What is an Experienced Public School Superintendent Worth?
Understanding the True Value of Fairfax County’s Superintendent
It’s not uncommon to hear complaints about how much public school superintendents make per year, especially by anti-public school commentators. They like to compare Superintendent salaries to those of the president of the United States or state governor, as if those are comparable jobs since there are independent administrative departments tasked with the work.
The field of public education has never been as lucrative as politics. For example, Forbes reported that President Trump managed to increase his net worth by $3 billion in one year (from 2024-25) and Governor Youngkin’s net worth was approximately 470 million in 2024. Interestingly, both of these obscenely wealthy men rejected increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which would translate to a salary of about $31,200 per year. Oddly, the Project 2025 Mean Girls never complain about their obscene level of wealth.
Being a Superintendent is more like being the CEO of a company with tens of thousands of employees and with hundreds of thousands of stakeholders (e.g., minor children, their families, and other community members) who require support and education, all while they ensure that the school district complies with layers of local, state, and federal regulations. However, CEOs of small companies often make millions of dollars and no one complains, while Superintendents of public school systems always get dumped on, as if they are supposed to supervise a district’s schools out of the goodness of their hearts.
For example, Dominion Energy has approximately 15,200 employees, over 4 million customers, and its CEO Robert M. Blue has a compensation package of more than $16 million. In contrast, Superintendent Reid, Superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), has over 25,000 employees (majority of which are school-based), serves approximately 177,000 students and their families, along with tens of thousands of other community members, but her current contracted salary through 2030 is $469,936. When one considers that Fairfax County not only educates almost 180,000 students per day and employs about 25,000 Virginians a day, and is targeted for lawsuits and harassment by many extremists and Project 2025 groups, and seems to have caught the eye of the Trump Administration’s Departments of Education and Justice, her salary seems more than justified, especially in comparison to a CEO’s $16 million salary.
Rarely do these anti-public education commentators, recently referred to as "Project 2025 Mean Girls--see their recent "Burn Book" to the right--compare a superintendent’s salary to other superintendents of comparably-sized school districts. Nevertheless, they drone on about the expense of a competent district Superintendent, as if one could find one willing and able to do the job for less, especially in the last six years post-COVID, during the never-ending culture war on public education, teachers, and schools. It won’t surprise anyone that School Superintendents have a high turnover rate.
In Fairfax County, this has been a nonstop complaint by Project 2025 paid propagandists: “Superintendent Michelle Reid’s salary is too high!” This blog will challenge that irritating refrain, by providing real data about superintendent salaries across the country, in the largest school districts, and in the region. Of course, Project 2025 Mean Girls will continue with their irritatingly political complaint, because it plays well to their base, but now, you will be armed with data to refute it, especially when these same Project 2025 Propaganda Mean Girls were silent when:
Governor Youngkin’s Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) Superintendent Lisa Coons resigned from Younkin’s Administration after failing to perform by missing “several deadlines for reports to the state legislature and failed to publish teaching materials for the new history and social science standards.”
Later, it was revealed that taxpayers paid over $100,000 in severance payments to Coons after her resignation. The Virginia Coalition for Open Government also found that her “department had violated state procurement laws, failed to publish teaching materials for the new history standards that the department promised to teachers last year, and hemorrhaged longtime staffers since Coons’ arrival two years ago.”
Youngkin was 25 people over the legal staffing limit, especially when he was in violation of the “checks and balances in our system of government” as noted by Senator Surovell. How much did that cost the taxpayers?
Be careful, haters of Northern Virginia public schools, you may even learn something valuable by reading this blog because it will inform you about the Superintendent’s job, what influences a Superintendent’s salary (hint: location!), nationwide and regional comparables, and more.
The Superintendent’s Job Description in a Nutshell
The best way to describe what it takes to be a good Superintendent is:
“Running a school district takes more than educational expertise. It requires financial acumen, political skill and an ability to manage thousands of employees across a sprawling organization. Superintendent roles sit at the top of that structure, and compensation reflects the weight of the responsibility.” Emporia State University
A Superintendent’s job is somewhat at conflict: they need to multitask while being focused, be multidisciplinary but know minute details about education and their district, be diplomatic but unmovable, and be a manager of thousands while answering to the district’s school board. At the same time, they need to ensure the best educational opportunities are available for students while ensuring testing performance targets are met even though those targets may be out of a district’s control. Meanwhile, they must be responsive to all stakeholders–some of whom have opposing interests–including students (and their families), staff, and school board to the local supervisors, state and federal department of education, and a myriad of groups who like to use public schools as a political football.
