State education officials are exploring standardized data collection practices to more accurately report total employee compensation after school district finance officers lodged complaints. Critics point to flaws in a system that, they say, allow officials to mask how much administrators actually make.
“The biggest thing to me is I can’t trust these local supplement charts at” the Department of Public Instruction, said Lisa Baldwin, a member of the Buncombe County Schools Board of Education. “It also makes me wonder if I can trust any chart that they put out.”
Baldwin’s biggest complaint is that there are several types of supplements that school administrators are awarded by her district and others, yet the reporting of those extras varies from year to year and from district to district. That frustrates the formation of public policy, she said.
“I can’t compare county to county if everybody’s doing it differently, to see if we’re in line or if it looks like some counties may be paying more or less. I can’t compare from year to year my own or anybody else’s” district compensation levels, Baldwin said.
“There is interest among local [school district] finance officers in helping them to understand more about exactly what they’re supposed to report there,” said DPI spokeswoman Vanessa Jeter.
“There is a working group of those finance officers that will be working to help develop a Q&A document for them and to also consider if using payroll records would be a better way to collect that information” than the current surveys, Jeter said.
“Any time you do a survey you have some variability in the way that a responder interprets the questions,” Jeter said. “We have the same issue sometimes with the way people code their payroll data, so it’s always a question of educating the folks who are giving us the information that we need in order to report out.”
Terry Stoops, director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation, believes employee compensation reporting reform is essential.
“It is extremely difficult to find reliable information on the salary and perks included in contracts for central office administrators. I suspect that this is by design,” Stoops said. “Taxpayers would be appalled to know what kinds of goodies are buried in these contracts.”
State and county governments do a poor job of tracking how local funds are used to create “jaw-dropping pay and benefit packages for school superintendents,” Stoops said.
“To my knowledge, Lisa Baldwin is the first school board member in North Carolina to publicly call for greater transparency and accountability in the reporting of superintendent salary supplements,” Stoops said.
“However, I doubt that she is the only school board member that worries about the accuracy of information reported by the Department of Public Instruction,” Stoops said. “Indeed, this is not a Buncombe County issue. It is a statewide problem.”
He said citizens across North Carolina rely on DPI to provide accurate and timely information about public schools.
“Unfortunately, it appears that the information has been compromised by either incompetence or dishonesty,” Stoops said. “Regardless if the problem is intentional or unintentional, it is the responsibility of state education officials to ensure that they are being honest with taxpayers.”
Jeter maintains that the supplemental pay chart published by DPI “is not used as a monitoring tool, it’s really just published for information for the districts to see kind of what is standardly done across the state.”
If that is the intention, said Mary Parker, chief finance officer of Buncombe County Schools, it is a failed initiative, in large part because of the so-called SS-300 form on which schools are asked to report compensation.
“It presents information in such a highly aggregated way it’s useless. I think most of us finance directors agreed it is useless for us,” Parker said.
Following intense debate of the matter at October’s quarterly meeting of the state’s school finance officers, Parker had requested that DPI officials put the reporting practices on the agenda of January’s meeting.
At January’s meeting, state officials told finance directors the current system was set up so someone could compare what school districts pay.
“I don’t think it does a very effective job of that,” Parker said.
Dan Way is a contributor to Carolina Journal.