mold or radon? Just the switch to using PPS facilities could cover the cost of a bilingual ESL teacher.
Zeke’s budget (and many other central office administrators) includes $10,515 for out of district travel. Why? I’m all for him traveling as long as he doesn’t come back.
One other point…the only position I had any doubts about cutting was the director of compliance position. Considering that PPS is facing numerous civil rights complaints and has been for years, and PPS employs 3 full time lawyers along with contracts for external legal services, it seems to be a reasonable cut.
Anyone seen this?
http://blogs.wweek.com/news/2010/04/12/rally-outside-school-board-meeting-to-protest-budget-cuts/
Good!
I have wondered why we have 2 directors of funded programs.
cliff and susan, both inept, both unqualified.
Cliff’s annual salary is $94,000.
There was a strong turnout in support of EA’s tonight!
Stephanie, I just read that here: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/04/portland_parents_speak_out_aga.html.
I’m so glad to see that Botana is looking at other options for retaining the educational assistants.
“At no time did I intend to cut education assistants,” Botana said.
Well, DUH! The budget proposal comes from the Superintendent’s office, not the CAO office! These people will say anything to pacify a crowd. . . .
The decision to cut bilingual/bicultural staff was a political suicide for the district as far as the communities of color are concerned. The district should be looking for money to hire 12 new ESL teachers and should not be looking for pockets for money to save the bilingual EA’s. What they have been doing is to treat the bilingual staff as second class citizens because they did not expect such a strong resistance from this group. But the sad part was there was no need to hire new teachers considering the low class loads ESL teachers have across the board. Some of the classes have so few students. The classes range from 1 students to 10 or 12 on the average. Why can’t ELL students learn if their class size is so small? The district does not need to hire 12 more ESL teachers. They just need to make sure the existing teachers deliver!!! I don’t think our communities of color will help the district pass the bond measures now. If the district is smart, they should rescind that decision to lay off 23 bilingual EA’s to hire 12 new ESL teachers. Botana is new so I believe this decision came from Zeke. I agree with Carrie. Give him a one-way ticket and lots of money to spend on his next out-of-town trip.
Three more highly paid positions can be added to Carrie’s list to be cut and we can save more money for the students:
Susan Kosmala, Cliff Brush and Ray Demarko (Director of a migrant program with 150+ kids?)
What do the other two people do?
To answer to Zarwen, the decision to cut the 24 bilingual EA’s was not well thought out and it works against the district in its intent to fix the OCR issues. One of the EA’s function was to help teachers to provide comprehensible classroom instruction because most teachers are monolingual. So to cut almost 40% of this workforce does not make sense. It would be going backward to the Lau vs. Nichols decision in 1974 when a group of Chinese parents in San Francisco sued that district for lack of programs to teach students in a language their children could comprehend. Botana is new and he has never dealt with OCR grievances so he made a political blunder by making this proposed cut. It is not about the 24 bilingual EA’s that was the most problematic but for our communities, it is about a long history of struggles in fighting PPS institutional racism that was the main issue. The proposed cut in one stroke of the 24 bilingual staff was symbolic of this past history so there was a strong reaction from staff, students, parents and community. Xavier Botana did not realize how disfunctional and how ignorant the district has been in dealing with diversity issues so he made the decision in a hasty manner. But I think he saw the light now and if he humbles himself and starts working with communities, he will last long enough to do some good work and leave a great legacy for PPS.
Local educational administration has become more bureaucratic as more programs were added and as states and the federal government played different roles in local administration than in the past. That’s true of teaching positions also – over the past ten years the number of teachers has increased faster than the number of students.
It’s terribly important to make sure that these human resources are used to their best advantage both for children and for keeping the system going smoothly. Unfortunately, I think that’s probably one of the things we are worst at in public education. With one teacher for every 15 students in the public schools, it’s hard to believe that a lot of students don’t get the attention they need.
Top administrators may seem like an easy target because of their relatively large salaries or because people want to blame them for things that are wrong about the schools. But wholesale trimming of the top spots creates more problems than it solves. Programs have to be administered by somebody and the superintendent can’t do it all by herself. Beyond that, the superintendent can’t be taking calls every time a child has a problem on a school bus, or is in a hassle with another kid, or gets a B minus instead of the usual B on a book report.
Art, where do you get your data? Can you tell me the number of teachers PPS had 10 years ago as compared to now? What are your thoughts on the “wholesale trimming” of bilingual educational assistants? While I agree that government regulations have required more on the part of administration, the number of administrators in PPS is excessive. My PPS HR experience included work with every employee group and I can tell you that the waste is in administration. The problem with this superintendent is that she isn’t qualified for her position so she requires additional staff and outside contractors to prop her up. The fact that she continues to hire noneducators for top level positions only contributes to the problems.
