Union head questions increase

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — When the Albuquerque Journal recently headlined a story about school administrators in Albuquerque getting a raise, it got the local head of the teacher's union to thinking.

Just how does the salary of Karen White, the superintendent of the Gallup-McKinley School District, compare to her counterparts with the Albuquerque school district?

The union's president, Brian Bernard, who posted his findings on the union's Web site this weekend, said he did the study in the spirit of "continuous improvement" since White herself brought up a comparison of the size of the Gallup district to other districts when she sought and received a 9.5 percent raise, boosting her annual salary to $128,000.

The new salary of the Albuquerque superintendent is $183,740. With a student enrollment of 90,000, that means she makes about $2.04 for each student, Bernard wrote.

Because there is no school district in New Mexico that compares to Albuquerque in size of student population, the Journal went out of state to compare the salary of the Albuquerque superintendent, Elizabeth Everitt.

The superintendent for the Wake County, N.C. school district gets $212,000, but when you break it down to a per-student ratio, it turns out the North Carolina district, with a student enrollment of 104,000, pays their superintendent the same as Albuquerque $2.04 per student.

The district also compared it to Memphis City, not listing the state. The superintendent there oversees an enrollment of 118,000 and makes $200,500. That averages $1.70 per student.

Which brings us to White's salary.

With a student enrollment of between 12,500 and 13,000, White's salary turns out to be five times that of her counterpart in Albuquerque, said Bernard. Her average is $10.25 per student.

Everitt, by the way, received a 5 percent increase in her salary this year, the same increase that teachers statewide received.

Bernard pointed out that while White supervises 34 schools, Everitt has 142. He also pointed out that White's salary makes her the third highest paid superintendent in the state while Gallup ranks sixth in enrollment in the state, behind Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Gadsden, Santa Fe and Rio Rancho.

White's salary is in the ballpark when you look at what superintendents in other districts about the same size are given. Santa Fe, which has about 1,000 more students than Gallup, pays its superintendent $114,000 a year.

It should also be pointed out that the smaller the school district, the higher the ratio between the salary of the superintendent and the student population.

With 39 districts having an enrollment of less than 1,000 students, it's not uncommon to see the superintendent's salary ending up surpassing $30 or $40 per enrolled student.

And using the Albuquerque salary as a comparison, paying White $2.04 per enrolled student would give her a salary of about $27,000 a year, less than a beginning teacher in the district.

Bernard said he understood that paying White $2.04 a student wouldn't be fair, but he also said there should be a base that board members used just as what districts of comparable size were giving their superintendents instead of just giving White what she wanted.