Manassas schools superintendent up for pay raise

The Manassas City School Board is set to vote to raise the salary of Superintendent Dr. Kevin Newman at its meeting on Tuesday.

The chief executive of the school system currently makes just over $200,000 a year. With the four-percent raise the School Board is considering for Newman, he’ll make about $209,000 per year, should the Board approve the raise.

The pay hike would be the second for Newman in as many years. Newman’s salary would have incased 7% since the 2019-2020 school year, according to school divisions spokeswoman Almetta Radford.

Newman came to the city in 2018 from Colonial Beach, taking over the superintendent’s role for Dr. Catherine Magouyrk, who came to work for the city in 2012.

Under Newman, the rate of chronic absenteeism has dropped, as just 13% of the school division’s more than 7,000 students were absent in the 2018-19 school year, compared with 16% the year before.

Students have also improved across the board when it comes to math and writing scores. However, the school division has seen declines in history and English assessments between the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school year, the last year that Virginia Department of Education data is available.

Residents will have the chance to speak during the meeting, which begins at 6 p.m., Tuesday, July 13, at City Hall located at 9027 Center Street in Manassas.

Also on the meeting agenda is an update from the School Board Policy Committee. The committee is reviewing multiple school division policies on how teachers evaluate themselves to how the School Board conducts business.

Two recent policies — ACC [the city school division’s newly proposed anti-racism policy] and DAB [newly proposed diversity, equity, and inclusion policy] — were updated on June 22.

The anti-racism policy states the school structural racism exists throughout the school division. The equity policy calls for hiring more teachers based on race to narrow and eliminate the achievement gap between high and low achieving students.

It also aims to create a new curriculum that incorporates “the contributions of diverse cultural groups” all over the course of the next three years.

The two policies were placed on the School Board’s June 22 consent agenda and approved along with several other, unrelated items, without comments from the majority of School Board members.

“Let these policies be a tool and a guide to stand against hast and discrimination and for educational access and fairness to all of our students,” School Board member Suzanne Seaberg said, following the approval of the consent agenda on June 22.