An educational sidebar...

Our illustrious anti-public education governor has been railing against the salaries of the state’s superintendents of schools, to the extent that he has issued a salary cap effective February, 2011, restricting all superintendents’ salaries to no more than the governor’s own salary of $175,000. While using his salary as a cap sounds a bit egotistical to me, who am I to question the governor? Several Boards of Education, whose superintendents already earn higher than $175,000 and whose contracts expire next year, have been giving them extensions recently in an attempt to beat the imposition of the cap. The governor has exploded at this and is ordering county superintendents to refuse to approve those contract extensions.

The result? Parsippany-Troy Hills has already initiated a lawsuit against the Department of Education, and the state Boards association has filed a request to be part of the suit.

So the obvious question here is: how serious is the governor about cutting salaries? In going after superintendents’ salaries, he has tackled the most visible high earners in education in the state, but they are definitely not the highest earners in public education in NJ. So who are the highest earners? Consider the following report from the Newark Star-Ledger:

July 21, 2008, 9:00PM
Five months after agreeing to terms that will pay him as much as $2 million annually with bonuses, Rutgers University football coach Greg Schiano quietly signed a side agreement providing for an additional $250,000 a year from the university in payments made through a vendor. In the addendum to his contract, dated July 2, 2007, the university arranged for Nelligan Sports Marketing, the exclusive marketing agent for Rutgers, to pay the coach the additional $250,000 -- keeping the payments off the school's payroll.

Or the following article from SwimmingWorldMagazine.com:

January 24, 2007
NEVER mind that the men's swimming team, among other sports, is ready to get the hatchet. Rutgers University, coming off its finest football season in years, is giving raises to several assistant football coaches on the staff of head man Greg Schiano. According to the Bergen County Record, nine assistants are making between $115,000-$185,000.

The assistants, despite state-budget cuts that are eliminating sports and course options, are also receiving a $7,200 annual car stipend and have been granted an additional month's salary as a bonus for Rutgers qualifying for the Texas Bowl. The raises for the football coaches are significantly higher than other raises around the university.

Rutgers University has been slashing programs and teaching jobs for the past several years, yet 10 football coaches are earning between $3,200,000 and $3,900,000 per year for what is an extracurricular activity having absolutely nothing to do with the quality of education at our state university. And our governor has not made a single comment about those salaries being out of line while he goes after superintendents of school who are ultimately responsible for the education of all our state’s students.

Does anybody know how to spell HYPOCRISY in the state of New Jersey?