Chambana Sun

Angi Franklin, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources, talks about administrative salaries in the district during the Urbana School District #116 board of education meeting.

“I want all of our teachers to make as much money as they can, makes my job easier and it makes our teachers happier and that they'll stay in the district longer and we can recruit people,” Franklin said during the board meeting. “So we have some teachers that are making a great salary. Go them! We want to pay them more to be able to recruit and retain the best, but to just kind of get an idea to see like our certified administrators sprinkled in. Right. And some of these people, you know, like they're they're getting into like year 25 and they should make that kind of money.”

The board uploaded a Livestream of its public meeting to the district’s YouTube channel.

Franklin talked to the board about administrative salaries because there were a lot of questions about them recently from board members, whether from community members or their own observations. The questions prompted HR to look into the numbers and do some investigations, which resulted in them finding out that the data pulls reported in the state report card were inaccurate and had been for at least 5 years.

The board accepted over ten district employees' resignations.

The HR team corrected these issues with help from people in the reporting organization and other mentors who helped them identify and correct other issues. One of the issues was position coding leading to an inaccurate administration-to-student ratio. The numbers were addressed and the ratio changed from 133:1 to 108:1.

The board will meet again at 6:30 p.m. in January at the Jean F. Burkholder Administrative Service Center on 205 North Race St.

She then went through a sheet of all the administrative positions in the district and their salary. She did remove the names just for a little bit of privacy; however, they are technically available because the district is a public entity. Some of the additional pay that went to some positions were because they were covering for vacant positions, like one school missing a principal. The intent was to give some clarity to salaries in the district, and the board and administration also promised they focused on trying to pay their teachers as much as possible.