How much money do Muscogee school employees earn? Search new database for their salaries

Mark Rice
·3 min read

The Muscogee County School District employs 96 people earning an annual salary of more than $100,000. That’s an increase of 13 six-figure earners in MCSD compared to last year.

This information comes from a searchable database of MCSD salaries compiled by the Ledger-Enquirer. The database comprises the annual salaries as of Nov. 9, 2023. School district salaries are public information and can be obtained through a request under the Georgia Open Records Act.

The database has salaries for 4,742 employees (5,187 last year) helping to educate Columbus public school students, including part-time workers. Among those employees, 4,336 (4,218 last year) are listed as receiving annual salaries. The others are paid daily or hourly.

The average of those annual salaries is $47,542.51 ($46,174.23 last year). According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the average (per capita) salary in Columbus (Muscogee County) is $30,980 ($28,523 last year), the average salary in Georgia is $37,836 ($34,516 last year), and the average salary in the United States is $41,261 ($37,638 last year).

To compensate for outliers (extremely high or extremely low salaries), a better way to compare the MCSD salaries to the typical Columbus resident is to use the median salary. That’s the figure at the midpoint of the range.

So the median salary for an MCSD employee is $45,705 ($43,705 last year), meaning half of the salaried employees earn more and half earn less than that amount. The U.S. Census Bureau reports median household income, not the median individual salary.

The latest census data shows median household income in Muscogee County is $54,561 ($50,542 last year), the median household income in Georgia is $71,355 ($65,030 last year), and the median household income in the United States is $75,149 ($69,021 last year).

Furthering filtering the MCSD database to exclude part-time employees, bus drivers and bus monitors, the lowest salary is $17,798.25 for elementary school paraprofessionals (teacher aides), the average salary is $51,198.76 ($49,718.06 last year), the median salary is $51,146 ($49,146 last year), and the highest salary is $243,600 for superintendent David Lewis, who received a 20% raise in October from his previous salary of $203,000, according to last year’s database.

Here are MCSD’s 10-highest salaries (11 employees are listed because of a tie):

  • David Lewis, superintendent, $243,600

  • Travis Anderson, chief operations and facilities officer, $148,216.80

  • Janice Bloodworth, chief financial officer, $148,216.80

  • Tonya Carter, chief human resources officer, $148,216.80

  • Ronald Pleasant, chief information officer, $148,216.80

  • Keith Seifert, chief academic officer, $148,216.80

  • Angela Vickers-Ward, chief student services officer, $148,216.80

  • Alan Harkness, director of Chattahoochee Valley Libraries, $144,326.40

  • Terry Baker, chief west region officer, $144,249.60

  • Matt Bell, chief central region officer, $144,249.60

  • Ronald Wiggins, chief east region officer, $144,249.60.

The complete database is attached below. Enter a name, job title or keyword into the search box in the upper left corner to find a particular employee or category of employees.