Date: April 15, 2009 9:18:06 PM EDT
To: hussinm@arps.org, churchilla@arps.org, mazurk@arps.org
Re: Public Documents/Open Meeting Law request
Now that the need for secrecy is over and the negotiated salary of incoming Superintendent Rodriguez has been publicly announced, could I please get under Public Document Law the minutes of the Executive Session of the Regional School Committee and the actual vote of the individual committee members when this package was approved?
Thank You,
Larry Kelley
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16 comments:
Ladies, start your Hibachi's!!
Let's see: $158K + 15K= $173K.
Now that's what percentage increase over Mr. Hochman's pay?
The debate over the fiscal condition of the Town in FY10 is over before it even started.
The elected leadership has essentially forfeited any ability to ask anyone to sacrifice for the greater good.
Makes you wish you had stayed in school for your masters and Phd and then gone into education, doesn't it?
You should butt out when it comes to this compensation. You get what you pay for. (And if you don't, you try try again.)
This is a joke. When they post the job they can state the salary - if candidates don't like it they don't apply.
"158-K plus $15-K housing/transportation. Yikes!"
So, what salary would Larry think is appropriate? And how much for moving and living expenses? What's your number?
A bargain!!! If they had hired David Sklarz, I'm sure it would've cost us even more. (he currently gets $188,000 plus bonuses in CT)
I would have advertised (oh yeah, and remember we used a "headhunter" at another 40-K) mostly on the web of course because it's free: the job pays $135,000. You don't like it, don't apply.
I've voted for every override since I moved here.
I expect to vote reflexively for any future override.
I thought that the arguments against the most recent override ranged from the oblivious to the ridiculous.
I thought that Jere Hochman was absolutely worth what we paid for him.
BUT I always recognized that override supporters had the burden of persuasion with the electorate, many of whom are living on fixed incomes, others have not seen real pay increases in years.
This salary level effectively disarms override proponents in the debate.
What is going to be the School Committee's position in any future override conversation: "Do as I say, not as I do"?
My sense is that the pain of this is going to be felt even more acutely in Pelham, and I wonder how that community's representatives on the Regional School Committee figured in the salary deliberations.
Rich Morse
That is why I ever so politely asked for the vote under Public Documents Law.
And they damn well better give it to me!
So $20K difference and you would have been happy? Would you have been as happy if you got a poorer quality candidate? You loved to rail against the last regime, so remember, you get what you pay for.
Actually it's $23-K. And yeah, I would have been satisfied.
And which former regime are you referring to: the acting, co-supers who did not carry out their full-year of interim service and are still getting paid their $135-K salary or Jere Hochman?
Because yeah, Jere and I started off on the wrong foot because he came in at $135-K and Gus Sayer went out at $103,000. And then there was of course the Vagina Monologues disaster (twice) but the West Side Story (perhaps a bigger disaster) occurred under Gus Sayer's watch.
And Jere did stand up for the American flags flying on 9/11 (much to the chagrin of the at the time ultra-left Select Board (when what's her name was still Czar).
So with him I'm happy to say we at least got our money's worth, and if he can get twice the pay in New York for the same amount of work then good for him.
Funny, I never hear the line “you get what you pay for” when it comes to cops, firefighters, or nurses.
"Funny, I never hear the line “you get what you pay for” when it comes to cops, firefighters, or nurses."
We don't hear that about teachers either.
"I thought that Jere Hochman was absolutely worth what we paid for him."
Precisely what did JH do besides sweat the budget crisis every year? Nothing. He spent fropm October through June wondering about the budget. He didn't provide any visionary leadership. And neither will anyone else until the funding is there for the schools to do more than limp from one month to the next.
JH was a nice enough guy and it's not his fault he couldn't really lead while he was here. Overseeing a budget is not leading. An accountant can oversee a budget for a lot less salary than a superintendent.
JH did bring in a new teacher evaluation and professional development model that the budegt can't pay for, so what the hell good is it?
Let me guess, you're a teacher?
I was going to go with that in place of nurses, but then, I was in a 'public safety' frame of mind.
And if you do not have public safety it is pretty hard to teach.
The vote may indicate some reservations from the reps from Pelham.
What the vote won't give you is the tenor of the discussion.
I'm sure that when the time came to argue about what to pay and whether to walk away from certain demands made by Dr. Rodriguez, the issue of race and ethnicity reared its ugly head to silence the dissenters.
We may never know.
Nothing shuts down discussion like the implication, or the outright accusation, that the speaker is a racist. If you watch this School Committee enough, and see the myriad of situations in which race is invoked by one or more of its members, it's hard to believe that such issues weren't used to shut up the hard bargainers on the Committee. What was it AG Holder said a few months ago? That we're "a nation of cowards" on race?
A *lot* of your frenemies agree with you (and Rich)
on this one....
Everyone making less than $158K, and everyone outraged that their retirements savings have shrunken by half due to wall street fraud, incompetence in government, and willful republican driven deregulation is likely to be bent out of shape about the super's comp package.
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