North Jersey school chiefs told to revise goals they thought would bring them bonuses
More than a dozen school superintendents in North Jersey report that the state has taken the unusual step of rejecting many goals they laid out for themselves to earn bonuses this year — to their surprise and frustration.
Most Bergen County superintendents who submitted new 2013-14 contracts for approval learned in recent days they had to revise their performance goals for getting bonuses worth up to 15 percent of their salaries, even though their school boards had approved those plans months ago. The superintendents have 10 days from when they receive the rejections to submit revised goals to the state Department of Education.
“Everyone is upset, because it’s the first time that this has occurred on this scale,” said River Dell Superintendent Patrick Fletcher, head of the Bergen County Association of School Administrators. Fletcher said he had spoken to 11 of the roughly 20 chiefs with contracts under review; all said they had to revise some or all of their five merit-pay goals.
Some superintendents complained that the rejections showed further erosion of local control. An Education Department spokesman said his agency was enforcing accountability rules and some of the goals that were rejected should be achieved as part of a chief’s regular job.
The state started reviewing superintendents’ goals for bonuses after Governor Christie imposed a cap on superintendents’ pay in 2011 to limit salaries according to district size. With a few exceptions for big cities, the cap meant they could not earn more than the governor’s $175,000 salary in base pay. Christie said the cap aimed to rein in excessive compensation and protect taxpayers, but critics charged it would lead to an exodus of talent. Superintendent turnover has accelerated since the cap was imposed.
The cap — and the requirement that specific goals for earning bonuses win approval from the state — took effect for district chiefs when their new multiyear contracts were written. In the past two years, most plans for earning bonuses submitted by North Jersey superintendents were approved by the state’s local representative, called an executive county superintendent.
This year, Fletcher said, most Bergen superintendents with contracts under review got letters in the last several days saying that their goals had to be more measurable or ambitious, or otherwise changed. His association counterpart in Passaic County, Ringwood Superintendent Hugh Beattie, said several superintendents had to rewrite their goals, too. They included Pompton Lakes superintendent Paul Amoroso, who said he was asked for more in-depth information.
Richard Bozza, executive director of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators, said such widespread rejections appeared to surface only in Bergen and Passaic counties. He noted that the region had a new county superintendent, Scott Rixford. “One concern we have expressed for years is discrepancy in review from county to county based on the perspective” of the person in the job, Bozza said.
There have been three people in the high-turnover executive superintendent’s post in the past year, delaying the review of some 2013-14 contracts. Rixford’s office referred calls for comment to the education department in Trenton. Department spokesman Michael Yaple said the agency wanted to make sure the bonus criteria could be quantified, and that the goals represented performance “above and beyond core responsibilities.”
For example, Yaple said, one superintendent listed a goal of maintaining a district’s website, but that should be part of a superintendent’s job in the first place. “There may be a difference between maintaining a website and renovating it,” Yaple noted, adding that it was up to superintendents to spell out why their goal exceeded regular duties.