Principals received the lowest salary increases in several years in 1982-83, according to a report released last week by the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
Principals received salary increases this school year ranging from 5.4 percent for elementary-school principals to 7.6 percent for high-school principals in schools with 10,000 to 24,999 students, according to the report. The report was based on the maximum salaries paid to principals and assistant principals by 1,120 school systems that responded to a survey questionnaire.
Last year, principals earned pay increases ranging from 7.1 percent to 9.3 percent; the year before the figures were 9.2 percent and 12 percent, according to the survey.
High-school principals in the districts of 10,000 to 24,999 students also had the highest maximum salaries--an average of $42,554.
Elementary-school principals in districts with more than 25,000 students had the lowest maximum salary--$37,450.
Scott Thomson, executive director of the nassp, said 10 percent of all principals have left the profession in each of the last few years--only one-quarter of those leaving, he said, were retiring.
The data for the report, which has been published in each of the past nine years, came from a national survey of public-school personnel salaries conducted last December by the Education Research Service, a research group sponsored by a number of education associations. The entire report is available to non- ersmembers for $26. Each member receives one copy free, and must pay $13 for eachadditional copy.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will conduct a nationwide survey this month of the use of computers, television, radio, and other audio media in elementary and secondary schools.
A cpb spokesman said questionnaires will be sent to 675 of the nation’s approximately 15,600 public-school districts. The final results of the survey will be available in October.
The cpb is working with the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania on the project, which is modeled after a 1977 study of the use of television in the schools.
Pennsylvania State University researchers have developed a telephone “hotline” for students who return to an empty home after school and need advice on personal or household problems in their parents’ absence.
“Phonefriend” operates 15 hours each week in the Pittsburgh area. The hotline is used primarily by about 4,500 children aged 4 to 16 years.
Officials with the program say there are as many as four million children nationwide who are responsible for taking care of themselves in the afternoons.
The organization usually helps the children with everyday problems, such as suspicious noises, and many children call because they are lonely, officials said. But the telephone operators have also received requests for help in dealing with more serious matters, such as rape or pregnancy.
Community volunteers--including homemakers, social-work students, and others--operate the phone lines.
The project has been endorsed by the police, several emergency organizations, and the American Association of University Women.
The Norfolk, Va., school board voted last week to abandon its 12-year-old mandatory student-transportation plan and to ask a federal district court to allow elementary-school students in the district to attend their neighborhood schools.
That vote, according to civil-rights advocates, made the 35,000-student district the first in the nation to decide to cast off a mandatory busing plan after successfully desegregating its schools.
The school district was ordered by a federal district court to begin busing students for desegregation purposes in 1970. In 1975, the court declared the system unitary and closed the lawsuit, Beckett v. Norfolk School Board, after 18 years of litigation.
The desegregation plan, however, has remained in effect since then. According to recent school statistics, about 20,000 of the district’s 35,000 students continue to be bused.
Today, approximately 60 percent of Norfolk’s students are black, compared to a 60-percent white enrollment in 1970 when busing began, according to Sam W. Ray, the district’s deputy superintendent.
The board, according to Mr. Ray, plans to ask the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to review the proposed neighborhood-school plan, which would leave 10 of the city’s 36 elementary schools almost entirely black and another 18 schools either 70-percent white or 70-percent minority. The plan envisions the continued busing of junior- and senior-high-school students.
