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I think that total compensation is supposed to include benefits so it's pretty hard to break down. A lot depends on the cost of living in that area and how that compares to other areas that are similar.

$88,000 TOTAL compensation sounds like a lot but you have to know whether they're including teachers aids and substitute teachers in that figure. That could be to skew the figures down and make it look better. I'd rather know what their take home salary is straight up. Lots of jobs have benefits packages but that isn't what you live on.

Don't forget, too, that that includes all those paid holidays and summer vacations. No other job I know of has that amount of time off. If you figure what they're earning for the hours worked per year, and calculate what an hourly rate would be then you can figure out how much that would be for your average work year of 2000 hours (40 hour week for about 50 weeks). That would give you a comparison to what they're earning per FULL year compared to others who actually have to work those number of hours.

When they start throwing around figures, it's hard to know what exactly is going on. When I got my degree, required reading for one of my courses was a little book that's an easy read called "How to Lie with Statistics" It's an excellent book and shows very clearly how figures can be manipulated to say anything you want. You ought to find yourself a copy and read it. So I'd take anything they tell you with a grain of salt. Whatever they tell you is going to be to make it sound like they're poor impoverished teachers so nobody will object too much to just giving them a reasonable wage to live on. (whine) I'd be skeptical myself.