Source: http://elighthouse.isolon.org/the-quest-for-controversial-salary-statistics-from-the-anne-arundel-public-schools
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 16:39:57+00:00

Document:
Beginning in 2008, I have requested AACPS compensation data from your office via a series of Maryland Public Information Act requests. I was motivated to seek this information in part by my two children who were student members of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education. I learned that Board members had only rudimentary access to AACPS compensation data and remarkably little understanding of that data. Nor were they alone. When the County Executive stopped by my house one day to chat about various items, he reported to me that the top salary was in the $70,000 range. And when I was chair of the Countywide Citizens Advisory Committee, I was astounded to find that at least one of the feeder system reps who regularly read our local newspaper thought the top teacher salary in the County was between $40,000 and $50,000 (at the time it was about $130,000). Perhaps even more remarkable, I learned that public officials from both political parties were very fearful about asking for this information.
In response to my 2008 Public Information Act request for disaggregated AACPS salary data, which were legally public, you sent a letter to thousands of AACPS employees complaining of this request. The response was dozens of angry emails to you and harassing calls to my home. Given that I had children attending AACPS and nothing was more important than my children, these calls were very intimidating. And though I have no record of you specifically seeking to intimidate me for seeking this data, I believe a reasonable person could interpret your actions as having that intent. I had previously published in Education Week a salary-related commentary, “America’s Million-Dollar Superintendents,” that AACPS’s superintendent found highly objectionable. In addition, a report I published on another public school system’s budget gimmicks had been reported on in Education Week.
In response to my request, you also complained to Maryland General Assembly members that such disaggregated salary data should not be legally public. Despite your complaints, the General Assembly did not change the law requiring disaggregated salary data—chock full of loopholes as it is—to be made public.
Based on this early research, I did publish an article in the Washington Post, “Need Teachers? Show Them The Money,” on top compensation by AACPS employees.
I later learned that when a reporter from the local newspaper asked for top salary data, she received similar treatment by both you and the superintendent. But unlike with me, you and the superintendent complained directly to her. She reported to me that during her entire time working as the education reporter for the Capital, she never received as much aggressive push-back on a story she was researching from you, the superintendent, and other AACPS staff.
I learned that when a school board member requested disaggregated salary data, it took him approximately a year to get it from your office, and he got it only after having the attorney for the Board of Education reach out to you. This school board member was later furiously opposed by senior AACPS staff when he sought renomination to the Board of Education. Perhaps as a consequence, he was not renominated.
Since my last child graduated from AACPS in 2013, I have once again sought this information from your office. Year after year I have sought this information and not once have I either received exactly the information I specified or have you acknowledged the discrepancies between what I requested and what I received. I won’t repeat those omissions here, which I have described in detail to you in previous communications. I will here focus on my most recent Public Information Act request to your office, which primarily sought the methodology by which you calculate various salary statistics submitted to the Maryland State Department of Education and reported in various public media. Your response vividly illustrates the problems I have had accessing legally public salary data from your office for close to a decade.
You merely sent me the MSDE instructions that I mentioned and quoted in my request. Since, as I explained, MSDE leaves great discretion to local LEAs in how these statistics are calculated, resending me that information did not comply with my request. Essentially, 1) to 4) above were simply ignored.
The name of the AACPS employee responsible for ensuring that accurate salary statistical data are provided to MSDE’s Web Data Collection System (WDCS).
The written methodology AACPS used for FY2016 to provide teacher retention data to MSDE’s Web Data Collection System (WDCS).
This information was not provided.
A copy of the AACPS manual(s) the AACPS employee mentioned in 2) above uses to implement the written methodology requested in 1) and 2) above. Please note that I’m not requesting the manual MSDE provides to local LEAs because, as described above, that manual leaves substantial discretion to LEAs.
I request that all the information be emailed to me in an electronic format (i.e., no paper copies). I also request that where an electronic document exists in a machine-readable format such as an Excel spreadsheet or Word document, it be provided in that format rather than scanned in an unsearchable format such as a pdf.
If fulfilling this Public Information Act request is expected to take more than 2 hours, then starting with 1) and moving down the list for any item above the two-hour free limit, the item should be costed out separately in your response to me. In addition, in the unlikely event that any information cannot be provided to me in an electronic format, it should also be costed out separately (i.e., above the first 50 free copies).
I look forward to your response within the ten days required by law.
When a custodian of records denies a request, the response must be provided within 10 working days of the request and must explain the reason for the denial, the legal basis for the denial, and the remedies to challenge the denial. GP § 4-203.
Since in your response, you effectively rejected my request for information under the Public Information Act, the effective legal deadline was ten days. To meet the relevant deadline under the Public Information Act, you would have had to reject my request within ten days. Simply pretending to have fulfilled it at thirty days (or, in this case, 32 days), clearly violates the law. I am not asserting that this law is meaningfully enforced in Maryland; I am simply stating that when you failed to reject my request within the required ten days in not only my most recent but also earlier Public Information Act requests you were already in violation of the law at the ten day rather than the thirty day mark. Needless to say, the vast majority of people who casually read your written responses and the sometimes voluminous documents attached to your responses will assume that because you blithely claim to have fulfilled my requests that you have actually done so.
Teachers whose salaries would be over $200,000/year if their partial FTEs were normalized to a 1.0 FTE.
FTE totals for fiscal years that added up to more than AACPS’s widely reported FTE totals.
Reported salary data without the requested FTE data to determine what the full-time equivalent salary data would be.
Missing pay codes that were covered under my Public Information Act requests.
