SC's Overpaid Educrats

As Rome burns, a bunch of fat cats are fiddling … enjoying the high life on growing piles of your hard-earned cash …

Several of South Carolina’s top “educrats” – i.e. non-teaching academic administrators – are drawing salaries more than four times as large as the $47,000 pulled in by the average Palmetto State public school teacher. And while there’s always plenty of money in the budget for these overpaid educrats to take taxpayer-funded vacations to the beach each summer (or build putting greens at their country clubs), teachers are constantly being forced to shell out their own money (or beg parents for their money) just to cover necessary school supplies.

Talk about misappropriating public resources … and misplacing priorities.

South Carolina’s already vast educrat bureaucracy has been expanding at a much faster clip than our state’s instructional budget – although in fairness both have seen stratospheric increases in recent years.

According to the the S.C. Budget and Control Board’s 2010 local government finance report, the portion of school districts’ budgets allocated to “instruction” has been creeping downwards. That’s a decades-long trend: The larger the K-12 budget in South Carolina, the less of it trickles down to the classroom. In 2010 it dropped all the way down to 43.4 percent. Meanwhile, nearly one third of all district revenue is devoted to what the B&CB calls “administration.”

More, this may be applicable to Maryland......