I am an Acton resident and Acton Agua Dulce Unified School District (AADUSD) school board observer. In this piece, I look at the ever-increasing expectation that there will be transparency in the public sector, especially in the area of employee compensation. Some public agencies go to great lengths to “sunshine” their processes, others not so much.

My old friend Topadzhikyan and I – Pfalzgraf and Topadzhikyan, you’ve got just about the whole alphabet there, eh cap’n? – were catching up the other day. He said he’d run across a couple of my spicier editorials online, which morphed into our mutual old-man amazement over what the Internet can do nowadays. Stumped on the name of the original host of Jeopardy, or lost, or looking for some place to eat? All of the answers are right there on that phone in your pocket.

Toward the end, he asked how I was doing at work. I told him he could look for himself on the Internet, as the city’s annual release of employee compensation information goes out to the press this week. He asked how I felt about the details of my compensation being available to anyone with a computer and the determination to spell my name correctly. I reminded him that the money I make comes from public funds, and taxpayers have a right to know where their money is going. It’s just part of the deal if you choose to be a public-sector employee.

Unfortunately, not everyone is as tolerant of the rays of public -sector “sunshine” as I am.

You may recall my commentary of several weeks ago which compared the annual cost-per-student of the AADUSD superintendent in comparison to his regional peers (here). I discovered a couple of things while putting that piece together. First, in comparison to his peers in Los Angeles County who are compensated as much or less, the AADUSD superintendent has, in the majority of cases, far fewer students to serve and fewer school sites to operate. Next, the size of a superintendent’s administrative team varies from district to district. Finally, the duties of a superintendent vary from district to district, as well. You’ll remember that we found one district in which the superintendent, despite being the entire administrative team and the principal, has a base salary 25 percent less than his AADUSD counterpart.

Continuing to peel the AADUSD onion, I decided to try to determine what the size of the superintendent’s administrative team means in terms of an annual cost per student. A Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) hinted around that the AADUSD administrative team was top-heavy in comparison to similarly sized organizations in FCMAT’s report on the district when AADUSD fell into negative certification last year (see pg. 39 here). I decided to have a closer look.

Every employment contract between a state or local agency and any public official or public employee is a public record that is not exempt under either the personnel or public interest exemption (Gov. Code Section 6254.8) and, by virtue of AADUSD board policy 4300, the superintendent’s employment contract “shall be available to the public upon request.” That means I have a right to know how the AADUSD administrative team is compensated and what the board expects from the AADUSD superintendent for what he is paid.

Easy enough, right? Wrong.

Some public agencies participate in the Transparent California program, a California Policy Center initiative that makes public-sector compensation information readily available to the public (http://transparentcalifornia.com). Other agencies post employee compensation information on the agency’s website. Since AADUSD does neither, I asked for the administrative team’s compensation package and superintendent’s employment contract by way of a California Records Request inquiry to the AADUSD board of trustees (see my request here). Learn more about the California Records Request Act and the responsibilities of the responding agency here.

When I received the response from AADUSD, none of the information I requested was provided. Instead, the cut-and-paste response advised me that my request had been grouped in with another unrelated request I had made a week later; that there would be a need to interact with other components of the agency; that records would have to be collected from other field facilities; and that my request was “voluminous.” This, coming from a district with an enrollment of almost 1,100 students and a district office that the average high school football quarterback could throw a football the length of?

That “other request” was for information on a contract the board had apparently approved without making any of the contract documents, the name of the contractor, or the value of the contract, available to the public in a board meeting packet (that’s a topic for another day). Anyway, here’s the AADUSD response to my request.

Knowing that government code and AADUSD board policy provide for free public access to the compensation and contract information I requested, how could the district arbitrarily combine two unrelated requests, stall for time, and claim higher reproduction costs?

I think questions like this are not unique to me. If the governor, the state Assembly, a superior court judge and a slew of attorneys can’t get AADUSD to keep charters schools within the district’s own boundaries, what makes me think I can get a proper response to a request for records the public is entitled to?

I say it’s just another example of AADUSD’s tendency to test the limits of the law to see if anyone will do anything about it. If I don’t want to hire an attorney, I guess I’ll just have to wait a month to see if AADUSD will let me have the info they were supposed to supply in 10 days. There that should get me another veiled cease-and-desist letter from an attorney.

On a brighter note, things seem to be looking up in AADUSD-land lately. The Agua Dulce-Acton Country Journal recently reported that “other than the loss of 128 students to the Einstein Academy Charter School located in Agua Dulce, enrollment in the district has stabilized in the past three years (click here).

Wait. That’s kind of like saying that other than the three DUIs I got last weekend, my driving record is perfect for the last three years.

Anyway, despite not being declared legal in the court system just yet, the AADUSD out-of-district-boundaries charter sponsorship plan seems to be working out just fine; that is, unless you’re one of those faraway, nameless, faceless students who is losing his crayon money to AADUSD oversight and/or facility fees and the 3.5-percent ADA cut.

I still can’t figure out how someone can educate kids with 96.5 percent of the money when someone else was struggling with 100 percent of the money, but who am I?

Bottom line is, the plan passes the Machiavelli test. AADUSD is now in the black. No more pink slips; those storage units (i.e. classrooms) can finally get some maintenance; and the special education program doesn’t have to be targeted for savings anymore. Why, there’s even enough money to buy a new paper shredder for the district office (click here).

Let’s hope I get to see that administrative team compensation package information and the superintendent’s employment contract before the new paper shredder in the district office does.

I’ll be sure to let you know.

Ken Pfalzgraf is an Acton resident.