Hinojosa Had Said He Was 'Off the Market'

The Cobb County Board of Education has given the superintendent job to a man who signed a three-year contract extension at his current job in September and announced that he was off the market.

Michael Hinojosa was confirmed at Thursday's board meeting on a 7-0 vote. He has led the Dallas Independent School District in Texas for six years and signed an extension that runs through mid-2015 after finishing second in Las Vegas’ superintendent search.

“My heart is in Dallas,” Hinojosa told reporters on Sept. 29, according to WFAA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth. “My name is off the market, absolutely it's off the market—so don't call me.”

In Dallas, Hinojosa leads an urban school system with nearly 156,000, more than 10,200 teachers and an annual budget of $1.2 billion, according to the school district’s website. By contrast, the Cobb County School District has fewer than 107,000 students and just under 6,000 teachers, supported by a general-fund budget of $841 million.

Hinojosa also faces a pay cut in Cobb. The Dallas Morning News, which broke the news that he was Cobb’s lone finalist on Thursday, says he earns $328,000 a year in Dallas, compared with Cobb Superintendent Fred Sanderson’s base salary of $208,000. Sanderson is retiring at the end of June.

The Cobb salary is not likely to rise much, Cobb Board of Education Chairwoman Alison Bartlett told the Morning News, reiterating previous statements about the pay for the job.

Cobb’s comparatively low salary has been an issue in the superintendent search, which drew 17 applicants. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, citing unnamed sources, had reported that one of those candidates, Rockdale County Superintendent Samuel King, was the school board’s lone pick for a finalist, then said he couldn’t come to terms on salary and withdrew his name.

A Rockdale County schools representative confirmed that King had dropped out of the Cobb search.

The  announced Thursday afternoon that the board would announce its pick at Thursday night's meeting. The Dallas newspaper reported that the choice was Hinojosa, and the AJC reported that unnamed sources confirmed the news.

Hinojosa attended Dallas public schools as a child and started his 30-plus-year career in education there as a teacher, according to his official online bio. He has served as a school system superintendent in Texas since 1994 and became the head of the Dallas school system, the 14th largest in the nation, in May 2005.

Eight months ago, he was one of two finalists for the top job in Nevada’s Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas and is one of the five largest school districts in the nation. During the final stages of that search, the Dallas School Board voted 5-4 to offer Hinojosa a three-year extension without a raise, the CBS affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth reported.

The Las Vegas Sun reported that Hinojosa was charming and folksy in his final interview for the Las Vegas job but failed to provide direct answers to questions.

After Clark County selected Colorado Education Commissioner Dwight Jones instead, Hinojosa signed the extension and declared his allegiance to his hometown school district.

"I'm excited, and I will make sure we get that executed and get that paperwork done," he told WFAA-TV. "I'm ready to move forward."

Moving forward this spring has meant multiple efforts at creating a balanced budget while trying to guess how much funding the Texas Legislature would cut. The latest version, 4.0, released last week, would cut the budget by $150 million and require laying off 274 teachers.

Here’s Hinojosa talking about that budget.

Hinojosa enters Cobb as to get rid of the balanced calendar is still ringing in the ears of citizens. The calendar Dallas will use in 2011-12 has school starting Aug. 21 and ending May 31 for students. Following the vote, Cobb schools are set to start Aug. 15 and end May 25.