LOS ANGELES (AP) — California teachers earned an average of about $85,000 per year in salary and benefits last year, while 100 superintendents made more than $250,000 each, according to data provided by hundreds of school districts statewide.
The information appears in a new database released online that allows users to search and download detailed employee compensation figures for superintendents, teachers, principals and other staff members at school districts, the Los Angeles Times reported .
The numbers are part of Transparent California, which compiles compensation data for a variety of public sector employees. The education section of the website has more than 581,000 individual compensation records from last year for about two-thirds of districts statewide.
It is operated by the California Policy Center, a Tustin-based, nonpartisan think tank. The center submitted Public Records Act requests with more than 1,058 school systems, but have so far only received data from 653, Jordan Bruneau, a spokesman for the center, told the Times.
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 Association 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 meaningful purpose,” Wells told the newspaper.
The group found that the average full-time teacher in California made $84,889 last year and about 34,750 teachers were paid more than $100,000 in total compensation. One hundred superintendents made more than $250,000 last year, the data shows.
The total figures include base pay, overtime, benefits and other forms of compensation.
