Eric Hartley: Hard times, but not at school board

By ERIC HARTLEY, Staff Writer

Published 09/07/08

With everything seeming pricier these days - gas for the car, electricity for the house and heck, even this newspaper if you bought it on the rack - a raise of, say, $20,000 or $30,000 over the past two years sure would have come in handy.

Well, if you've got a senior position in the county school system, you might be in luck.

More than 100 school employees received raises of $18,000 or more over the past two fiscal years, with the top salary bump being $34,322.

Overall, the number of six-figure jobs in the system has skyrocketed from 213 to 450 since The Capital did a similar story last year.

True,...

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School Bureaucracy - September 7, 2008

Name one company in Maryland -- publicly traded or private -- where a person making $100,000 a year does NOT consider their job to be more than 9-to-5. And my comments do not apply to teachers and education personnel that are actually in the schools, doing their jobs. My comments apply to the layers and layers of the directors-upon-directors-upon coordinators-upon-supervisors-upon Superitendents and Assistant Superitendents who keep enriching themselves while doing nothing to impact overall performance in our schools. Pretty easy to do when the school board is not accountable to the people and decisions are always made in a closed room. The rationale used by the AACPS PR machine doesn't pass the straight face test. If today's column by Eric Hartley and the accompanying article by Elisabeth Hulette don't spur an investigation of AACPS spending and ethics, nothing will. The doubling of people making 100k per year underscores the need for fundamental reform of our school bureaucracy. Kudos to the Captial for doing what the average citizen is typically denied -- access to information on where our taxpayer dollars are going once the money goes to Riva Road. As Mr. Hartley has written about the Maryland Public Information Act before, its time for the Act to be enforced on the AACPS - including the criminal penalties that are supposed to be the consequence for violations of the Act, and the public trust. In the meantime, don't bother watching Channel 98 or whatever the school board channel is -- their meetings are all pomp and no substance, which shows their distrust for public involvement or scrutiny at any level.

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Chris Doherty - Harwood, MD - Karma: Neutral