Dearest reader,
Step Three takes us to Rudyard Area Schools' superintendent compensation, and this may be one of the shortest compensation ledgers I've opened. 🧐📜
Rudyard's own 2024 employee compensation disclosure reports one superintendent and eight compensation categories.
The receipts:
Salary: $112,606
FICA/Medicare: $8,492
Retirement: $53,838
Health Insurance: $16,817
Dental Insurance: $715
Vision Insurance: $260
LTD Insurance: $281
Life Insurance: $406
Add it all together:
$193,415 in total reported compensation for calendar year 2024.
And there's something else worth pointing out here.
The district didn't make me hunt through multiple documents trying to reconstruct the superintendent's compensation package. They put it in a table.
Salary. Retirement. Insurance. Employer-paid benefits.
Right there.
That's what transparency is supposed to look like.
Now, $193,415 is still public money, and putting a number on the ledger doesn't automatically make it good, bad, high or low. Context matters, especially for a smaller Upper Peninsula district.
But after Step One showed teacher salaries gaining purchasing power, and Step Two showed teacher FTE increasing despite a 13.85% enrollment decline, Step Three gives us another fairly straightforward receipt.
And remember what I said when we started Rudyard:
Lady Budgetdown doesn't open a district looking for something to criticize.
I open the receipts and let them tell us what is there.
Sometimes that means a red circle.
Sometimes it means giving a district credit for making the public's job remarkably simple.
Rudyard's ledger isn't closed yet.
But so far?
My spectacles aren't fogging up. 🧐🪶
With receipts & respect.
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