Superintendents have ‘grave concerns’ over report on their pay hikes

Eggen considering options, will have more to say in ‘the weeks ahead,’ aide says

EDMONTON Superintendent pay in Alberta rose 10 per cent in five years and is slightly higher on average than other provinces, says a corrected and updated version of a report prepared for school trustees across the province.

Despite several adjustments to the initial report, which said superintendent pay rose 10 per cent in three years, Education Minister David Eggen remains concerned about pay for school district leaders, his press secretary, Lindsay Harvey, said in an email Monday.

“As you know, our government has frozen salaries for cabinet ministers and senior management in the civil service. We expect the same kind of restraint from senior school board administrators,” Harvey wrote.

Eggen is considering reining in superintendent pay with options such as a salary grid or a cap.

Superintendents, meanwhile, have “grave concern about the quality of the work that went into producing this report,” said Barry Litun, executive director of the College of Alberta School Superintendents.

The Alberta School Boards’ Association had hired Western Management Consultants to study publicly available data on superintendent salaries in Alberta, and compare trends with superintendents in other provinces and other top public sector executives in Alberta. While CEO pay dropped, superintendent pay rose, it said.

After Postmedia obtained the report earlier this month, the college of superintendents disputed some of the methods and data. A revised report, dated last Wednesday, changed its conclusions about how rapidly superintendent pay rose in Alberta, and pared down an apparent gap in pay between Alberta superintendents and those in other provinces.

The report is meant to help Alberta school trustees strike agreements with the superintendents they hire, the Alberta School Boards’ Association’s manager of communications said in an email Monday. The changes don’t “materially change the analysis of the report,” Rae Thygesen said.

Litun will be asking the college’s board to commission its own study on superintendent compensation, he said.

He remains unsatisfied the corrected version of the report is accurate. It uses incomplete numbers to add up superintendent salaries over time, and miscalculates the average superintendent pay, he said.

It should also look at a superintendent’s total compensation — including benefits and bonuses — because contracts vary considerably across the province, he said.

The college may be amenable to a salary grid or cap, if it accounts for the difficulty recruiting senior leaders to remote towns, and the cost of living in different locations. Some superintendents have called him since the initial report became public, saying they hadn’t had a pay raise in years, Litun said.

Harvey said Eggen would have more to say about superintendent pay in “the weeks ahead.”