Jose Melendez - Campaign Director, TPPF Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seven, twenty two, our time here on Houston's morning news. Right,
we have some very well paid superintendents in the greater
Houston area. Actually, the best paid superintendent in Texas, though,
is in Victoria and and he is making somewhere in
the neighborhood. Let me find his salary here. It's well
over a half a million dollars. Yeah, Randall Meyer heads

(00:22):
up Victoria Ist. He made base salary. Five hundred and
sixty five forty seven dollars is his base salary? Joining
us Jose Melendez, campaign director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
He's far from alone. We have a lot of superintendents
that are making well over four hundred thousand dollars a year.
In fact, Mike Miles here in Houston just got an

(00:43):
eighty two thousand dollars a year raise to bring his
salary up to four hundred and sixty two thousand dollars.
Are these guys worth Itjse I think this is alarming.
I'll share a couple of fun facts.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
It's striking to me that out of the top ten
superintendent salaries, all of them make more than the President
of the United States, and all of them make more
than the governor of Texas. In fact, over five hundred
of them make more than the governor of Texas.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, that's pretty scary. Here's the other thing that strikes
me too, because you know, when we think of schools,
we'd like to think that the vast majority of the
money is going into the classroom. It's not just superintendents.
These superintendents have assistant superintendents, and then they underneath them,
they have principles and they have assistant principles. You take
the hierarchy of any public school and you've got an

(01:36):
amazing amount of people making a whole lot of money.
They don't spend any time instructing in the classroom.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
So the rising superintendent salaries mean that there is more
expenses being used on IC personnel. It also means that
less tax relief is being used to actually reduce your
tax rate, and ultimately we the taxers, fut that bill
at higher property tax bills. And in reality, what it
does is it erodes to public trust in our officials. Uh.

(02:05):
The state has consistently done its part or this past session,
the session before that and sending tax relief back to
the locals, But every single time, these locals it's seemingly
a recurring storyline. These greedy local governments, your school districts,
your cities, your counties see it as an opportunity to
jack up your tax rate. So I'm in the in

(02:25):
the vout of the next legislature not only needs to
do relief, but we need to do reform. There's a
lot of reforms needed at the local level to guard
our gains.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Well. Certainly, again, I think we're very top heavy when
it comes to most of these public school systems. How
did how did they get to be that way? How
did we go from having you know it used to
be a superintendent was was pretty hands on, pretty much
in charge of everything. Now they just pretty much delegate
their duties to their assistance.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
I think we let it go for far too long,
and the legislature in recent times has provided some legislative solutions.
But I think these are going to gain more steam
because everyone is becoming more and more aware of the problem.
There's a couple of good solutions that came about this
past legislative session. They didn't go anywhere, but I think
we're going to catch more steam heading into next session,

(03:16):
and that is you know, limiting or capping salaries for superintendents.
One solution was a superintendent can't make more than twice
as any classroom school teacher.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Well, that'd be quite a pay cut, wouldn't it. That's
exactly right. Interesting. Okay, we'll see if anything comes with that. Jose,
Thank you. Jose Melendez, campaign director of Texas Public Policy Foundation,