After I wrote a long post about the new contract and salary deal for H.T. Sanchez at TUSD, I steeled myself, waiting to have my head bit off in the comments section. To my surprise, that’s not what happened. The commenters took a variety of positions on the contract, but the arguments tended to be more nuanced than the usual polarization I find in the comments section. [That’s not true, however, of the very long 28th comment, which called me naive and ignorant and argued at length about how badly Sanchez has harmed the district. I’m fine with that, by the way, it comes with the territory. My surprise was that my post didn’t get more comments like that.]
In the course of the back-and-forth, one anonymous commenter said I was “missing the point” on one issue. And you know, the commenter is right. So I want to post the comment here as a kind of post script to what I wrote initially.
In a reply to a comment, I wrote that the size of Sanchez’s salary wasn’t directly relevant to the salaries of teachers and other staff. With 3,000 teachers and even more support staff, any lowering of his salary would result in pennies for everyone else. Earlier, I had also mentioned Mesa Superintendent Michael Cowan, whose district is a similar size to TUSD and who has a similar salary to Sanchez’s. Cowan’s is probably a bit lower, though it’s hard to tell with all the add-ons to the base salary. But, as someone pointed out in another comment, Cowan refused a raise because of the financial problems Mesa, like all Arizona school districts, is suffering through.
With that background, here’s the comment.
David: You seem to be missing the point here. It doesn’t matter whether Sanchez and his cabinet refusing to take a raise and / or bonuses could make a material difference if the amount they refused to take were divided up and applied to teachers’ salaries throughout the district. This has to do with morale and the ability to lead. Does it make sense for Superintendents and central administrators to take raises and bonuses in a context in which the legislature is further cutting funding to an already disastrously underfunded school district? The quote from the Mesa Superintendent Cowan provided a perfect example of how a good leader handles himself in a situation like this. The behavior of the leader sends a message to the troops which either improves morale and unifies the force or degrades morale and impairs his ability to lead. It seems that Sanchez has done the latter — and in a context where morale and confidence in his leadership were already dangerously low.
Point well taken. I’m not sure how it could have or should have come about, but the best outcome for the sake of the district would have been for Sanchez and other top administrators to forego raises at this point while committing to stay on. It would have hurt their pocketbooks— hough not anywhere near as much as the non-administrative staff is being hurt by the state budget cuts to education—but it would have sent a message to the rest of the TUSD employees: We’re in this together.
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2015.
Maybe you should have just made this an equally long comment over on your original topic.
I still don’t know why you allow anonymous commenters. By the way, what is HT’s real name?
Dave, You will always be outside looking in at TUSD. What a person reads or hears, or even listening to HT speak is not living day to day with his inexperienced “leadership.” That commentor you refer to said he/she was a site administrator. I’d like to confirm everything he/she said including, “the current TUSD environment as one filled with fear, favoritism and fraud (meaning both pretentious and unethical; perhaps illegal)………., as a whole, both central and site administrators are fearful of speaking up during meetings.” Why did the board never look at trends in the district? Why DID the entire cabinet from 13-14 leave the district after HT’s first year? Why was the elementary director’s job advertised when she was in surgery, when the Texas boys had asked her to stay on for another year? Bullying and intimidation is the top down model and some site administrators are modeling that very behavior. Top brass even denied a student being bullied at one school, the ability to transfer to another school. The district continues to bleed students, love tunnel or not.
Rat. His first name is Heliodoro
Wow! Thank you.
David I read all the comments also, and there were many good points made and lots of information presented, yet you do not discuss that. You are still missing the point, the damage is already done , moral has been destroyed. You talk about the Governor and legislature cutting funding, the governor has made it clear that he wants more money put into classrooms and not administration, what has happened here is a slap in the face to the governor , which will draw more attention on TUSD. Your friends on the board and Sanchez have brought down a wrath that will end TUSD, and Grijalva and Sanchez are supposed to be the great defenders of public education. How does public education get destroyed? with thunderous applause and a love tunnel. The more you support these people the more you and TW lose credibility .
Right on the money Brian. No pun intended. The so called lovers are destroying it. And just maybe it needs to happen so we can start over.
Right on the money Brian. No pun intended. The so called lovers are destroying it. And just maybe it needs to happen so we can start over.
I continue to dissent. Morale IMHO is down because of testing, the lack of community support and the affect charter schools have on the funding schools get as well as the governor and legislators. This blog demonstrates this. I think just because we are unable to provide better pay to the educators, doesn’t mean we pay the superintendent and other administrators poorly. I think they deserve the pay and we have been unable to attract and keep superintendents of quality to Tucson. I support him and pray all of our educators get more pay and not pay others less or have them give up part of their pay. THey must have respect for themselves and their profession.
David, you hit the nail on the head. I was never so proud of Roger Pfeuffer as when he gave his money back to the district and John Pedicone did the same thing. Of course they had a deep commitment to Tucson and/or the district and had real skin in the game. H.T. Should have done this as a morale builder. But he is a much younger leader and has not been anywhere long enough yet to know that deep commitment to the whole scene, not just his part of it. I hope he will develop that feeling now that he has committed to stay. So many people said he would leave right away. Glad they were wrong. The learning curve continues now.
gcb 1: Roger Pfeuffer and John Pedicone had appropriate levels of experience and local knowledge before assuming the superintendency of this troubled district. We do not need a young, inexperienced, arrogant out-of-towner in the process of “developing” a commitment to Tucson “learning” about how to be a Superintendent while we pay him over $400K a year of the district’s sadly limited resources to ensure that he condescends to continue his “on the job training” at the expense of the children and professional educators in this district. This young man has made any number of mistakes that have been damaging to our students and to the professional educators who serve them in our schools. Agreeing to accept absurd compensation increases while the state further cuts funding to public schools is only one among many.
If the current irresponsible board majority knew enough about education and about the schools that fall under their so-called “governance” (which, as they exercise it, doesn’t deserve the name), they would have terminated this misguided experiment and hired someone qualified to start repairing the damage that has been done in the past two years. Instead, they extended the contract and threw more money at their mistake.
Those who care about the thousands of students served by this district should work to ensure that two of the three members of the current majority will be deprived of their board seats in the next election. With a responsible majority in place, some appropriate modifications can then be made to the ill-advised policy decisions, compensation packages, and board governance practices Grijalva-Foster-Juarez have unwisely introduced, while occupying (and betraying) positions of public trust.