A conversation that started with discussion of Matayoshi’s salary — which is quite low compared to what superintendents for other large school districts make — quickly turned to concern about discrepancies between wages earned by managers working in the field and those earned by officers working in other administrative capacities.

HR committee member Brian De Lima said he had heard that employees in field management positions, such as principals, make much more than other high-level administrators, including complex area superintendents and assistant superintendents. 

“In order to recruit the best and the brightest there needs to be pay equity,” De Lima said. 

Matayoshi explained that the varying pay structures stem largely from the fact that superintendent salaries had in 2006 been capped at 80 percent of the statewide superintendent’s salary, which was frozen at $150,000. (On average, superintendents for large urban school districts made about $239,000 in 2010, with 54 percent making more than $250,000 per year.)

Hawaii DOE superintendent salary figures, including that for Matayoshi, haven’t changed in seven years.

Meanwhile, salaries of field executives have been on the rise, increasing by about 15 percent, Matayoshi said, with some principals’ salaries even exceeding her own.

“We’ve had problems with recruitment in the past because we do like to have people with great experience out in the field … it’s difficult to ask someone to take broader responsibility and a pay cut,” she said. “We do have disparity caused by a solution, but ultimately the concern is that if we don’t start to address the inequities, we won’t be able to recruit into leadership positions in the department.”

Read past coverage of DOE salaries here.  

Hawaii Department of Education building. (Photo courtesy of Katherine Poythress.)

— Alia Wong