Austin ISD: student, teacher numbers decreasing while admin salaries rise

Enrollment in the Austin Independent School District has been on a six-year slide with no end in sight. Consequently, the number of teachers has been steadily decreasing.

During the same period, however, the number of administrators, the highest paid group of professionals in the district, has held fast, while their average base salaries have increased by 32 percent since the 2011-12 school year.

In the 2015-16 school year, 12 AISD administrators were making an average base salary of $100,000 a year or more, an investigation of Texas Education Agency data by The Texas Monitor shows. In this just completed school year, that number jumped to 145. Steadily climbing over the past decade, 116 school principals alone now have average base salaries of more than $100,000 a year, according the the TEA data.

Austin ISD is no outlier. The state’s biggest school districts experiencing declining enrollments (Please see pg. 8 of this AISD report on student population) have little problem shedding teachers, but hold onto their administrative staffs — rewarding them with salary increases that far outstrip increases awarded to teachers in the classroom.

In Austin, where enrollment is off by almost five percent over the past five years, the salary of the district’s superintendent has jumped by almost 10 percent. In Dallas, with enrollment off by about two percent, the superintendent salary is up by nine percent.

In the growing districts, the discrepancy is even more stark. In Fort Bend ISD, where enrollment has grown by 6 percent, superintendent base pay has shot up by almost 23 percent, according to the TEA data.

The biggest jump among large districts is in fast-growing Katy ISD, where the superintendent made $386,850 in base pay alone this past school year, a 13.1 percent increase in just one year and 29.6 percent more than the $298,494 the superintendent earned five years ago.

Katy’s superintendent, however, is no longer earning that pay, having resigned last month, effective Jan. 1, 2019, after having been accused by a former classmate of having bullied him when they were children.

“I can not justify putting my wife and family through it any more,” Dr. Lance Hindt said in his announcement.

Although the investigation into the allegation isn’t complete and the district has expressed its intention to sue Hindt’s accuser, the Katy School Board unanimously agreed to give Hindt a $750,000 severance package.

Taxpayers in North Texas, concerned about the inflation of administrative pay, have also discovered unexplained perquisites. This past week, Grand Prairie ISD officials shared with their taxpayers a report that revealed they had paid $160,000 to renovate the home of Supt. Susan Hull.

Hull, who drew a salary of $390,795 this school year, lives in a home that school district taxpayers brought in 2016 for nearly $700,000. The district rents the home to Hull for $1,000 a month, part of a $75,000 annual package of benefits, according to an investigation by KVTV-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth.

District officials and school board members were unaware of the renovation because contractors broke up invoices to make sure none was more than $50,000 — the threshold for review and approval by the school board, according to KVTV.

“A tipping point is coming in a long-running battle over administration compensation,” said James Quintero, director of the Center for Local Governance for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Superintendent salaries are out of control and, unfortunately, it comes at the expense of funding children in the classroom.”

Using the same TEA data sets, Quintero found nearly 40 superintendents in Texas were making base salaries of more than $300,000 a year. In this last school year, 350 superintendents, more than a quarter of all the top administrators in the state, made more than $153,000 a year, the annual salary of Gov. Greg Abbott, Quintero said.

“It isn’t just salaries, there is the larger issue of excessive, rich fringe benefits that are out of control,” he said.

And once installed, administrator positions rarely go away. While teacher totals have decreased every year for the past four in Austin, administrator numbers have remained largely the same, but for a slight drop this past year.

At the same time, average salaries for administrators such as principals, athletic directors and human resources directors have climbed steadily. In the last year alone, the average pay for an administrator in Austin ISD ballooned by 12.8 percent to $92,010, at a cost to taxpayers of $2.4 million, according to TEA figures.

The Texas Monitor contacted Fernando Medina, chief Human Capital Officer for AISD and Geronimo Rodriguez Jr., president of the AISD Board of Trustees, to answer questions about the data uncovered in this investigation. Neither responded before this story was published.

The problem is longstanding. Coming out of the 2011 legislative session, when teacher union leaders and advocates had predicted billions of dollars in funding deficits and more than 10,000 teacher layoffs across the state, school districts responded with some layoffs, but for the most part by declining to fill their thousands of teacher vacancies.

In spite of the panic, when all of the belt tightening was done, administrators mostly survived. Houston ISD dropped 835 teaching positions and 21 administrators, an attrition rate of more than two to one. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD shed 300 teaching positions, all by attrition, and lost just two administrators. Fort Bend ISD’s attrition rate favored administrators by almost five to one.

A year later, a five-year study by the Austin American-Statesman found that while the operating budget for AISD had decreased by nearly $160 million to $724.2 million in 2012-13, the number of administrators making at least $100,000 a year went from 43 to 70.

“I’m not surprised by the numbers,” Roger Falk, an analyst for the Travis County Taxpayers Union, said. “There is a lot of disgust with the spending in the school district And the cost of administration, a non-classroom expense, is a pretty big target.”

AISD officials at the beginning of March solicited public input into how to contend with a projected $30 million deficit for the coming school year. Quintero, in an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman at month’s end, suggested the district consider taking on what he called “administrative bloat.”

“Past research suggests that if Texas had limited the growth of its non-teaching staff to the same level of growth as its student population over this period, then $2.2 billion could have been saved annually,” Quintero wrote. “Such savings could have gone back into the classroom or given back to taxpayers — either of which would have been a marked improvement over the status quo.”

“Superintendent pay,” Quintero told The Texas Monitor, “is taking money that would otherwise be spent in the classroom. It’s a clear misallocation of resources.”

Mark Lisheron can be reached at [email protected].