By now, I'm sure you know that Jefferson County Public Schools have a $188 million deficit. They have a couple options: cut expenses to match income or raise taxes. I'm afraid raising taxes is not only the easiest solution but also the most likely. It's also the laziest and most unfair to taxpayers.
Through a WDRB open records request, we learned that more than 1,100 JCPS employees make more than $100,000. Of those people, the average salary is about $123,000. That's an annual payroll of about $137 million, just for those people making over $100,000. Many jobs are worth that, but I question the number of positions that pay that, especially since 344 more people are making over $100,000 since just 2022. In business, this is called "Scope Creep" where an operation slowly gets much bigger than it needs to be.
In times of crisis, perhaps JCPS should think completely differently about how they run things. Instead of being so bloated at the central office level, they could decentralize operations, eliminate hundreds of high-priced jobs and push authority down to the smart people at the school level: principals, vice principals and teachers. I'll bet they would find out that most of those central office jobs weren't all that necessary anyway.
I'm Bill Lamb, and that's my Point of view.
