As the Lawrence school board is poised to approve an interim superintendent contract with a salary equivalent to $235,000 over a full year, here’s a glimpse at how superintendent pay compares across several districts.
The Lawrence school board on Monday will consider approving a contract to hire an outside candidate as the 2024-25 interim superintendent, with a salary of $194,482 for 10 months. (Read more about that and see the draft contract in this article.)
If approved, Jeanice Swift will serve as interim superintendent for Lawrence Public Schools from Aug. 30 through June 30, 2025. See additional coverage of the interim superintendent search at the links below this article.
Previous Superintendent Anthony Lewis’ last day was Friday. He was selected to lead Durham, North Carolina public schools.
Lewis’ last negotiated contract with the district included a salary of $229,295. Swift would be paid the equivalent of a $235,000 annual salary prorated for 10 months, plus benefits, according to her tentative contract. Her 10-month salary would be equivalent to about 4.4 starting annual salaries of first-year teachers with bachelor’s degrees ($43,983).
For comparison to other top public positions in Lawrence, City Manager Craig Owens was paid $244,733 in 2023, and Douglas County Administrator Sarah Plinsky was paid $237,953, according to data from kansasopengov.org.
This chart includes data from the 2013-14 through 2023-24 school years for the 10 largest districts in Kansas as well as Eudora, Baldwin City and Perry. It also includes the state median and average superintendent pay, which have generally trended lower than all of the districts charted.
For the 2023-24 year, Lawrence — the seventh largest public school district by enrollment in the state — paid its superintendent the eighth largest amount of the districts on this chart, passed by De Soto, which was 10th in enrollment.
The total amounts include salaries as well as fringe benefits, which may include things such as stipends for cellphones or travel (which is why the number shown here is higher than Lewis’ contracted salary with the district).
Click here to open the chart in a new tab.
Superintendent salaries, like any other job, vary based on many factors. One of those is the size of the district.
Here’s a look at enrollment totals for these 13 districts, and several others around the state, over the same time period:
The largest increase to the Lawrence school district superintendent pay in the past decade was an 18% bump between the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years.
Rick Doll resigned with total pay of $179,193 in June 2016 after seven years with the district. Kyle Hayden, then assistant superintendent of business and operations for the district, was named superintendent with total pay of $211,557. In May 2017, he announced his plans to step down into a new position, chief operations officer. He resigned from that position in July 2019 to become CFO of Blue Valley schools.
Anna Stubblefield was selected in June 2017 to serve as interim superintendent for the 2017-18 year with pay of $211,798. Lewis was selected from two finalists as the next superintendent in January 2018 and started in the job in July 2018, coming to Lawrence from Kansas City, Missouri Public Schools. His pay for the 2018-19 year was $239,121, a 4.7% increase.
Stubblefield stayed on as deputy superintendent in Lawrence until she was selected from a national search to serve as superintendent of Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools, resigning June 30, 2021.
The district recently brought the deputy superintendent position back, naming Larry Englebrick to the job in July — a promotion from his role as chief operations officer. He was considered as a finalist for the interim superintendent position role, but the school board opted to go with an outside candidate. The other finalist was Thomas Ahart, of Iowa.
The school board intends to engage the community in the selection of the next permanent superintendent, who will begin with the 2025-26 school year.
The school board on Aug. 1 approved an increase of 4.08% to the administrative salary pool. The board has also recently approved salary pool increases of 6.27% for classified staff — a 99-cent per hour raise — and 4.08% to the certified salary pool, for $1,400 increases to the base annual salaries for teachers.
See a series of articles on district data, including administrator and teacher pay, linked below.
The school board meeting is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Monday, Aug. 12 at district offices, 110 McDonald Drive. Swift will be at district offices starting at 5 p.m. Monday ahead of the board’s meeting to meet and greet community members.
Meetings are open to the public, livestreamed on the district’s YouTube channel, youtube.com/@USD497, and broadcast on Midco channel 26. Full meeting agendas are available on BoardDocs, via go.boarddocs.com.
To give public comment during the board meeting, sign up before the meeting starts either in person or by emailing PublicComment@usd497.org. Commenters may request to participate by Webex video/phone conferencing.
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Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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August Rudisell/Lawrence Times
