 [FoxNews] Virginia school superintendent earning $424K annually seeks personal bodyguard for $143K
Three years after leaving a sleepy Seattle suburb to run the school district in Fairfax County, Va., outside the nation’s capital, Michelle Reid earns more money than the U.S. president and gets a car allowance. Now she wants a taxpayer-funded personal bodyguard.
In new job posting No. 25212BR on BrassRing, an online recruitment platform, the Fairfax County public schools superintendent is advertising for an "Executive Protection Agent," based at the school district’s C-suite headquarters on Gatehouse Road in Falls Church, Va. The deadline for applicants is Aug. 5.
The new job would earn between $84,552 to $143,880, according to the FCPS pay scale for a "Unified Scale-Schedule B/Grade 006" job, paying far more than the starting salary of about $58,000 that a new teacher gets in the school district.
The new position comes at a time when public school officials, like Reid, are facing heightened accountability in the post-COVID era over curriculum, contracts, budgets and "diversity, equity and inclusion" policies. In 2021, the Biden administration targeted parents for charges of alleged "domestic terrorism" for raising concerns at school board meetings, but new email records have revealed the allegations were overblown and politicized.
Since taking over on July 1, 2022, Reid has come under fire for allegedly covering up scandals over improprieties in football recruiting, the withholding of National Merit awards from students and, most recently, defying Department of Education orders regarding Title IX protections for girls in sports and schools. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights just announced that Fairfax County Public Schools and four other northern Virginia school districts, including Loudoun County Public Schools, violated TItle IX protections by discriminating against students on the basis of sex.
Last November, the all-Democratic school board voted unanimously to renew Reid’s four-year contract and increased her annual salary to $424,146 from $380,000, more than the salary of New York City’s education chancellor. Board members also gave her a $12,000 annual car allowance. In contrast, the U.S. president earns $400,000 annually.
The hiring of a personal bodyguard for a school superintendent is unusual, say experts. The 12th-largest school district in the U.S., Fairfax County Public Schools includes 180,714 students in 223 schools, according to the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Services.
Meanwhile, the third-largest school district in the country, Chicago Public Schools, is about double the size as Fairfax County Public Schools, serving 322,809 students in 643 schools, according to the latest data, and its superintendent, also called its chief executive officer, doesn’t have a personal bodyguard.
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[FoxNews] Virginia school superintendent earning $424K annually seeks personal bodyguard for $143K