Melissa Bailey Photo
High schools director Charles Williams will get a $99,656 pension.
Thanks to a $10,000 bonus dangled before potential retirees, the city school system is getting a head start on finding replacements for four administrators next year, including one of its most veteran top officials.
Charles Williams, the director of instruction for high schools, is one of four administrators who gave notice by Dec. 31 that they will be leaving the district at the end of the year.
Also leaving are Nancy Esteves, assistant principal at the John S. Martinez School, Francisco Soto, assistant principal at Hill Regional Career High School, and Cynthia Beaver, the district’s guidance supervisor. They are set to retire effective June 30, the end of the fiscal year. All will receive a bonus giving for notifying the system months in advance of their departures.
Williams, who’s 62, started out with the district as a science teacher at Lee High School in 1972. He rose to become the chair of the science wing at Hillhouse High, an assistant principal at Wilbur Cross High, and the principal of Hill Regional Career High for 13 years. He has held his current job since 2004. His retirement will take place at the end of the first year of a citywide effort to close the city’s achievement gap and improve its schools.
Schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo called Williams’ departure a “tremendous loss.”
“I’m shocked once in a while; that was one thing that shocked me,” Mayo said. “We’re really, really going to miss Charlie. He’s probably one of the most capable central office people I have.”
Williams now makes a salary of $137,172. Upon retirement, he will get a pension equivalent to 75 percent of his highest three years’ salary, according to Darlene Perez, administrator of the Teacher Retirement Board. That computes to $99,656 per year, according to the Independent’s calculator. The pension is paid for by investment gains on employee contributions, plus contributions from the state.
A native of Walterboro, South Carolina, Williams speaks with a warm southern twang. Holding a black fedora in his hand on the way out of the Board of Education meeting Monday, he paused for a brief interview.
“I thought it was time to look at what I was doing through a different set of lenses,” he said of his coming departure. “I’ll still be in education, but doing something different.”
Williams said he lived in New Haven for 22 years before moving to West Haven a few years ago.
Mayo said he has been a great “troubleshooter” and is “widely respected by the whole school community. He was a great principal, and he was a great director for high schools.” Williams has been working hard on the College Summit and New Haven Promise programs, Mayo said.
“You’re not going to find a person more loved, more capable, more competent than Charlie among central office,” Mayo said.
The school district’s central office is already down two directors, Mayo said: Andrea Lobo-Watley and Charles Warner both left and have not been replaced. In their absence, Assistant Superintendents Imma Canelli and Garth Harries have taken on the extra task of directly supervising schools on their departed colleagues’ caseloads.
The district is also looking for a new director of communications to replace Michelle Wade. The job was posted Jan. 7 on the New Haven Public Schools jobs website with a salary “commensurate with experience.”
Mayo said he will have to replace Williams in time for next school year.
Now he has six months to do so: Williams took advantage of a clause in the school administrators contract which encourages them to give lots of notice before leaving the district. School administrators each get a $10,000 bonus if they announce their departure by Dec. 31, but don’t retire until June 30. In addition, they’d pay nothing towards a medical cost-sharing plan for the first four years of their retirement.
That bonus remains intact in the school administrators’ proposed new labor agreement, according to schools Chief Operating Officer Will Clark. The three-year contract covers 110 school administrators, including all the principals and assistant principals at the city’s 47 schools. The contract was approved by the Board of Education in December and awaits approval by the full Board of Aldermen.
$10K Bonus To “Do The Right Thing”
The early warning bonus was one point of discussion as the contract came before the Finance Committee of the Board of Aldermen, which met in the Aldermanic Chambers of City Hall Tuesday night.
Aldermen have until Jan. 21 to reject the contract; otherwise it will automatically take effect. The Finance Committee discussed the item and took no action. The full Board of Aldermen may discharge the item from committee and take it up for an immediate vote at its next meeting on Tuesday.
As COO Clark presented the contract to eight aldermen, two of them zeroed in on the $10,000 bonus, which is included in the current as well as proposed contract.
Uma Ramiah Photo
“It almost sounds like we have an early retirement plan,” said Hill Alderman Jorge Perez (pictured).
