5.4.7 Support Administrators

Now, there is a whole other category of administrators, we've been talking about line administrators who have authority. Now we'll talk about support administrators who are there to help people like logistics support. The people who plan the bus schedules and things like that and the purchasing departments of large school districts and all those people with logistics support and they're necessary, but by and large I think they are overpaid and overqualified. There is kind of a tradition in education that all the administrators have been teachers at some point in their career and then they get promoted up and all promotions are away from kids. I think this is really bad. It's bad enough in the logistics side, it's even worse in instructional support. Right now for example, we have this really destructive cycle. Teacher's aren't paid very much so they tend not to be up to date so you need to hire people to help them. Now when you hire people to help them, that takes a lot of money because you have to pay them large salaries so there is less money to pay teachers so teachers become weaker so you need to hire more people to help them. And so you keep on going and right now we have these enormous staffs of people helping teachers and as far as I am concerned it is just out of whack. I would much rather have, you'll find out later on that my recommendation is that we have really small school districts. I would not have a Norfolk public schools district. I would have a separate school district for every high school and its feeder schools. So I would have five different local school districts in Norfolk. Then they would be really local. And then you might have a support staff, a support services unit, that would serve all of southern Tidewater and that the schools would get whatever they needed in terms of special services from them but the schools would hire whatever they needed from the central service units and the schools would decide whether they wanted it or not rather than the way it is now that those instructional support services people are there whether you want them or need them or not. In New York it is carried to the most obscene extreme where you have one administrator for every three teachers. It is horrendous. I don't know what it is going to take to turn that around but I really think we need smaller school districts and fewer support staff.

	According to the instructor, why should we have smaller school districts and fewer support staffs?	Answer Here
	How would a smaller school district and few support staffers assist a large public school system like the Norfolk Public Schools? Would it be feasible to create this sort of system that is comprised of a lot of mini-systems? How would this sort of system affect a teacher that has been in the large system for their entire career? Would it ease stress or create more for them?	Answer Here