Jackson Jambalaya

As an aside, I took note of those board members copied on distribution. I'm fairly astute and try to keep up, but I have never heard of a single one of these people.

Oh, sorry. I do see the name of the former mayor of Clinton.

That is it leave on your own or jail time.

If you can not follow the law sure should not be running a huge state agency spending public money.

Oh my my. That poor DC liberal. She must have thought she was still in....Maryland or DC or wherever she came from. Bet she wishes she was back there. Las Vegas odds says she resigns in the next 72 hours. If she had not pulled the Obama Trany stuff they might have forgiven her for the salary fiasco - not now no way no how. She's done.

The current state elected officials and good old boy network of school administrators will not be happy until a good old boy gets the job of the current state super tenement. Then all of the recent improvements and qualified MDE personnel can be shelved in favor of how it use to be- dumb, happy and satisfied to be last.

The real question is how did the state auditor not catch this sooner. Should there not be controls in place for authorization of salaries in excess of the governor's? Something that triggers an automatic review? The state surely can't be hiring that many high earners every year.

Board member Bill Jones is a lawyer, former legislator (Democrat appointed by our last Governor ?/!)

I am guessing Bill knew this was in violation of law, I wonder how he voted on this item.

At least one of the members is a real teacher who is in the classroom every day. Bet she doesn't make a fourth of what they are paying that person.

At least one of the members is a real teacher who is in the classroom every day. Bet she doesn't make a fourth of what they are paying that person.

MDE Administration. State Board of Education. MDE HR Director. Lawyers from the Attorney General's Office on staff at MDE. A lawyer and former legislator on the SBE. And Dr. Porter still got his $195,000.

Dang, those checks and balances!!

Any idea which num-nut legislator that Feel is going to appoint as DFA director? I assume qualifications will include IQ of a mid-level 7th grader like our new Tax Commissioner.

The lackey who filed the airport bill, of course.

Oh, wow. Huge, huge story. Huge.

Looks like it is time for a change of board members at the State Board of Education. The existing group merely rubber-stamps items brought forth.

6:19 suggests:

"Then all of the recent improvements and qualified MDE personnel can be shelved..."

Please list one or two 'recent improvements' and the personnel of whom you speak.

The current 'woman in charge' has turned the place into her personal employment office and rubber stamper of all things liberal. The combination of her support for both Common Core and The Obama Pee Policy alone should be sufficient to get her an Amtrak ticket outa here.

If she is allowed to rack up eight total years under the PERS system, her legacy lasts around here forever.

Doesn't approval have to go thru the state personnel board?

Post the salaries of all state agency employees and you will find much of the same! Nothing new, " we're from the Government and we're here to help you"! Yea right, themselves.

Probably exempt positions not subject to SPB regulations.

@11:27 - read the previous post about the exemption.

What is so hard for people to understand? There are people who are so much smarter then us that they deserve to be paid higher pay. We need these people to make the decisions that we are too dumb to make. After all they do know what we really need. People like that do not work for free. I would imagine they put in many hours making the decisions we are not equipped to make. Who are we to question anything they say?

12:10; It's not so much an 'exemption' as it is hundreds of positions that are simply excluded from SPB coverage. You can call it an exemption if you like and technically, it is an exemption. There are hundreds of positions in State government that aren't subject to SPB oversight and salary regulation. Nor do those incumbents answer to any sort of performance evaluation or review.

Agency heads can slide political favorites into these positions at a whim. Without oversight. Without review. Without approval. Without qualifications. Without jack-shit.

Haley was the master of all masters when it came to creating and populating exempt positions. His favorite was Hot-Lips-Hoolihan-Finch. She had a Steelcase desk on a tandem-axle trailer and would show up at some agency on a random Monday morning ready to work.

While I don't think anyone would say that a review/audit of employee compensation is all out unwarranted, one of the biggest challenges the state faces when trying to find the best talent to staff positions in these agencies is - in fact - the state personnel board. I won't say what work that I previously did for the MDE, but can say in full confidence that the staff at the MDE, the legislators I worked with while in the State, and district staff across the state would all agree that I was absolutely qualified to do the work that I did in the state. However, even with two Master's degrees and a PhD I would not have been qualified to fill a permanent employee position that I served in as a contract worker. So, even though I clearly had a unique skill set, of value to the State there would be no way for me to be on boarded without MDE having a variance in the hiring procedures.

I can't imagine that I am alone in believing that if I consistently surpass expectations in my job performance it will be reflected in compensation, but state employees (without legitimately applying for positions that require significantly more responsibility and different types of duties) are rarely given this incentive to do well. In other words, if there is absolutely no hope that being more productive and doing better work will lead to better compensation, where is the incentive to do better?