It’s a job that begins before sunrise and ends at midnight many nights. For example, this author, who is an active parent and volunteer, sees Superintendent Reid at morning, daytime, late night, and weekend events. No matter how many meetings and hours she has been running from school to school, she has always appeared alert, professional, and ready to do her job no matter what that job may be at that moment.
Her job performance displays this, as well. Specifically, in Fairfax County, the high level job requirements of a Superintendent are:
Student-First Philosophy: Prioritizing academic success, equity, and closing the achievement and opportunity gap for all students.
Strategic Planning: Developing and implementing long-term goals, such as the FCPS Strategic Plan, while managing division resources and a large budget.
Instructional Leadership: Ensuring consistent quality in core programs, advanced academics, and special education services across roughly 200 schools.
Communication and Engagement: Acting as the primary face of the district, building transparent relationships with families, staff, local government, and community stakeholders while “listening and learning continuously.”
Operations and Accountability: Overseeing central departments (including academics, finance, human resources, and safety) and supervising regional assistant superintendents.
Other: Managing “complex circumstances through problem solving/decision-making.”
Superintendent Salary: Size and Location Matters
A 2025-26 study by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) surveyed 1,951 superintendents across 49 states to find that superintendent salary “scales sharply with the size of the district.” Thus, the larger the district, the higher the superintendent salary which means that the salary is correlated with student enrollment. So, to a certain extent, a superintendent’s salary is based on the number of students, which means one could even compare superintendents based on their cost per student (i.e., salary/# enrolled students), as 4 Public Education does below.
For example, the study found that in a district with fewer than 300 students, a Superintendent made a median salary of $117,500, versus for a district with 25,000 to 49,999 students, the median Superintendent salary was more than twice that at about $295,000.
Essentially, the study found that district size was the strongest predictor of compensation, followed by increases based on community type: whether rural or suburban/urban. In other words, suburban and urban community superintendents earned significantly more (nearly 50% more!) than their rural counterparts due to district size and cost-of-living.
Interestingly, this study didn’t cover larger districts, but that is because less than 2% of schools have more than 25,000 students and those districts account for over 34% of public school students (per 2021-22 data). Larger school districts are covered next.
Largest School District Salaries
Per 2021 National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) Data, there are 83 districts with more than 50,000 students. Fairfax County ranked 12th on that list, above Hawaii and below Gwinnett County, Georgia. It should be noted that Niche currently ranks Fairfax County as the 10th largest school district, above Houston Independent, so lists may rank district size differently.
The eleventh largest district, Gwinnett County School District, recently conducted a Superintendent search hoping to “unify and inspire” its 179,000 students and 24,000 employees. The listed salary range was $325,00 to $375,000, despite the former superintendent, Calvin Watts, salaried at $475,000 plus expenses, according to state records, at his dismissal in January 2025 (note: per records, it cost close to $675,000 for the school system to buy out his contract). After an extensive (and expensive) search, Gwinnett County named a new Superintendent: Dr. Alexandria Estrella, who has 26 years of education experience. Her base salary was reported to be $400,000 per year in Georgia’s largest school district, with a buyout clause of up to a year’s salary.
In Hawaii, the thirteenth largest district, Superintendent Hayashi leads the only statewide public school district in the nation which serves 164,000 students across 296 campuses on seven islands, with over 40,000 employees, and a budget of $2.8 billion. He recently received an 18% raise to $294,674 at the beginning of his 4-year contract.
It is important to note that these are two data points among hundreds for larger school districts, and they do not include additional compensation, such as those for Superintendent Alberto Carvalho of Los Angeles Unified School District (who resigned in June 2026) whose base salary was about $440,000, but also received an annual retirement contribution ($50,000), a life insurance policy, and transportation and security paid for by the school district.
Some much smaller districts, like those in the state of Washington, have higher than average salaries for district superintendents, even for very small districts where 26 school district superintendents earn more than $400,000 per year, possibly due to high cost-of-living.
In Texas, there are ten district Superintendents who earned more than Dr. Reid in 2025-26, but only one of those Superintendents oversaw a district as large as FCPS: Mike Miles of Houston ISD. Miles reportedly earned $462,000 last year and oversaw an enrollment of 168,812 students. The other nine Superintendents oversaw school districts that were between 6-65% of the size of FCPS. See chart below of Highest Paid Texas Superintendents.
