House speaker looking to cap school administrative costs

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- House Speaker Catherine Hanaway said Thursday she was studying whether to propose a mandatory cap on school districts' administrative expenses.

At a news conference, Hanaway invited educators and school boards to comment on the feasibility of limiting districts' administrative costs to 10 percent of their state and local school funding, "so that every possible dollar can be put into the classroom."

Hanaway, R-Warson Woods, has not filed legislation detailing her idea.

Local districts within limit

Locally, Jackson school officials said in July they planned to use 5.1 percent, or $1.3 million, of a $25 million budget to pay the district's 20 administrators.

The Cape Girardeau schools this year will spend 4.3 percent, or $1.4 million, of a $32 million budget to pay for 23 administrators.

The Scott City schools are spending less than 4 percent of their $6 million budget on administrative costs.

Administrators in each district said with so little information about the proposal, they could not speculate on what total administrative costs would amount to.

Hanaway said she considered administrative costs to include such items as superintendents' salaries, office space and computers. Services that are not directly related to the classroom but affect students -- such as transportation -- would not come under the cap, she said.

"Regardless of the content or focus, I'm very wary of anything that restricts local control of public education," said Cape Girardeau School District superintendent Mark Bowles. "I wouldn't want to be restricted in the use of our funds, we already have enough trouble with grants and entitlements."

Brent Ghan, a spokesman for the Missouri School Boards' Association, said most of Missouri's 524 districts already spend less than 10 percent of their budgets on administration.

Defining costs

The effect of Hanaway's idea would depend on how broadly "administrative costs" were defined.

Jackson School District superintendent Dr. Ron Anderson agreed.

"Based on what I know at this point, it would not be something most school people would be for," Anderson said.

Anderson said he's aware of a few states, like Minnesota and Iowa, that have recently done away with such a system because it has inhibited their ability to recruit administrators.

"It basically handcuffed the state that had it. They couldn't keep up with the national market in getting people they needed," Anderson said.

Cutbacks, belt-tightening

Hanaway said a mandatory cap "may require some cutbacks and some belt-tightening at the administrative level for school districts, but it should be a very reasonable, functional limit that does absolutely put the emphasis on classroom teaching."

"You simply have to have some level of administrative costs no matter what the size of the school district is," he said. "It sounds like a one-size-fits-all approach for prescribing administrative costs for school districts. There's a lot of variation in school districts in Missouri."

Diann Bradshaw Ulmer, superintendent of the Scott City schools, thinks the idea is simply a reaction to the pressure being placed on legislators to maintain or increase school funding levels.

"I think they're lashing out at us because we have to go to them for money. ...," she said. "They get aggravated with us and they get mad at us because we're trying to represent our kids."

Hanaway said legislators also will review the state's school accreditation program to see whether it places too many burdens and expenses on administrators without improving students' learning.

Staff writer Callie Clark contributed to this report.