Two Muncie foundations have set up endowments to help fund the top position at Muncie Community Schools.  IPR’s Stephanie Wiechmann reports.

The Director of Public Education and CEO of Muncie Community Schools is currently Lee Ann Kwiatkowski, who took office in July.

A $100,000 endowment by the Ball Brothers Foundation and a $50,000 endowment by the Ball Sate University Foundation is intended to “benefit MCS far into the future,” according to the Ball Brothers Foundation.

After a legislative mandate was passed that let Ball State University take responsibility for running Muncie Community Schools, the district changed the title of “superintendent” to “CEO.”  School board president Jim Williams has said it’s because the new partnership meant that person would take on new challenges.

“One of the things that we wanted to communicate as a board was that this is a unique model, it is different, and if you look at this [job] description, we are asking more of this individual than has traditionally been asked of superintendents.”

The endowment from the Ball State University Foundation will let Kwiatkowski serve in a second role as a Clinical Professor of Educational Leadership and Innovation at Ball State.

According to her MCS contract, Kwiatkowski receives an annual base salary of $165,000.