High School Principal LaSusa to Take Reins as Assistant Superintendent

Clarification appended

The School District of the Chathams' Board of Education unanimously approved Chatham High School co-Principal Michael LaSusa to be the district's new assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction at its meeting Monday night.

LaSusa will replace current Assistant Superintendent Anne Dudley, whose retirement will go into effect at the end of the summer. Superintendent Jim O'Neill said today that current high school co-Principal Darren Groh will remain in his job, and that instead of hiring another co-principal to replace LaSusa, the district will instead hire an assistant principal to replace him. The high school already has an assistant principal—Lori Gironda—so next year, the school will have two assistant principals.

"I'm certainly in favor of Dr. LaSusa," board member Alan Routh said. "He's a very fine gentleman and one of the most impressive educators I've met and worked with."

Routh then went on to say the district needs to take a hard look at how much it pays its central administration.

Its top six administrators make about $800,000 in total, he said—some administrators, he said, make close to the 85th percentile statewide—and with local property tax costs skyrocketing, the district needs to be a little bit more careful than it has been in the past. LaSusa would make $155,000 per year.

"I think it's very important that we take a closer look at similar administrators in similar districts at these levels," Routh said.

Later, he continued: "I'm not very comfortable with the level of analysis that we're doing. I would hope that we do a little more analysis in the future."

The board's Personnel Committee had approved Superintendent Jim O'Neill's recommendation that the board hire LaSusa to replace Dudley. The committee's chair, Heather Turnbull, said Routh's concerns had been raised during a meeting prior to the regular board meeting.

"These kinds of positions are really important in a high-performing district that we're in," she said. "If we want to continue to get high quality people in these positions you have to expect to get a high salary to them."

She said she feared that any drop in salary could also mean a drop in quality.

Other district officials—such as Business Administrator Ralph Goodwin—said that it is difficult for the district to compare its administrators' salaries with those of administrators from other districts because the positions are, in many cases, not exactly the same.

Director of Special Services Harold Tarriff, for example, who will retire at the end of 2010, doesn't have a large staff of assistants under him, and some of the salary that would go to assistants in other school districts instead goes back to his position, Goodwin said.

Routh agreed, but said that "that's why you can't take raw data."

O'Neill expressed disappointment that the board was having the discussion in public, since he had hoped any concerns board members might have had would have been raised during the Personnel Committee meeting. He said the district has, in fact, done its analysis of the position, and said "there are very few [assistant superintendents] in the state with the same level of responsibility."

He also noted the district has grown by almost 100 teachers and 1,900 students in recent years, but has not added any administrative positions during that time.

"There's probably not another district in the state that can say the same thing," O'Neill said.

In the end, the board decided to approve LaSusa, saying that "if you want quality, you have to pay for quality," as board member Richard Connors put it. Board member Al Burgunder said he was pleased with the fruitful discussion regarding pay scales.

"I think the discussion that we're having here is fabulous and it's a discussion that needs to be done in the open," he said.

LaSusa will start his new job Aug. 1.

Clarification: An original version of this article said the district had not yet decided whether it would hire a co-principal to replace LaSusa. It will not; it will instead hire an assistant principal to replace him.