I would also push back on some of the comments about not requiring any kind of qualifications - although I fully acknowledge that there will always be cases that get through. While I'm not a part of any of the stuff in the news at the moment, I can tell you that my credentials were vetted multiple times before I was brought on. In addition to the normal processes that are in place, I spent a day interviewing with several teams throughout the building that I would be working with to see how well I would fit in and how well I would respond to the needs of Mississippians. Prior to that my credentials were vetted multiple times, by several agencies. And after all of those processes, the board still had the opportunity to check my credentials and weigh in on whether or not I would be brought in to work with the MDE.

Again, I'm not going to say nothing bad has ever happened at the MDE nor will I say that there shouldn't be reviews and audits of compensation/salary for positions there. But I will say that the rules imposed by the State Personnel Board are partly to blame for a lot of the issues that everyone here has raised about the quality of the staff working in these agencies. There isn't much an agency can do when some of the screening/requirements that SPB mandates in job postings have absolutely nothing to do with the job/duties and force otherwise qualified candidates to be turned away.

The way it was explain to me is that a contract worker position is usually filled by a retiring person who still wants to work. This way the worker can quit working for the state, still collect all of the bennies, and return to work the next day with a very large raise. The position usually has no benefits but the worker still has benefits provided by the state from their retirements. Since the state pays no benefits and it is contract work it the money paid to the employee does not have to be carried like a normal state employee. There is no limit on the amount paid.
Just another way for some special people to suck up the tax payers dime without it showing up as an employee.

6:40; I'm glad you managed to get on-boarded. Before you were on-boarded what was your position with a school system?

Since you've gone to great lengths to assure us that you're qualified, well respected and highly valued, will you also assure us that upwards of 70% of the people in the building were NOT retreads who either could not make it in the education trenches, those whose licenses had been recently reinstated after revocation or those who had managed to get themselves either terminated or slid off to the side and forgotten in a school district? The only alternative to those three possibilities is a contract position into which retired or failed educators are on-boarded.

You managed to get yourself on-boarded into a non-state-service or non-status SPB PIN position which is basically exempt from oversight and control by SPB.

In the midst of wallowing around in your value and superior qualifications, you seem to know very little, if anything, about the process of writing job descriptions and tailoring requirements to the duties of jobs.

11:29 you can't retire one day and return the next as a contract employee. There is at least a 90 day window and some state institutions are now requiring 180.

And, while laws should be followed it seems so far that Dr. Porter is worth his salary. He has been charged with dragging MDE into the 21st century. Skilled data and tech people don't come cheap, and in addition to that he will be overseeing the new improvement districts. If he can do all of that well he will be worth every penny. Why is it that it is OK for people in other professions who are well educated and have decades of experience to make good salaries, yet those in education aren't supposed to? The education reps in private industry that are selling things to districts are certainly making heavy duty salaries and those companies have been siphoning off many of the best people in the public sector because the salaries are better, and you aren't constantly being accused of being lazy and sucking off the public tit.

10:02 - You are correct in your opening several sentences. However, MDE is heavily laden with contract workers who got into the double-dip-system before this rule was adopted. Why do you think the rule was put in place in the first place?

Since you brought it up, loading up the place with 'skilled data and tech' people is precisely the problem. We needed five hundred people to stamp letters on the foreheads of children and another 500 to count those letters and sort them into columns.

I attended school before the Education Bureaucracy Complex was created. I did fine and learned. We have way too much bureaucracy in education today. Past Superintendents are on the "consulting" payroll and are double dipping. Just eliminate all this, pay teachers more and buy them adequate supplies.

10:02, you can try to get people to believe it but I have a friend who did retire one day and return the next day as a contract worker for an additional $40,000 a year. Of course they will try to say it can't be done but those are the ones who are trying to cover it up or those who did not get the contract worker job. Maybe you need to kiss a little more butt or try to hide it a little better.

Doesn't the state superintendent make around $300k/yr or something like that? If they give me the job I will screw it up just as bad but for 1/2 the cost! There! Easy way to save the state some $$$

"And, while laws should be followed it seems so far that Dr. Porter is worth his salary. He has been charged with dragging MDE into the 21st century. Skilled data and tech people don't come cheap, "

Uh, IBM just announced layoffs of 14,000 Americans (while importing H1B visa hires).

I bet that "data and tech" ability is getting more affordable every day in this country :-(

Memory of the day when the so called cleansing started here is the link to Ch 16 news.

http://www.wapt.com/news/mde-fires-dozens-of-longtime-employees/27889674

As far as Anonymous May 23, 2016 12:46 comments, Porter has no university degree in Technology and his history is not appealing. In my view he does not deserve a penny of my tax dollars.