It’s not an early retirement plan, Clark explained. The city isn’t asking people to retire ahead of when they normally would.
“That provisions been there for a number of years,” he said. “On the financial side the benefit is that we can start planning for attrition or rehiring.”
The transition piece is an issue, noted Clark. For example, even when longtime Wilbur Cross High Principal Rose Coggins gave notice by Dec. 14, 2009 that she would be leaving at the year’s end, the district scrambled to find a replacement in time for the following year, and did not fill the position until August.
“If you’re trying to find a new principal at Cross on August 31st, you’re in trouble. Whereas if you make the move now, you can move aggressively, sell the school, and target more than one principal. It allows for a smoother transition,” Clark said.
Goldfield questioned the practice.
“It seems like we’re paying people 10 thousand bucks to do the right thing,” he said.
Clark nodded. “I guess,” he said, “but there are other dynamics to it.”
School Reform “Bribe”?
Uma Ramiah Photo
Budget watchdog Gary Doyens (pictured) zeroed in on a provision in the contract that gives school administrators a 1 percent raise in return for agreeing to implement a series of reforms laid out in the teachers contract. The contract allows for changes in work rules in certain “turnaround schools,” including a longer school day and school year.
“This is like a bribe for principals to execute reform, but they’ve been overseeing schools that produce dropouts,” Doyens objected. “You’d think they’d be concerned that reforms go forward with energy, but we’re paying extra to do reform that should be required!”
“Obviously there’s no bribe,” retorted schools COO Clark. “We were aggressively attempting to negotiate a contract that was conservative on the cost, with a dramatic shift on the medical side of things, that also protected reform.”
In the three year contract between the School Administrators Association and the New Haven Board of Education, administrators would see no salary increase in the first year.
“The wage element for first year is a hard zero,” Clark told the committee.
In the second and third years, they would receive a 2.5 percent increase. One percent of that, said Clark, would be tied to school reform.
What does that mean?
“When we’re looking at school change, if we decide we want to extend the school day, and we don’t negotiate with the administrators, they could stop it,” said Clark.
Essentially, the 1 percent wage hike ensures that administrators will implement any work-rule changes without negotiation, including extended days or hours, further training or more teacher evaluations amongst other initiatives.
The total cost of the wage hikes over the two-year period would be $299,227, according to Craig Manemeit, the city’s director of labor relations.
Doyens was not impressed.
“It’s like we’re paying people to do the right thing,” he charged. Doyens was the sole person to speak during a public comment section following Clark’s presentation to the board.
The contract includes health care givebacks estimated to save taxpayers nearly $1 million over the next three years, according to Clark’s estimate. Read more about that here.
Layoff Protection
The city’s school reform drive calls for closing failing schools, and removing principals who have been there for years without improving student performance.
What happens to principals who don’t work out — can they be laid off, or shifted to another school?
Aldermanic President Carl Goldfield inquired what power the district has to relocate them.
“Do we have the right to move administrators from one school to another?” asked Goldfield.
Uma Ramiah Photo
“Unfettered,” replied Clark (pictured).
It’s a historic tradeoff in these types of agreements, he explained. The principal gets to keep a job and benefits, and the city gets free discretion to move administrators around.
While principals can be moved around to different schools, the contract protects them from losing their jobs due to layoffs.
Alderman Perez asked about a provision in the contract that allows principals who lose their jobs to become teachers instead.
“That provision only relates to if there is a layoff or reduction,” said Clark. If principals get laid off, “they have the right to bump down to being teacher.”
In such a case, he explained, a principal’s salary would be reduced by $1,000 per year until it reaches the teacher pay grade.
“So what this really means is we can’t lay anybody off,” noted Goldfield, “So for the administrators it doesn’t do any good. They’re just going to get paid the same salary, so we can’t reduce our administrative costs without attrition.”
But the school district tends to have about half a dozen retiring administrators each year, said Clark.
“So there tends to be an attrition rate.”
At the end of the discussion, Doyens urged aldermen to reject the contract.
Clark replied that the pay raises are in line with those for other unions.
“The assumption that we should go back to table and do better when every other contract in the city had raises over the same period of time,” he said, “is a difficult one to swallow.”