Teachers

Ontario-Montclair Superintendent’s $516,000 pay package tops state list

Robert Fellner 2016, Press Releases , ,

Today, Transparent California released 2015 public employee compensation data — complete with names, pay, and benefits — for over 800,000 K-12 workers statewide.

Ontario-Montclair schools superintendent James Hammond’s $516,573 compensation package was the highest of any K-12 worker statewide, excluding those who received one-time settlement or separation payouts.

A survey of 460 K-12 superintendents statewide revealed the average superintendent collected $213,511 in total compensation.

The next 4 largest compensation packages received by Inland Empire K-12 educators went to:

  1. Corona-Norco Unified superintendent Michael Lin: $390,925.
  2. San Bernardino City Unified superintendent Dale Marsden: $385,415.
  3. Riverside County Office of Education superintendent Kenneth Young: $345,579.
  4. Desert Sands Unified superintendent Garrett Rutherford: $326,884.

The below table contains the average compensation package received by full-time district employees, along with the total cost per student for employee compensation:

School District

Average FT compensation

Cost per student
Rialto Unified $76,342 $6,099
Hesperia Unified $76,564 $5,827
Murrieta Valley Unified $84,771 $6,821
Moreno Valley Unified $85,538 $7,415
Temecula Valley Unified $85,764 $6,396
Lake Elsinore Unified $86,898 $7,034
Ontario-Montclair $87,078 $8,507
Desert Sands Unified $87,677 $7,692
Colton Joint Unified $87,906 $7,829
Chino Valley Unified $88,690 $6,820
Riverside Unified $88,884 $7,223
Fontana Unified $89,203 $7,751
Palm Springs Unified $90,094 $8,127
San Bernardino City Unified $91,091 $8,085
Corona-Norco Unified $94,374 $7,105
Chaffey Joint Union High $106,866 $8,417

Transparent California research director Robert Fellner expressed concern over the continued growth in retirement costs.

“As more funds are diverted to servicing California’s rising pension debt, less is available for salaries or other educational resources, which is likely to harm both teacher recruitment and student learning.”

Compensation is defined as total wages plus the employer cost of retirement and health benefits. Full-time workers are defined as those receiving a total regular pay amount of at least $25,000.

To explore the data further, please visit TransparentCalifornia.com

To schedule an interview with Transparent California, please contact Robert Fellner at 559-462-0122 or Robert@TransparentCalifornia.com.

Transparent California is California’s largest and most comprehensive database of public sector compensation and is a project of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a nonpartisan, free-market think tank. Learn more at TransparentCalifornia.com.

An easy solution to the teacher shortage

Robert Fellner Blog ,

In today’s Washington Examiner I highlight the unfair burden public pension plans impose on today’s teachers and students.

A slice:

CCSD could boost teacher pay, at no extra cost, if lawmakers allowed it to modernize its retirement system — the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Nevada (PERS).

While CCSD pays PERS directly, teachers pay their share through salary reductions.

Consequently, as PERS costs skyrocketed — up over 36 percent since 2007 — to today’s all-time highs, CCSD was unable to raise salaries as much as they, and teachers, would like.

What’s most frustrating about this rate hike, however, is that it provides no additional benefit to the current teacher paying it. Instead, almost all is spent on paying down PERS debt — a function of a system which was designed to transfer the cost for the previous generation onto present-day teachers and taxpayers.

In other words, current teachers are receiving lower wages to pay for PERS past funding failures.

Be sure to read the whole thing here.

2013 Charter Schools Data Added – Charter Teachers Make Substantially Less than Public

Robert Fellner Blog , , ,

Transparent California has just been updated with 2013 salary and benefits data for 82 charter schools from across the state; including the largest charter school in the state – Green Dot Public Schools.

We expect to have many more charter schools added by the time 2014 data is made available later this year.

Below are two charts comparing median teacher pay at charter schools against traditional public schools. The first chart compares the largest public school in San Diego County – San Diego Unified School District – against the largest charter school in the county – High Tech High.

SDUvsHTH
Comparing pay between the biggest public school and charter school in San Diego County.

Below is a similar comparison for Los Angeles County.

Comparing pay between the biggest public school and charter school in Los Angeles County.
Comparing pay between the biggest public school and charter school in Los Angeles County.

Teachers at LAUSD make about 35% more in total pay and benefits as compared to teachers at Green Dot Charter School. In San Diego County, teachers at San Diego Unified make 52% more than do the teachers at their county’s largest charter school.

Both SDU and LAUSD had several dozen different job classifications with some form of the word “teacher” in them. For the purposes of this comparison, only the “Regular Teacher” job classification was used for the SDU teachers and only the “Teacher” job classification was used for the LAUSD comparison.