Davis

Davis Board of Education member Richard HarrisÕ recent letter generates more questions than answers. For clarification, five furlough days is not a Òworkload reduction of five school days…Ó as it does not reduce the amount of curriculum content the teacher has to cover during the academic year in order to meet state-mandated criteria. It just compresses the time available, so in most cases it creates additional work for the teachers and students, i.e., more with less.

While the board agenda of May 21, 2009, does have an item titled ÒApproval of Workday and Salary Reduction for Administrative Leadership Team, Confidential Employees and Individual Contracted Employees,Ó there is no way to validate this for individually contracted employees as they do not have a posted salary schedule. No record of amendments to their individual contracts for a 5 percent reduction can be found. Rather, this year the opposite was true.

Recent public revelations regarding action by the California School Boards Association, of which DJUSD is a member, to increase the annual compensation for its executive director by almost 70 percent in two years to more than $500,000 has caused considerable angst among its executive board and its member agencies.

CSBA acknowledges it needs to be more transparent, engaged in oversight and make decisions based on complete information. Based on its need to re-establish the public trust over past compensation actions, on its website CSBA has posted a four-year summary of the executive director and staff salaries: Òcalendar year compensation figures are based on W-2 documents, showing base compensation, bonus and incentive compensation, and other compensation (equal to the first three columns of IRS Schedule J, Form 990).Ó This summary is available at http://www.csba.org/AboutCSBA/AboutCSBA/CSBAFinancialAccountability.aspx

Perhaps the DJUSD board should take the lead from CSBA and do the same for a four-year period to validate the statements that current and past individually contracted employees did, in fact, take a 5 percent reduction in compensation. What better way for the board to show transparency in its financial dealing, as this is public information.

Walter E. Sadler

Davis

Comments

comments