Elected Regional Superintendent of Schools in November, Joe Williams has announced he does not intend to take office on July 1st.
The Northwest Herald’s Kevin Craver broke the story that the current and incoming McHenry County Regional Superintendent of Schools are resigning, apparently because their salaries, hence, their pension base will probably be cut soon.
Current Supt. Gene Goeglein gets paid $100,762 per year. His term expires at the end of June.
Assistant Supt. Joe Williams won the right to take his place in last fall’s election. He gets paid $90,686 for being second in charge.
If the salary next year is cut 12%, as Craver reports, then Williams earnings would be in the neighborhood of $88,000 next year–less than he is making now.
Illinois Statehouse News reporter Benjamin Yount tells a bit of the background from the Springfield point of view:
Lawmakers ignore Quinn, add millions back to budget
May 11, 2011
By Benjamin Yount Illinois Statehouse News
SPRINGFIELD — What Gov. Pat Quinn took away, the Illinois Legislature is giving back.
Lawmakers restored millions of dollars in their final drafts of the education and human services budgets that the governor had cut from the 2012 spending plan.
But they also trimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the budget that Quinn presented earlier this year.
Quinn made headlines and raised eyebrows in February when he suggested that the state stop paying for regional school superintendents, which totaled $12.6 million this year. The governor zeroed out that portion of the budget for next year, but lawmakers returned $11.3 million in their draft.
State Rep. Will Davis, D-Homewood, who helped craft the education budget, said lawmakers feared that doing away with regional superintendents would cost the state more than the governor’s cut would save.
“When we talked to the State Board of Education, they were fearful that if the regional superintendents go away that they would then have the responsibility to provide all of those services. So they were panicked, feeling there was no way they could provide those services,” said Davis. “So there was actually some disconnect between the governor’s office and the State Board of Education.”
The $11.3 million includes salaries and nearly $2 million in grant money. Rock Island Regional Superintendent Jim Widdop said the grants alone used to be $12 million, but any funding is better than nothing.