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Albuquerque Public Schools has about 14,000 employees. They have not had a cost-of-living raise or increase in benefits in four years. But four lucky employees this year saw improvements in compensation.
Guess who they are?
Superintendent Winston Brooks is one. His retirement benefits got a $23,000-a-year boost in January. He earns $256,000 a year now, and if he stays with APS until he turns 65 in 2018, he will collect $82,250 a year in state retirement instead of the $58,750 he would have received without the pension boost. Sweet. In the long run, APS says this move will save the district money. But taxpayers certainly will be asked to shore up a state educational retirement program with $5.9 billion in unfunded liability.
The other big winners are associate superintendents Eddie Soto, Diane Kerschen and Raquel Reedy. The got 6.6 percent pay raises this summer to boost their annual salaries to $125,000.
This largesse to a few comes despite decreased state funding and increased class sizes affecting the district’s 90,000 students and roughly 6,000 teachers.
Several board members justified Brooks’ pension bump as an enticement to keep him from jumping ship. He has been asked to interview for posts in four other urban districts. Brooks says he wasn’t threatening to leave or sell his services to the highest bidder, but it was a factor in contract negotiations.
And Brooks justified giving his three associates pay hikes because they have taken on extra duties as positions have come open and not been filled — again, he says, ultimately saving the district money.
Everyone understands that in a perfect world when you take on additional work it is nice to be compensated for it. But in today’s real world, who hasn’t had to do more just to stay employed? For sure, APS teachers, educational assistants, principals, secretaries, nurses and maintenance workers have. So why not APS brass?
Ellen Bernstein, the president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, points out “although it makes perfect sense that when someone has more duties added to their job that they make more money, there will be incredible resentment among the thousands of people I represent, because their jobs continue to grow, their responsibilities increase, the amount of work they do has gotten to the point of being overwhelming, and nobody’s offering them a raise.”
Meanwhile, Brooks and an entourage of 17 recently went to an out-of-state conference on the taxpayer dime. The tab was $34,463, a pittance in a $600 million budget, but nonetheless another symbol of the district’s tone deafness in today’s climate of economic austerity.
Brooks says the APS folks will host the conference next year, and all wore pins promoting Albuquerque.
At the end of the school day the dollars might not be large, but those at the top in APS should consider how it looks to the many at ground level — and to the taxpayers who foot the bill.