I was citing national figures, but the PPS home page lists 46,785 kids and 3,016 teachers , which is 15.5 kids per teacher, so PPS figures align closely with national figures. Historical figures for PPS enrollment are at
http://www.mis.pps.k12.or.us/.docs/pg/10309
FTE information might be available at ODE.
I can’t speak to the issue with the bilingual assistants because I know almost nothing about it.
This book looks like a must-read on school finance:
http://www.urban.org/books/educationaleconomics/index.cfm
Art,
You may be missing the fact that some of those teachers are part-time. You are right, what is needed is the total number of FTE, not the total number of teachers.
Show Me, I was actually asking what Susan Kosmala and Cliff Brush do. What are their job titles?
susan kosmala is director of funded programs and cliff brush is director of funded programs, grants,ect
OK, I dug around a little and found some 2005-2006 figures for PPS.
ODE reports 2605.3 FTE classroom teachers for PPS. The PPS October 2005 enrollment report lists 47008 students. That count includes community programs, alternate programs, special education, charter schools, and other programs on top of the “regular” schools.
That comes out to 18 kids per classroom teacher.
If charter schools were included, then your figures may not be correct. As far as I know, charter school teachers work for the charter organization, not PPS. At any rate, PPS has nothing to do with hiring them. This may also be true of some community programs and alternative programs.
Taking the 571 kids in charter schools out of 47,000 total would make a tiny difference over 2600 FTE.
Zarwen, Sorry for a slow response. Susan Kosmala started out as an Assistant Director of Title I. Then, the district promoted her to Director and added Title IA (ARRA) to her plate. She could not even manage Title I, let alone the additional task. Then, the district reorganized central and added Cliff Brush as another layer on top of Susan so now Cliff is Susan’s boss. To make effective cut, one of them should be gone. Ray Demarko is overseeing Migrant which only has 150+ kids and Private Schools which is a joke. He needs to be gone too. That cut would make sense because he makes over $100K for doing nothing. In terms of teacher-student ratio, I know for a fact that ESL teachers only average 1 per 9.6 students across the district. Some classrooms only have 4 or 5. Some even have one. So why aren’t ELL students progressing at the rate they should be. NCLB laws require that ELL students make one level per year. In order to close the achievement gaps, experts estimate that they need to do 1.5 level per year. PPS needs to push teachers to do more not less since their class loads are so low. Of the 4,700 ELL students at PPS, only 750+ students are high school age. The rest is K-8. So why can’t ELL students acquire English at a faster rate at a younger age? We cannot blame it all on students’ homes speaking another language because some of the best ELL students come from pre-literate families.
In terms of our superintendent relying on her staff to do her work, it is very true, Carrie. She came from having been a long-time administrator of a very small alternative school to Chief of Staff and then Superintendent. We like her and would like to invest in a local Superintendent and want her to succeed. But her decisions to hire staff to help her have not been wise. She wants to hire people who are more like her but do not have the expertise or skills to help her. She needs to get rid of a few and reorganize her team and gets some experts in to help her run the show. If this HS Redesign and the bond measures don’t pull off, she and her team might have to go too.
At this point, I would regard that as a given.
It is reported that Mr. Botana stated he slept fine after making the decision to cut para educator hours for the second time in 5 years. And the Supt. asked for applaue for that.The Paras are already not making a living wage and now they are cut down to 6.5 hours a day. And of course many and most of them will continue to work longer hours and not get paid, because they are caring professionals. Why not ask administrators to take a 1 or 2 percent cut in pay. Take from the highest not the lowest paid.
The PFTCE union told us that he cut 1,000 classified employees when he was in Chicago. If this is true, he is used to cutting classified employee staff. The fact that he proposed cutting 24 bilingual para-professional and shaved 2 1/2 hours from the Special Ed para-educators indicated that the union information might be correct. Mr. Botana came from Chicago so he does not have any strings attached. He does not have to put names and faces together so it was an easy decision. I don’t think he has been able to sleep well. But it will take him a while to learn that our district is quite disfunctional and it will take a while to fix both ESLL and Special Ed problems that have accumulated for over two decades.
I hope he can’t sleep well, but when he gave the anouncement about cutting hours of para’s, he said I am fine with my decision and I can sleep at night. Of course he doesn’t know the faces of the people, or how hard and how long they work. I’d like to see him change the diaper of an 19 year old, or get kicked and spit at by a middle school behavior student, or teach a child with learning disabilities how to read. He doesn’t know or doesn’t seem to care. But Joanne Mabbott is millions over budget from her inappropriate spending habits: putting kids in expensive out of district schools, doing contracts with her husband, hiring family members, for the first time in years putting lots of kids in home instruction and hiring 8 teachers…..But instead of looking at her spending habits: her large raise her assistant’s large raise, a life coach to help her and her assistant get along, lots of food for her staff, lunch, dinners, snacks….taking staff out for dinners, traveling…But lets cut the para’s who make the least.
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