“Dear Red Phone, I’d like for you to post the salaries of school board officials. It should be public knowledge, no? They are indeed acting like selfish 2-year-olds. Without an 8th-grade graduation ceremony, it’s another incentive lost for our struggling youth who will someday be running this country.”
& Red Phone: Dear Incentive Lost, you are correct that school board pay is public information. School board members are paid on a per-meeting basis, the amount of which is not to exceed $240 per month. So, they are paid $60 a meeting for four meetings a month, $80 a meeting for three meetings a month, $120 a meeting for two meetings a month, and $240 if there is just one meeting that month, for example in July of this year, there is just one scheduled meeting.
According to Morgan Hill Unified School District policy, a member may be paid for any meeting when absent if the board, by resolution, adopted and included in its minutes finds that at the time of the meeting he/she is performing services outside the meeting for the district, was ill or on jury duty, or the absence was due to a hardship deemed acceptable by the board. According to the minutes Red Phone has seen this year, that happens often.
If each board member is paid the maximum each month, they earn $240, and there are five members of the board, meaning the board costs the district $1,200 each month, or $14,400 annually. Not a lot of money, considering the district has cut more than $10 million from its operating budget in the past four years, and will likely need to cut more now that the state’s budget deficit has grown to a whopping $16 billion.
Governor Jerry Brown has said that if voters don’t approve a tax-hike initiative on the November ballot, he’ll cut an additional $5 billion from schools. That could mean that MHUSD would need to cut about $3 million more next year.
That could mean larger class sizes, additional furlough days, and layoffs, which the district avoided this time around.
Hope that answers your questions, good caller.
