The Chicago Sun-Times released a school teacher and administrator data base this week that some might find interesting.

“Salary data includes base, summer-, after-school pay, benefits, vacation- or sick-day payouts, pre-retirement salary bumps. Average includes only full-time employees,” says the print on top of the search engine page.

Not specifically mention, but included is the pension payments that taxpayers pay for teachers and administrators. Teachers are supposed to pay 9.4%, but many in McHenry County and elsewhere don’t. Those who must pay the employee share of Social Security might be envious of this negotiated deal.

First I looked for average salaries for high school teachers in McHenry County’s districts. You see the results below:

Average compensation for McHenry County's High School District's teachers.

District 300 is classified by state policy-makers as a Kane County school district, so it cannot be combined with the other districts in McHenry County.

You might find it of interest to compare the salaries with the percentage of students who meet or exceed state standards.

Those high schools where students do the best are Crystal Lake and Richmond-Burton.

67.9% for Richmond-Burton High School District and 67.3% for District 155.  Both have a similar percentage of low income kids.  Richmond-Burton’s is a tad higher than Crystal Lake’s.

Compare the average compensation of Crystal Lake and Richmond-Burton and there is no contest.

Crystal Lake High School District 155 ranks 16th highest in the state with average compensation of $91,960.  $62,237 is Richmond-Burton’s average, almost $30,000 less.

District 155 is currently in secret negotiations with its IEA teachers’ union.

Even a cursory review of the salary data will show that teaching in a high school district is the way to make the most money.

As I have explained before, the legislator who wrote the Resource Equalizer State Aid to Education formula in the mid-1970’s was a high school teachers from a high school district.

State Rep. Gene Hoffman figured out how to make sure high school districts benefited most for the formula.  From the figures above, you’d have to agree he achieved his goal.

It doesn’t always work out as well as it does for Crystal Lake’s District 155 teachers. Marengo and Richmond-Burton are also high school districts. The others are unit district, meaning all 13 grades are governing by one school board.

I am sure some commentators will want to share their analyses of these statistics.

Not having figured out how to make charts, but wanting people to be able to search the data, I present below the raw data.  Get the headings from the image above.