Too Many Chiefs, not enough Braves

A comment was made on a different posting about the large number of administrators that some yeshivas have, some of those administrators with exceedingly high salaries. This is something that I have wondered about myself. What do all those people really do? The commenter mentioned that his daughter's yeshiva has 20 administrators. Twenty?!

This is clearly an area where parents ought to be asking about. Administrators don't work for $16 thousand a year. Let's be low-ball and say $30 thousand a year. But the commenter said that 6 make exceedingly high salaries. So 15 administrators at 30 thousand is "only" $450,000 per year. Give the other six "only" $100,000 each, and our total is $1,050,000 in administrator's salaries. Of course, I'm only guessing as to what they make, since yeshivas are not open with what they spend. The amount could be less...and it could be more.

We also don't know exactly how many administrators each individual yeshiva has. Some may make do with only a few, some with many more. What is considered an administrator? Some schools, most of them, consider anyone who is not a classroom teacher to be in "administration." This is certainly an area where parents need to be better informed about.

I did a little nosing around. One school, which has 5 nursery and kindergarten classes, has a pre-school supervisor/administrator. It has a principal for the school over all, and an assistant principal for English studies. There is one person who serves as maintenance person. When needed, he brings in more help. The cook for the lunch program counts as administration, but is part time and only 4 days a week. Parent volunteers are present at every lunch to do the serving and help with clean up. The teacher who runs the resource room program is considered administration. There are two secretary/administrative assistants and one book keeper who count as administration. That is 9 "administrators" for a school with about 200 children in attendance.

A different school, which has both an elementary school and a high school for girls, has a menahel that heads the whole school. He has an assistant menahel. There is a pre-school supervisor for nursery through Pre-1A. Then there is a principal for English studies and a principal for Jewish studies for both the elementary school and the high school, total of four. There is a secretary for the high school Jewish program, who works only the mornings and a secretary for the high school English program who works only the afternoons. The central office has three secretaries on varying schedules, a part-time book keeper and a full-time Administrator whose job is "organizational." There are two assistant administrators as well. There is a cook and assistant who cook for both the elementary school and the high school. There is a maintenance person in every day who has a hired crew that come in twice a week for the "heavy" work. There is no resource room or librarian. There are 19-20 individual classes for about 350-400 students across the pre-school, elementary school and high school. There are 19 administrators plus a few called in as needed. And perhaps it should also be noted that the school is a "family business" and among the administrators are 5 members of the family.

It should be noted that the first school offers group medical insurance to the teachers and administrative staff, which the teachers pay for 100%. The second school offers no insurance to its teaching staff but does provide insurance for its senior administrators.

One thing becomes obvious: because of the dual program in English and Judaic studies, the administration is also doubled. One thing I also noted: the larger the school, the larger the number of different types of administrators the school hires. One school of over 600 students has a full-time administrator for fund raising, along with his secretary. He also gets "assistants" as needed. The larger the school, the more the breakdown by grade as regards administrators: there may be a supervisor for 1-3 grade, 4-5 grade and 6-8 grade, both for English and Judaic studies. There may be a curriculum specialist. There may be an IT specialist. The list goes on and on. And the more "senior administrative personnel" there is, the more secretarial help you have backing them up.

Let's see, a boys school with three classes per grade, Nursery through 8th grade has 660 students at 20 students per class. It has 9 teachers plus 9 assistants in the pre-school--18 teachers. It has 30 teachers from grades 1-5. It has 16-18 teachers grades 6-8. That's 66 teachers and some 30 plus in administrative staff. You do the math.

Yes, there must be some sort of administration in a school. The question may be how many and how much are they getting paid? Are they all necessary? What jobs are duplicated that don't have to be? And the really big question may be, what if, after going over the books carefully, we see that most or all of the administrative staff may actually be necessary? What if a fund raiser really is necessary, and you can't get one to work for less than $80-100 thousand a year? Hard questions we need to ask, and I don't think we are going to like some of the answers.