Highest Paid Texas Superintendents
Superintendent | District | Total Pay | Enrollment | Pay/Student |
Dr. Gayle Stinson | Birdville ISD | $551,576.00 | 22,123 | $25 |
Dr. Douglas Killian | Cypress-Fairbanks ISD | $520,231.00 | 114,697 | $5 |
Dr. Greg Poole | Barbers Hill ISD | $513,601.00 | 8,088 | $64 |
Dr. Jenny McGown | Klein ISD | $508,554.00 | 51,236 | $10 |
Dr. King Davis | Killeen ISD | $508,057.00 | 41,391 | $12 |
Dr. Curtis Null | Lake Travis ISD | $483,116.00 | 10,771 | $45 |
Dr. K. Gregorski | Katy ISD | $474,440.00 | 95,925 | $5 |
Dr. Ricardo Lopez | Garland ISD | $467,047.00 | 49,151 | $10 |
Mike Miles | Houston ISD | $462,000.00 | 168,812 | $3 |
Dr. David Vinson | Conroe ISD | $454,589.00 | 72,757 | $6 |
Average | $494,321.10 | 63,495 | $18 | |
Median | $495,586.50 | 50,194 | $10 |
It is clear that there is not a direct correlation between a Superintendent's salary and enrollment when comparing salaries among districts. Additionally, unless expressly written into a contract, a Superintendent’s salary would not drop if enrollment dropped, particularly since there is an economy of scale in running a school district. In other words, minor drops in enrollment due to COVID (in 2021) or due to birth rate changes (since 2007) would not be significant enough to reduce overall costs to run one of the largest school districts in the nation.
Ultimately, it is hard to compare compensation packages of superintendents, even across the largest districts, due to unknown compensation factors and unknown job expectations across the districts. They may be helpful data points, but they should be used in combination with regional comparisons, as well.
Northern Virginia Comparison
As indicated above, studies have shown that the size and location (i.e., rural versus urban/suburban) of a school district matter the most to determine a superintendent's salary. As best as this author could, she gathered salaries for Northern Virginia District Superintendents (using 2025 as a baseline, where possible) and associated enrollment in Northern Virginia school districts below. The table below shows how there are vast differences in superintendent salaries and enrollment across Northern Virginia school districts, so 4PE evaluated superintendent salaries against their total 2026 enrollment (i.e., divided superintendent salary by total enrolled students) to show the range of “value” for each superintendent based on enrollment alone.
This table shows that the cost per student based on the superintendent’s salary ranges greatly from $2 in the largest district (Fairfax County) to $116 in the smallest district (Falls Church City). Of course there are other compensatory benefits for all of these Superintendents, but likely those benefits come out in the wash and would be fairly equal.
Northern Virginian Superintendents
School District | Total 2026 Enrollment | Salary (2025) | Salary per Student |
Alexandria City | 16,302 | $265,000* | $16 |
Arlington City | 27,670 | 283,707** | $10 |
Fairfax County | 177,249 | $424,146 | $2 |
Falls Church City | 2,675 | $310,000*** | $116 |
Loudoun County | 80,410 | $425,334 | $5 |
Prince William County | 89,662 | $414,324 | $5 |
*departing **2023 ** *estimated
As one can see in the chart above there is a wide range of salaries for Northern Virginia Superintendents that seem somewhat unrelated to the size of student enrollment. It is possible that larger districts achieve a high economy of scale for superintendent cost per student versus the smaller districts. In fact the three largest districts (Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William) average about $4/pupil for the Superintendent’s salary versus the smallest three districts (Alexandria, Arlington, and Falls Church City) which average about $48/pupil for the Superintendent’s salary. However, in these smaller districts there may be other factors that lend to higher salaries, including the high cost of housing and comparable salaries.
Both Loudoun and Prince William have had active and powerful extremist groups in the form of Moms for Liberty, Fight for Schools, Parents Against Critical Theory, Army of Parents, etc. which might add a form of “hazard pay” to the superintendent salaries, particularly with the number of political lawsuits against the districts and “screamers” at school board meetings. Fairfax County also would fall into this group, particularly since the groups and bad actors in Loudoun and Prince William are involved in lawsuits and actions against FCPS.
One should note that Dr. Reid is the “best value” Superintendent if one looks at her base salary which comes to the rate of $2/pupil. Considering her school district is about twice the size of either Prince William or Loudoun counties, one would think that her salary would be much higher than Loudoun or Prince William. There is evidence that women are paid less than men in the education profession, which likely leads to this disparity.
