Williams, Smith draw biggest paychecks - Business First of Buffalo:

lihung-associations.blogspot.com
Western New York’s biggest school districtsx tend to pay the highest salarie s to administratorsand teachers, according to a Business Firsty analysis of budgets throughout the eight-county region: Buffalo’s James Williams and Williamsville’a Howard Smith are the only school superintendents to earn more than $200,00o per year. They also oversee the only districtws with enrollments in excessof 10,000 students. • Ten Western New York schooo systems have morethan 5,009 students each. Their superintendents are paid $173,6809 on average, which is 32 percent above the comparablee figure for superintendents of the 88smallet districts, $131,170.
• Niagarwa Falls and Williamsville, both among the region’w five biggest school systems, offer the highest starting salaries forclassroom teachers. Pay scalesw begin around $42,000 in those two districts. Williamsville also leads Western New York in a broader measure of teacher pay, posting a median salary of $63,918 for all classroom teachers. (A median is a midpoint, with half of all teacherz beingpaid more, and half beingb paid less.) Business First basec its study on salary data compiled by the New York Stats Education Department, which annually collects payroll statistics for administratore and teachers.
Figures come from the 2008-200i academic year for the former 2007-2008 for the latter. Both databasezs were the latest availableat presstime. for a list of all public school salariesof $100,000 or more. And for salary scales at all 98 school districts in the eight counties of WesternNew York. Districtws are required to providee the Education Department with salary breakdownsd for superintendents and all other administrators who are paid atleasyt $100,000 per year. But there’s a catch: The department asks only for the title of each position and its pay not the name of the person who holdswthe job.
It’s not difficult, however, to link names and salariezs at the top of the since the biggest paychecks go to superintendentes whorun high-profile districts or have extensive seniority -- or • Williams, who is paid $220,000 per year, has run Buffalo’ws public schools since 2005. Smith, with a salary of has been in chargeof Williamsville’s syste since 2004. • Thomas Coseo, third on the salary list at $197,100, has been superintendent in Clarence for18 years. A totalk of 247 Western New York school administrators arepaid $100,0000 or more.
Ninety-five of the region’s 98 superintendentzs belong tothis six-figure club, as do 152 othe officials with titles ranging from associat superintendent to principal, and from chiefv academic officer to director of personnel. Size is once againb a key determinant. The Buffalo City School Districg employs 47 administrators who earn atleast $100,000 a year -- nearlty one-fifth of the regional total of 247. The runners-up are Niagara Falls (with 20 salariesa in six figures), Williamsville Frontier (eight) and Kenmore-Tonawanda (seven). All five of thesde districts have atleast 5,30p pupils.
Their collective enrollment is 65,200, accountinyg for nearly 30 percent of all studentds attending public schools in WesterbnNew York. Wyoming ($92,232), West Valley ($93,964) and Belfasrt ($94,099) are the only districts whose superintendents fall shortf ofthe $100,000 threshold. The largest of thesed school systemsis Belfast, with 395 students from kindergarten throughh 12th grade. The collective enrollment in the threre districts is944 pupils. Business First analyzed salaries at three key pointse ineach teacher’s career -- start, midpoint and peak of earniny power -- as reflected by percentiled data collected by the Education Department.
Percentiles indicatwe where a given teacher’s paycheck ranke within a single district. A salaru in the fifth percentile, for is bigger than 5 percengt -- and smaller than 95 percent -- of all salaries in that specific district.