How much does your superintendent get paid?

Tracie Cone / AP

Fresno County School Superintendent Larry Powell poses in his office, in Fresno, Calif. Powell is forgoing $800,000 in compensation over the next three years of his term. Until his term expires in 2015, Powell will run 325 schools and 35 school districts with 195,000 students, all for less than a starting California teacher earns. As he prepares for retirement, he wants to ensure that his pet projects survive California budget cuts.

School superintendent gives up $800,000 in pay 

'There's no reason for me to keep stockpiling money,' he says

8/28/2011 12:03:51 PM ET

 FRESNO, Calif.— Some people give back to 

their community. Then there's Fresno County 

School Superintendent Larry Powell, who's 

really giving back. As in $800,000 — what 

would have been his compensation for the 

next three years. 

Until his term expires in 2015, Powell will run 

325 schools and 35 school districts with 

195,000 students, all for less than a starting 

California teacher earns.

"How much do we need to keep 

accumulating?" asks Powell, 63. "There's no 

reason for me to keep stockpiling money."

Powell's generosity is more than just a gesture 

in a region with some of the nation's highest 

rates of unemployment. As he prepares for 

retirement, he wants to ensure that his pet 

projects survive California budget cuts. And 

the man who started his career as a high 

school civics teacher, who has made anti-

bullying his mission, hopes his act of 

generosity will help restore faith in the 

government he once taught students to 

respect.

"A part of me has chaffed at what they did in 

Bell," Powell said, recalling the corrupt 

Southern California city officials who secretly 

boosted their salaries by hundreds of 

thousands of dollars. "It's hard to believe that 

someone in the public trust would do that to 

the public. My wife and I asked ourselves 

'What can we do that might restore confidence 

in government?'"

Powell's answer? Ask his board to allow him to 

return $288,241 in salary and benefits for the 

next three and a half years of his term. He 

technically retired, then agreed to be hired 

back to work for $31,000 a year — $10,000 

less than a first-year teacher — and with no 

benefits.

"I thought it was so very generous on his part," 

said school board member Sally Tannenbaum. 

"We get to keep him, but at a much lower rate."

His move was so low-key, his manner so 

unassuming, that it took four days after the 

school board meeting for word of his act to 

get out to the community. There were no press 

releases or self-congratulatory pats on the 

back.

"Things like this are what America is all about," 

said friend Alan Autry, Fresno's former 

celebrity mayor who played Capt. Bubba 

Skinner on the TV series "In the Heat of The 

Night."

"America is as much about overcoming 

obstacles in difficult times as it is opulence," 

Autry said. "This reminds me of the great 

sacrifices made throughout our history, 

especially the Great Depression."

No one has been more surprised about the 

positive reaction than Powell, a lifelong 

educator who didn't realize that what he did 

was newsworthy. He chuckles at his desk 

when yet another e-mail arrives from a 

colleague blown away by his generosity. Two 

days after word got out he had received 200

messages on his Facebook page.

"When you make good choices, good things 

happen to you," said Powell, who tends to talk 

in the kind of uplifting phrases that also make 

him a sought-after motivational speaker.

He even sees as an asset his childhood 

contraction of polio, which left him with a limp 

and a brace, and now a lingering post-polio 

syndrome.

"It's the most spectacular thing that has 

happen to me in all my life," he said. "People 

stepped up to help me be successful."

Powell might credit others, but others say 

Powell's drive always has come from within. 

Despite the right leg brace and experimental 

operations to stop the growth of his healthy 

leg, he became a champion high school 

wrestler in Fresno and set a record for one of 

the most dreaded of all gym class drills — the 

20-foot rope climb, which he completed in 1.8 

seconds. Today he carries a six handicap in 

golf.

After moving into school administration he 

became deputy superintendent, and was 

appointed to his current job before running 

for the office in 2006.

The ordained Baptist minister, who serves on 

the board of a national anti-bullying group 

that sprang from the Columbine shootings, is 

so popular he even counts among his friends 

his contract bargaining nemesis, the former 

head of the employees' union.

"For a leader to step up to help the budget is 

phenomenal," said Mike Lepore. "It gives you 

hope. It gives you the feeling that everything is 

being done to try to make education work. It's 

Larry. It really is."

 Powell will still earn a six-figure retirement, 

especially hefty by the standards of 

California's farming heartland. But because his 

salary comes out of the district's discretionary 

budget, for the next three years he'll be able to 

steer the money he is giving up where he 

wants: to programs for kindergarten and 

preschool, the arts and a pet project that 

steers B and C students into college by 

teaching them how to take notes and develop 

strategy skills.

"Our goal has never been to have things," 

Powell said of himself and his wife, Dot. "We 

want to give back."