In truth, a Superintendent’s contracted wage range is often determined before they are even hired, and annual incremental increases are also part of that contract. Thus, salaries are not negotiable after the fact unless that is part of the terms. Typically, trying to break a contract could be more costly than just paying out the contract. For example, as mentioned above Youngkin agreed for taxpayers to pay over $100,000 severance to former VDOE Superintendent Coons after she resigned. One can be sure that anyone, including a Project 2025 Mean Girl, would sue if their contract was broken.
Value your Superintendent if they are Supporting Schools
Like Liam Neeson’s character in Taken, public school superintendents have “a very particular set of skills, skills" that they have acquired over a long career in order to serve a school district community.
Their job begins before school begins and ends when the school board meeting ends late at night. Their goal is to educate students, pay staff, and repair crumbling buildings with too little money after too much delayed maintenance, while also managing conflict among multiple stakeholders, which can generate ill will. And unlike Mr. Neeson, they need to do all of their work collaboratively with extreme tact and diplomacy as an externally facing civic leader who needs to bridge informational, political, and policy divisions.
For sure, many Superintendents are not up to the task of managing an entire school district, especially if they do not have the staff, resources, skills, education, or temperament. One would be hard-pressed to say that about Fairfax County’s Superintendent Dr. Michelle Reid. Even though this author may not agree with all of Dr. Reid's decisions, it is easy to see that she is one of the best Superintendents of a large district in this commonwealth and country. Readers may not know that this was a hard won opinion, since this author spoke out against the appointment of Dr. Reid in 2022. Over the years, Dr. Reid has earned trust and shown herself to be adept at handling complex problems by being committed to students, families, staff, equity, opportunity, and academic excellence.
In some ways, complaints about Superintendents’ salaries may be deeply rooted in sexism. Superintendents are the highest step in a female-dominated job sector, one that is historically underpaid and overworked. Just like the average public school educator, Superintendents need to be the most educated and skilled to get the job, yet they will never earn incomes commensurate with their experience and education, as they would in other professional fields like law, finance, or private consulting. They will never make millions like any other CEO. Since the public education profession is inextricably linked to “women’s work,” which has been historically devalued by society, even those at the top of the profession are underpaid according to their experience, education, hours, and accomplishments. Interestingly, there are still gender disparities in pay among Superintendents and educators.
However, in the case of the paid propagandists, their complaints are clearly political. If it was really about the cost to taxpayers then the Project 2025 Mean Girls would have:
Highlighted excessive costs by Youngkin's VDOE blunders noted above.
Done a detailed analysis of Superintendent salaries like this author has.
Reviewed the average cost of living in Fairfax County, which Salary.com reports is 43% higher than the country.
Looked at census data for Fairfax County to review median income.
Analyzed impact of local job market for people with comparable experience and education.
However, they did none of this. To this author, the Project 2025 attacks on FCPS salaries, especially the Superintendent’s salary, seem to expose their political aims which include undermining civil rights of students, staff, and families; politicizing school curricula; privatizing public schools; and destroying public schools as we know them.
Their hyper-focus on Superintendent Reid is likely, in part, because they keep on losing to her in the courts and in the court of public opinion. So maybe, these attacks on her salary are really because they are afraid of her, her staff, and the school board who have defeated Project 2025 and their anti-student, anti-staff, anti-public education at every level so far?
This author has heard complaints from staff and families about many local Superintendents, and this author has had her own concerns at times. However, it is doubtful that any one of us would be willing to do the job of Superintendent in a Northern Virginia school district no matter how much we were paid. Much less would we be up to the task.
Feel free to offer constructive criticism where it is warranted, and remember to also offer compliments because even adults need to know what they are doing right. How can a school district, Superintendent, educator, or other staff member know to keep on doing something great unless you tell them it’s great?
In fact, this author has a personal rule regarding complaints: they should be balanced with compliments. It is too easy to notice the bad and ignore the good, so before leaving any 1-star reviews, this author needs to leave at least one or two 4- or 5-star reviews. Because if all you are doing is complaining, then you aren’t making the world a better place for you or anyone–you are just being a pain in the neck.
And if all you have is complaints (looking at your Project 2025 Propagandists), then maybe it’s not about the Superintendent’s salary. Maybe it’s about you and your political agenda.
Actually, it’s definitely you.
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