New database details pay of California public school employees
Last year, James Hammond, the superintendent of the Montclair-Ontario Unified School District in the Inland Empire, was paid $492,077. Jonathan Eagan, the principal of a junior high school in the Bay Area city of Martinez made $279,669.
And 31 custodians at California public schools were paid more than $100,000 in 2013.
That is a sample of statistics found in a newly released online database that allows users to search and download detailed employee compensation figures for superintendents, teachers, principals and other staff members at school districts across the state.
The figures were added to Transparent California, which compiles compensation data for a variety of public sector employees. The education section of the website is composed of more than 581,000 individual compensation records from last year for about two-thirds of districts statewide.
The California Policy Center, a Tustin-based, nonpartisan think tank that operates the database, submitted Public Records Act requests with more than 1,058 school systems, but have so far only received data from 653, said Jordan Bruneau, a spokesman for the center.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest system in the nation, has yet to provide the documents.
"The public votes on tax measures, bond measures without complete knowledge about how the money is being spent,” said Ed Ring, the center's executive director. “Taxpayers are paying these salaries so they have a right to know.”
The California Teachers Assn. supports the release of salary schedules and school district budgets, which show the range of pay teachers receive and overall staffing costs, said Frank Wells, a spokesman for the union.
"However, we see no legitimate purpose in taking that down to the individual teacher level by name, and a database like this would seem to be an invasion of privacy that doesn’t really serve any New database details pay of California public school employees - LA Times: