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USD Dean, Sioux Valley Supt. Make $8000 Conducting Yankton School Job Search

A certain frequent flyer in the comment section likes to flog the meme of "fat-cat administrators" and "whining educrats" hogging our education budgets and keeping money from teachers. With some trepidation, I hand him another whip.

Dr. Rick Melmer left the South Dakota Department of Education to work as dean of education at USD. According to the state salary database, that dropped Dr. Melmer's pay 5.6%, from $161,116.60 to $152,000. His friend Tom Oster only makes $97,000 at his day job as superintendent of Sioux Valley School District. To keep themselves out of poverty, they moonlight as "consultants."

How's business at Dakota Educational Consulting? Well, they just got the Yankton school board to pay them $8,000 to search for their next superintendent. Their big selling points are price...

[Melmer] added that he is not aware of other firms with which the board negotiated to handle the search, but cost could have been a reason why his group was chosen.

...their taxpayer-funded connections...

“Tom (Oster) and I are connected throughout South Dakota and the region, and now, a lot of folks in education as well,” Melmer said. “We have both been with the Department of Education and have been superintendents in the state, which allowed us to make connections in education.”

...and an eager desire to excuse board members from doing the job for which they are elected:

“All of the board members have jobs or lives outside of their work at the board, many of them probably don’t have the time to make contacts, call recruits, answer questions about the application process because they’re already busy in their daily lives,” [Melmer] said. “Many of the members on the board probably don’t have the connections Tom (Oster) and I have because board members, generally, live in the private sector. Oster and I are well networked in the state and region” [Andrew Atwal, "Firm Focused on Recruitment in Search for YSD Superintendent," Yankton Press & Dakotan, 2013.02.25].

I think Melmer is selling a bit too hard here. Yankton is a good-sized school district. Any superintendents in the region looking to change jobs would likely hear the Yankton opening ping on their radar without a shout from über-networked Melmer and Oster. The press surrounding long-time superintendent Joseph Gertsema's retirement only enhances the visibility of that position. $8,000 seems a pretty big investment to only marginally increase the applicant pool.

The Yankton board could make this job search a do-it-yourself project at significant savings. At $40 per meeting, Yankton could pay its five school board members to sit through five extra meetings to go through résumés,* another five meetings to interview the best applicants, keep the money and all of the decision-making local, and still save $6,000.

Far be it from me to complain about educators doing side jobs to balance their home budgets. But given the Yankton school district's financial distress, spending $8,000 on Melmer and Oster to advertise a job that advertises itself and vet applicants for a too-busy board doesn't send the most positive message about the board's oversight of the public's money.

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*Perhaps Melmer and Oster can hire me as their spelling consultant. Check your brief on the Yankton position, guys. If you're going to be fancy and put French accent marks on résumé, you need two accent marks, one over each e, not an apostrophe at the end of the word.

4 Comments

  1. Rorschach 2013.02.26

    So nobody applies for these well paid jobs without the district paying a recruiter $8,000, huh? Maybe in Dick Cheney style, Mr. Oster will nominate ... himself.

  2. caheidelberger Post author | 2013.02.26

    I can't imagine he'd go that far, R. That might harm the ability of the consulting firm to draw other clients.

  3. grudznick 2013.02.26

    That fatcat administrator from Sturgis is raking in the extra money too. Do not forget him. He pulls the strings.

  4. JoeBoo 2013.02.26

    I wouldn't blame Oster and Melmer though. They were getting called about every Superintendent position (as well as other jobs), on what they thought, they decided to make money doing it.

    I think its more that these school boards who are willing to pay them. There is some other things they do, such as training and interviews but, yes I agree that the school boards could save a fair amount of money by doing these themselves.

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