School's top pay outpaces growth

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CORRECTION

A report Sunday on the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics had two errors. The percentage growth of Chancellor Gerald Boarman's salary from 2004 until present has been 32 percent, from $185,028 to $245,000 today. The report should also have made clear that the figures showing a drop in African-American enrollment from more than 50 students to an average of 33 were for graduating classes, not all classes.

****** In June 2006, the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics' Board of Trustees approved $31,150 in raises for Chancellor Gerald Boarman for the upcoming fiscal year. The pay increases pushed Boarman's annual salary at the elite high school to $230,050 -- better than chancellors at six state universities in North Carolina.

Brock Winslow, a graduate of the school and former aide to Gov. Jim Hunt, was then the board's chairman. The next February, Boarman asked him to be the interim vice chancellor for institutional advancement, a job he won outright four months later. He is now making $105,000 annually.

Winslow said he had no idea that he would move to a six-figure school job when he helped increase Boarman's pay by 16 percent. But the boost in fortunes to both men fits a pattern of inside moves that has troubled critics and raised questions about the school's management costs.

In five years, the school's administrative costs grew nearly $1.1million, or 46 percent, records show. That's faster than the 36 percent overall growth in the school's budget, and slightly more than the growth in academic costs during that time.

The school has added 70 students during that period, and 24 teachers. But it has added only two administrators. Much of the increased administrative expense is in pay raises.

Boarman's salary alone has risen nearly 40 percent, from $175,728 in 2004 to $245,000 today. Most of the salary growth came in fiscal 2006-2007. Boarman said the big raises that fiscal year helped make up for no raises in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

A review of salaries shows that most administrators did not receive pay raises from 2002 through 2004, but many have received hefty pay increases since. Boarman's chief of staff, Mike Reidy, now makes $128,353, a 25 percent increase since 2004, while security director Harry Tucker's pay rose 37 percent from $57,000 to more than $78,000.

Those increases are greater than the 14 percent growth in the consumer price index over that period.

Critics say the growth in administrative costs is out of proportion for a school that enrolls roughly 670 students annually. They also say much of the money has been spent on an inner circle of administrators Boarman has hired in his nine years who are more interested in protecting his reputation than improving the school.

"What he's done to the school is criminal in my mind," said Carol O'Dell, a former faculty council chairwoman. Her teaching contract at the school was not renewed in 2005. She thinks she was let go because she regularly challenged Boarman.

O'Dell complained in writing to UNC administrators earlier this year about the administrative moves and costs.

Boarman and other school officials and faculty dismiss O'Dell as a malcontent with an ax to grind. But other former faculty, who say they left the school because they were troubled by Boarman's administrative moves, say O'Dell is raising valid issues.

"Eventually, I think [Boarman] formed an administration that was unified in carrying out his sense of the mission for the school -- or his construction of the academic mission of the school -- of which many of the faculty did not agree," said Lisa Nanney, a humanities instructor who left three years ago.

Among the disagreements: the move to a trimester calendar that offered students a wider variety of courses but, as many faculty contended, less instruction time on core requirements.

Boarman and his supporters say the criticisms are unfounded. He and they say he has hired quality people who have made the school better.

"Every one of those people not only have the qualifications, but they are far superior" to the job requirements, Boarman said.

A quarter of the school's 22 administrators have long-standing connections to Boarman or other school officials. Reidy and Tucker, for example, are among three administrators Boarman hired from the Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Maryland, where Boarman was a highly acclaimed principal. His communications director, Lauren Everhart, is a graduate of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The school's legal counsel, Natasha Nazareth-Phelps, is the daughter-in-law of the science and math school's former distance learning director. Its internal auditor, Katie Collini, is the daughter of the school's counseling dean, Gail Hudson.

In some cases, it's not just who was hired that has riled critics. It's how.

In 2003, Boarman created the school's first deputy executive administrator position, and hired Reidy, by eliminating a position formerly held by the school's legal counsel. (At the time, the counsel also split duties as personnel manager.) Four years later, he reinstated the legal counsel position. Nazareth-Phelps, a former special needs coordinator at the school, makes more than $90,000 annually in the job.

Boarman hired Darlene Haught to run the school's distance learning program despite a lack of experience in the field. She is a former business teacher and media technology coordinator from Eleanor Roosevelt. She has since become a recognized expert.

Winslow said he was concerned about a possible conflict in his own shift from the Board of Trustees to the science and math school's administration. He sent a letter to the State Ethics Commission for its advice, but did not receive a reply.

'Faith ... was crushed'

Boarman and his staff also said the rise in administrative costs is not out of line. Overall, administrative costs accounted for 16.5 percent of the total budget in the 2003 academic year; last year they accounted for 17.7 percent.

One way the school, which is free to students, has added revenues is by increasing enrollment. The UNC system provides money to schools at roughly $27,000 per student.

Last year, Patrick Bohan of Asheville was one of those students. He was assigned to a windowless room, narrower than a prison cell. Since Bohan was among the last admitted, he had no choice but to take it or leave, a school administrator told him and his parents. They returned home to Asheville that day, demoralized.

"When you send your kid away to a boarding school, you are turning over a lot of the parenting responsibilities to the adults in charge," said his mother, Judith Bohan. "And our faith in their decision-making was crushed."

Bohan was one of three students that fall put in rooms the state fire marshal later said were little more than janitor's closets -- and violated habitable space regulations.

Boarman said placing students into the tiny, windowless rooms was not a money grab. The rooms kept him from having to turn away more students. Most, he said, did not complain. He closed the rooms after the fire marshal's report.

This year, the school, like nearly all of state government, is taking a budget hit. The school could see as much as a $2million cut from last year's $19.5million budget.

UNC system President Erskine Bowles and Shirley Frye, the chairwoman of the school's Board of Trustees, have read O'Dell's complaint, but they did not find many of the issues raised to be troubling. Both give Boarman good marks.

They say he has hired highly competent people, and that the school has improved under his administration.

"I am very, very pleased with the progress we are making," Frye said.

Bowles said he views Boarman's tenure as more a case of seeing the cup as "half full" rather than "half empty." He said the student-to-faculty ratio has decreased, while the number of prestigious UNC-Chapel Hill Morehead-Cain scholars has risen.

School records show a mixed bag during Boarman's nine years at the helm. Mean and median SAT scores dipped below 1300 in 2002 before climbing back to the mid-1300s. The number and percentage of national merit semifinalists has declined, but the number of students with high scores in advanced placement tests has increased.

A more troubling number to Bowles is the drop in African-American students. The school routinely enrolled 50 or more black students before Boarman arrived. During his tenure, the school has averaged 33 black students, even as the total enrollment has grown by 110 students. Boarman said that the downward trend began before he took the job and is a national problem not just confined to the science and math school.

Bowles said he did not support the big pay increases Boarman received over fiscal 2006-2007, just before the school came under UNC control. The raises came under a multiyear contract that tied Boarman's salary to that of chancellors and other senior academic officers in the UNC system's smaller universities.

School officials noted that Boarman could have received an additional $11,000 raise under those terms during that fiscal year, but he declined it.

Bowles added that it is unlikely Boarman's pay will be increased in the near future. But Bowles said the administrative salaries are not out of line with the smallest UNC school, Elizabeth City State University.

O'Dell, the former faculty council chairwoman, said ECSU isn't a valid comparison. ECSU has more than 3,100 students, making it roughly five times the size of the science and math school.

News researchers DavidRaynor, LamaraWilliams andBrookeCain contributed tothisreport.