While there was not a word of coverage of the consideration of the FY10 Worcester Public Schools' budget this past week, there is on the front page of today's Sunday paper a considerable article on administrative compensation.
The gist of the article is that it's been difficult to decipher who makes what and why in past years. You'll receive no arguments from me there. It's a system that has recently had a number of changes made it; most people receive several forms of compensation. In some cases, this information has been difficult to access; if you don't know what's what, it can be hard to understand.
The direction of the article, from the title ("Despite economy, school pay is up") on, is entirely misleading, though. The amounts of pay cited are for 2006 and 2008.
We are in the final month of fiscal year 2009.
We've just considered the budget for fiscal year 2010.
The economy didn't crash until the end of calendar year 2008.
The article sets up a false comparison. These administrators received this pay last fiscal year, before the economy went south. Their pay for this year was set during the spring of last year, again, before the economy declined.
Now that the economy has been hit, these administrators, along with everyone else who works for the Worcester Public Schools, are looking at a year without a pay raise--this coming year's budget depends on it.
There's plenty of fodder for articles in that, or in plenty of other aspects of the FY10 (the upcoming!) school budget: we haven't cut back the budget to only core services; we haven't funded our translation services enough to be in compliance with Civil Rights obligations; we are still going to have classrooms of 30; we have English teachers who are photocopying novels as we can't afford books; we have schools without paper towels because we've run out for the year. And the School Committee took just over two hours to consider a $300 million budget.
At best, this article is a year out of date. At worst, it's an attempt to mislead the public into anger regarding administrative pay (as it gives a great excuse to print a chart of salaries in the paper). This bracketing (with a pull-out quote by the superintendent, declining teacher raises) of previous year's raises to this year's economy is false.
It's fine to have a conversation about compensation of public employees. Let's have it with clear and correct information if we do.
I would go with intentionally misleading. I have a problem with a lot of reporting in the Telegram for just this reason. The articles are generally not well researched and in the cases where they are, they tend to have a hidden agenda. Someone taking an article at face value with out the proper background knowledge will easily be misled. When it's done by someone with an agenda it's a serious issue because people expect the truth from newspapers. They don't expect to have to pick the kernels of truth from the hidden agenda.
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