Garden State Patriot

While most Americans place great value on education and are willing to spare no expense to provide children the best education possible, unfortunately many of these dollars are eaten up by education bureaucrats. Such is the case in New Jersey.

In an article published in yesterday’s Bergen Record, BCRO Finanace Chairman Joe Caruso exposes some of these outrageous salaries made by superintendents, administrators and other state education employees.

It’s time the average school district was forced to be as frugal with our tax money as the average family is with its money.

The fact that schools are forced to turn down the heat in classrooms, cut school trips, reduce programs, operate fully loaded buses and increase class sizes is not cause for hand-wringing. Rather it is to be celebrated as a heavy dose of financial reality that has been lacking for too long in New Jersey’s school system.

I attended a grammar school in Staten Island, where my class size was 28 to 32, depending on the year. My learning experience there was excellent and far less costly than public schools in New Jersey are today.

The school superintendent of the City of Passaic, Robert Holster, says that 80 percent of his budget goes toward staff, thereby making cost cutting difficult. If a private sector business ran with that much staff overhead, it would be out of business in no time.

In Passaic, according to information from the state Education Department’s Web site, it cost $15,860 to educate a child in 2007. Of that amount, $7,954 goes to teacher salaries and benefits and more than $1,000 to administration salaries and benefits. Only $310 goes to classroom books and supplies.

What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty.

Salaries

Let’s start with Holster’s salary: He earns $212,000 a year and his assistant superintendent makes $195,276. The business administrator makes $195,000 a year.

This is in a city of 67,000 people with a median household income of just $27,691. This is also a city that receives $200 million a year in state aid paid by people who don’t live in Passaic.

How can Holster justify his overpaid staff? He can’t and he’s never been asked to.

The top 36 administrators in the Bergen County Vocational High School are paid $3.9 million in salaries, not counting health benefits and pensions. Many of these are unnecessary or duplicate jobs that could be handled by the county (the school employs three people to handle grants writing).

Robert Aloia, who heads the Bergen County Vocational and Special Services District, makes $231,000 a year, plus $80,000 in other allowances; the assistant superintendent makes $181,000.

It’s no wonder that it costs taxpayers $24,000 to educate a single student at the vo-tech high school. And it costs $55,000 to provide educational services to a single student at the special services school. These numbers are staggering for taxpayers and unsustainable.

In Paramus, where the superintendent was bemoaning delayed computer purchases, the cost to educate a student at the high school is $14,729. Classroom salary and benefits represent $6,700 per student and administration salary and benefits are $1,220 per pupil — so nearly $8,000 of the per pupil costs, or 54.3 percent, are taken up by salaries.

Overall, eight administrators in Paramus make more than $100,000 and seven make more than $90,000.

While educators talk about increasing class size, none mentions cutting salaries or positions.

In district after district in New Jersey, you will find similarly outrageous salaries in a top-heavy bureaucracy that survives to perpetuate itself. And while the salaries are outrageous enough, keep in mind that the administrators and staff receive generous pension and health benefit packages.

Joe goes on to point out that the pensions made by these workers are, quite simply, ”bankrupting the state.”

In addition to these outrageous salaries and pensions, New Jersey taxpayer money is also being wasted by the state’s School’s Development Authority. In a post at Alice’s Restaurant Blog, Alice points out how the Authority is spending money to build new schools rather than simply renovating the one’s that are currently on site. She links to pictures of the school’s which show that they are actually in decent condition and hardly in need of being torn down and replaced with a completely new building.

Lastly, if you don’t think New Jersey’s education bureaucracy is too big, I’d also recommend this post from Alice which lists out every division in the New Jersey Department of Education. And, yes, it’s a long list.

As Mr. Caruso pointed out in his piece, it is time for New Jersey’s education bureaucracy to do more with less (particularly in these trying economic times). New Jersey taxpayers are already paying more than enough on education. These dollars need to be used more wisely and the bureaucracy itself needs to be trimmed down considerably.