The Henry County Board of Education wants to keep Superintendent Mary Elizabeth Davis around for a while.
After multiple board members at the March meeting praised her first 16 months of service and the board gave the official go-ahead to renegotiate her contract, details of the new deal were released to the Times last week.
She began her tenure in November of 2017 with a three-year contract at a salary of $213,000 per year. The new agreement, which took effect March 12, is also for three years but at $300,000 per year. That is the second-highest salary among public employees in Henry County.
It is also comparable with other nearby jurisdictions. Clayton County superintendent Morcease Bailey and DeKalb County superintendent R. Stephen Green were hired in 2017 and 2015, respectively, at the same pay rate.
If she fulfills this contract, Davis will have been on the job longer than each of her three immediate predecessors. After Jack Parish served eight years in the post, he was followed by Michael Surma, Ethan Hidreth and Rodney Bowler — each of whom held the office less than four years and then retired.
In other school board news, a $1,424,388.23 expenditure for data center equipment and infrastructure was approved at the April 8 regular meeting. The purchase from Light Networks, LLC is intended to “refresh hardware in the data center to ensure reliability and support increased demand,” according to a staff report. Funding comes from the district’s SPLOST account.
Also approved was renewal of the annual Ricoh copier lease agreement at a cost of $1,161,878 from the general fund. There are approximately 200 copiers throughout the district in all of the schools and the central office.
An update on the process for amending the district’s code of conduct included a timeline that leads to expected board action in June. The issue is being reviewed by district attorneys now and a draft of the new code is expected at the May 13 board meeting, with public review set to take place May 14-June 9, as the next regular board meeting is June 10.
A total of 99 comments were reportedly received from internal and external stakeholders, according to officials, and a review of that feedback led to a decision to cluster the comments under the following headings: code of conduct, dress code, electronics, general comments, grading, and textbooks. A tentative budget for the 2019-2020 school year is in the works, but officials are waiting on final projections from the state budget, which was not passed until the end of the legislative session. The state funds 60 percent of the school district’s budget. It was reported at the meeting that projected revenue adjustments show a positive change of $15.6 million for the district.
