(The Center Square)–Secretaries are well known for earning modest wages, but not the ones who work at Pocantico Hills Central School District. At the school district of 500 students outside New York City secretaries make $130,000 and $190,000 a year, an investigation by The Center Square found.
The highest paid is Gina L. Downes, a confidential secretary. Her salary is $110,538 this school year, and she will receive $79,281 in benefits and other payments. Downes, who will complete her 20th year on the job in the spring, has benefited from a civil service-based pay system, a common feature in the public sector.
Another secretary, Annabel Maya, will earn $73,659 plus $56,034 in benefits and overtime. Her tenure began four years ago. Downes and Maya were among the district’s well-compensated employees.
Daniel Linehan, a physical education teacher who started in the district in 1995, will earn a salary of $146,199 and almost $60,000 in other benefits this school year.
Michael Vanyo, assistant superintendent for business and operations, will make $240,507 and $53,511 in benefits. In a phone interview, Vanyo defended the pay packages.
“I have very few staff members, so those secretaries are doing multiple jobs, he said. “Plus, they tend to stay, because Pocantico Hills is a good place to work and live. I could pay them less, but we would have constant turnover.”
Pocantico Hills Central School District, in Westchester County, is not alone in the Empire State in compensating its employees generously. Another district is Shelter Island Union Free School District, a school district of roughly 190 students in Suffolk County.
Office assistant Donna Clark will earn $98,792 in salary, benefits, and other payments this school year, while her counterpart Meghan Lang will rack up $91,328, according to school district records. While Clark’s and Lang’s secretarial peers in Pocantico Hills earn more, Shelter Island pays its top administrators more.
The district’s superintendent, Dr. Brian Doelger, will take home an eye-popping $319,170 in salary, benefits, and other payments this school year. Director of Athletics Todd Gulluscio will receive a total pay package of $189,513. The school district did not respond to a request for comment.
A third school district that rewards employees with generous pay packages is Bridgehampton Union Free School District in Suffolk County, a region known popularly as the Hamptons.
Superintendent Mary T. Kelly will earn a total pay package of $246,291, while two district staff will make six figures. District clerk Tammy Cavanaugh made $44,318 in salary, benefits, and overtime from July 1 to Nov. 14, a figure that prorated comes out to $118,938 this school year. Brianna Covais, director for pupil personnel services, earned $59,423 in salary, a figure that prorated comes out to $159,480 this school year.
The three school districts’ per-pupil spending was among the highest in New York State’s K-12 public school system of 2.4 million students, according to state data. Pocantico Hills spent $71,439 per student, while Shelter Island spent $65,959 in the 2023-2024 school year. Both are on the high end of what private four-year colleges charge for tuition.
Bridgehampton spent $92,586 for each of its roughly 200 pupils in 2023-2024. The sum was more than the $90,012 that Pepperdine University, a private Christian school in Malibu, Calif., charged for on-campus tuition.
In a previous story, district staff attributed the high per-pupil costs to infrastructure spending spread over very few students, but additional data obtained by The Center square shows that salaries in those districts are also big budget items.
Zilvinas Silenas, president and CEO of The Empire Center for Public Policy, a non-profit, free-market oriented think tank, said high salaries help account for the districts’ high spending.
“The median pay for a teacher in Pocantico is $121,703, which is in the top 20 percent of school districts with the highest median pay,” he noted.
Vanyo, Pocantico Hills’ assistant superintendent, said the district spends more on other budgetary needs.
“It is a unique situation,” he said in an interview. “We are a K-8 school district and pay tuition for our high school students.”
Vanyo added that the district pays the costs of its high school students to attend one of three public schools in the area as well as the textbooks and healthcare of students who attend private high schools.
The typical school district in New York spent $35,095 per pupil in the 2023-2024 school year, according to the state’s Department of Education. The figure was the highest nationwide. By contrast, Utah spent roughly $10,000.
Despite New York’s high median figure, six school districts spent almost or more than $70,000 per student, double the average.
The top spending district was Fire Island Unified School District, a small island off the coast of Long Island. It reported spending $132,196 for each of its roughly 50 students, according to state data.
The second highest spending district was Bridgehampton Union Free School District in Suffolk County. It spent $92,586 for each of its roughly 200 pupils in 2023-2024.
Two more high-spending districts were in Suffolk County on eastern Long Island. Quogue Union Free School District spent $86,163 for each of its roughly 130 students, while Amagansett Union Free School District spent $78,916 for each of its roughly 120 pupils.
To get a better handle on the districts’ spending, last month The Center Square submitted requests under New York’s Freedom of Information Law for staff salaries at five school districts. What the districts’ responses show is generous staff pay is only one reason for high spending.
“It’s complex and multi-factorial,” Silvenas said in an interview, “To be fair to Pocantico Hills School District, there are roughly 100 school districts where median teacher pay is even higher.”
Consider Scarsdale Unified School District in Westchester County, a district of 4,700 students outside New York City. It pays its teachers $156,000 annually, the highest in the state. Yet Scarsdale spent $37,800 per pupil in 2023-204, a figure far below that of Pocantico Hills’ $71,439.
Silvenas acknowledged that transportation, building upkeep, and classroom materials are key reasons for high spending. Each of the six highest spending school districts in New York has fewer than 500 students, a barrier to economies of scale.
Dr. Mary T. Kelly, superintendent of Bridgehampton’s school district, said small districts like hers get no breaks from the state.
“Bridgehampton offers a full continuum of services — including Advanced Placement courses, a new Career and Technical Education program, athletics, performing arts, special education, and transportation across a large geographic area — all of which must be provided regardless of enrollment size,” she said in an interview.
While capital and transportation costs are important, teacher and staff salaries are, too.
Roxbury Central School District in upstate New York had roughly 230 students in the 2023-24 school year, a figure less than half that in Pocantico Hills and only 40 fewer than Shelter Island. Yet Roxbury spent less on annual teacher salaries—$60,517 per teacher, according to The Empire Center.
That was similar to the $59,449 and $57,673 annual salaries of Shelter Island’s two office assistants and tens of thousands less than Pocantico Hills’ two secretaries. Vanyo rejected the comparison between upstate and downstate school districts.
“We’re twenty-five miles outside New York City,” he said in an interview. “It’s an expensive place to live.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
