A Long Island public school superintendent makes over $340,000 a year – and that’s not counting fringe benefits.

A superintendent in Buffalo takes home more than New York Governor David Paterson’s $179,000 salary.

Only two superintendents in all of Steuben, Allegany and Livingston counties collect less than six figure salaries.

Nearly all of New York State’s superintendents’ salaries — and now their contracts, too — are posted on the Internet. The State Education Department has compiled a listing of the school chiefs’ salaries and benefits every year for over a decade.

But this summer, a financial watchdog group went a step further, posting the administrators’ contracts word-for-word online. The database, which also includes teacher union contracts, can be found at www.SeeThroughNY.net.

The average superintendent salary in New York State is $158,883, according to the state School Boards Association, which analyzed the data. In an Evening Tribune analysis of Steuben, Allegany and Livingston county school systems, Hornell City Schools Superintendent George Kiley was the only administrator whose salary exceeded the average. The SED listings report that he’ll collect $164,327 and an additional $58,533 in benefits this school year. Examples of benefits are employers’ contributions to social security, insurance and pension plans.

While the majority of local superintendents are paid well below the statewide average for their profession, their compensation is several times higher than their communities’ typical salaries. The average income in Southwestern New York’s rural counties is $34,820, according to a May 2007 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Superintendents’ salaries are all over the map statewide, but they all do pretty well,” said Lise Bang-Jensen, senior analyst for the Empire Center for Public Policy, which set up www.SeeThroughNY.net.

She said school officials are “the new sort of aristocracy. They’re the rich people in communities that don’t have a lot of industry around.”

But the deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, Bob Lowry, said most of the state’s public school superintendents are paid far less than their equivalent in private schools, who make an average of $260,000 a year. And that’s not to mention CEOs of major corporations handling the same size budgets and staffs.

In Alfred-Almond Central School District, Superintendent Richard Nicol oversees a $12 million budget, more than 150 employees and about 700 students.

Collecting a $142,000 salary and $38,388 in benefits this school year, he said salaries are a result of “supply and demand.”

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