Monday, June 18th 2018, 11:20 am
Education funding continues to be the top issue as we head into the primary election and Lt. Gov. Todd Lamb has been touting his new plan. In one of his ads he claims school administrators are taking money from classrooms by getting car allowances.
“Kids are using tattered text books. Teachers are buying school supplies out of their own pockets. While some administrators get car allowances,” Lamb said in the ad.
Are school administrators raking in money in car allowances? Yes. But there’s more to the story. In the most recent data we could find on administrator pay, 39 principals and 56 superintendents were given auto or travel allowances. And the range of that pay was wide. A principal in Keys, OK was as much as $7000 while another in Ponca City was only given $9. Overall the average auto allowance was just under $1500 a year.
Same goes for Superintendents. The least paid came in at $32 while the highest paid was in Tulsa where that superintendent was given more than $29,000 for his travel allowance. The average allowance for district heads came in at more than $5100.
Auto allowances aren’t uncommon in public jobs and the allowances generally represent a fraction of the overall district budgets, meaning it’s not likely the money is making a major impact on funds heading to the classroom.
But some administrators are getting car allowances, so we rate the Lt. Gov.’s statement, True.
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