Teacher Signed for $45 Million!

By Janet Emig

After weeks of dramatic, often bitter, wrangling and bidding among the country's top three urban school districts, Amy Pomeroy, 38, an 11th-grade teacher of English at the inner-city McDonnell High School, signed on today with the Atlanta board of education to teach next year at a new school she herself will design and staff in South Atlanta.

Even in these days when the average public schoolteacher's salary now comes in at $1.4 million (the Preschool Teachers Association is understandably making the case that its current average salary of $800,000 does not adequately acknowledge preschool teachers' crucial influence on the very young), Ms. Pomeroy's contract for $45 million over three years is impressive, particularly since it is rumored that the Consortium of Textbook Publishers provided another $9 million...