Changes from year to year in the methodologies used to report individual pay codes and salaries without any acknowledgment or explanation of the changed methodologies.
Arbitrary changes from year to year in the interpretation of the law regarding which individual pay codes are legally public information.
Refusal to provide manuals used by AACPS staff to enter payroll data or the names of data fields collected by AACPS’s multi-million dollar payroll software.
Of course, most of these problems would not have happened in the first place if you posted this legally public salary-related data online as I have requested on numerous occasions over the years.
A governmental unit must not treat (or be perceived as treating) controversial or uncomfortable public records requests differently than it handles “garden-variety” requests.
PIA requests must be handled without regard to the identity of the requestor or the subject of the records requested….
Although fees may be charged by a custodian, waiver requests should not be denied without consideration of the public interest, because doing so can undermine the purpose of the PIA by deterring requestors from pursuing their record requests.
Please either fulfill my December 16, 2016 Public Information Act request or provide a clear explanation why the information I requested is exempt under the law.
This email is in response to your request (below) under the Public Information Act, Annotated Code of Maryland, General Provisions Article (GP) § 4-101, et seq., seeking information regarding Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) reporting of data to the Maryland State Department of Education.
Pursuant to GPA §4-362, in the event you disagree with any determination regarding this Maryland Public Information Act request you may seek judicial review by filing a complaint with the Circuit Court in Anne Arundel County.
This communication is in response to your request under the Public Information Act, Annotated Code of Maryland, General Provisions Article (GP) § 4-101, et seq., seeking information related to salary and teacher retention data.
This request has been forwarded to the appropriate staff, and pursuant to the Maryland Public Information Act, we will provide that information which is public within 30 days of your request, and certainly sooner if it is readily available. Please note that the Act does not require an agency to create new documents to satisfy a request.
As you may be aware, § 4-206 (b) allows a custodian to “charge a reasonable fee for search for, preparation of, and reproduction of a public record.” Under the provisions of the Act, the first two hours of labor would be provided free of charge. You would be responsible for reimbursing Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) for the labor required to complete all other research and compilation of documents.
If we determine that there will be a charge to you, we will notify you before proceeding with your request.
As has been stated in response to prior requests you have made and as is allowable under the Act, AACPS will not disclose any documents deemed to be proprietary and/or intended to be used by employees in their operation of a system or systems.
I want to correct two factual errors contained in your request. While I am sure they are simply typos given your knowledge of the Act, AACPS’ Administrative Regulation regarding responses to public records requests, and the breadth of requests you have made under the Act over the years, I do want the record to reflect the corrections.
First, AACPS Administrative Regulation KI-RA provides that “Documents of 10 or fewer pages will be copied free of charge. As authorized by the Act, AACPS will charge a fee of 25 cents per page for documents that exceed 10 pages.” You referenced the “first 50 free copies” in your request.
Second, the Act requires an acknowledgement of a request within 10 days of receipt of said request, but a response within 30 days.
If you have further questions, please feel free to contact me at 410-222-5312 or by email at rmosier@aacps.org.
“[T]he General Assembly enacted the “salary” provisions of the PIA to ensure that members of the public could find out how much public employees earned. The term “salary” should be construed to help achieve this objective. Giving “salary” too narrow a construction would allow governments to secretly augment the earnings of public employees through bonuses and performance awards, contrary to the General Assembly’s goal of holding a government publicly accountable for its compensation decisions. Under the PIA, to borrow a phrase from an Ohio court, “the public has an absolute right to ascertain the earnings of its servants.” State ex rel. Jones v. Myers, 581 N.E.2d 629, 631 (Ohio Com. Pl. 1991).
The figure AACPS provides to the Federal government for W-2 Medicare wages appeared to me a way to determine gross pay. Unlike the comparable W-2 Social Security figure, the Medicare figure represents gross pay without deductions. That is why I chose it.
If you have another data field that summarizes gross pay to each employee, I would be happy to accept that as a substitute. Obviously, I am not seeking data that is not legally public. What I am seeking—and that was not provided to the Capital—is the actual gross pay per employee that is disclosable under Maryland law.
I ask that you fulfill my February 27, 2017 Public Information Act request with the single difference of substituting what you accept is a legally disclosable figure for gross pay to each employee in lieu of the W-2 Medicare wages that you say you cannot provide. If you insist that I formulate this as a new Public Information request, then treat this request as such a request. But as a courtesy to me and to reduce a wasteful flow of paperwork between both of us, I think we would have a shared interest in not going that route.
I also ask that you provide all the data fields in a single document as I requested. As I’m sure you know, separating the data into two separate documents would make the data unusable; for example, AACPS does not allow access to unique identifiers for employees and many employees have the same names. Obviously, providing a single document only with unit, FTE, and gross pay data would be worthless for my stated purposes, which I trust was not your intention. A point of my requesting the data provided to the Capital in an earlier Public Information Act request was to find out what data, if any, I would need in a later request to assess its salary analysis. Because of the inherent limitations of the Capital’s data, I was forced to make what, for reasons explained above, should be viewed as a totally new request. In short, dividing my request into two separate documents would effectively deny my request because it would make it impossible for me to assess the Capital’s data analysis.
On February 14, 2017, Anne Arundel County Public Schools provided you with a spreadsheet containing data supplied to The Capital newspaper. That spreadsheet contained, as you indicated in your request and is copied above, data for the first six bullets in your most recent request. For your convenience, that spreadsheet is provided again with this email.
Given that you have the aforementioned data already, AACPS is not compelled to supply you with it again. AACPS will, as soon as possible, provide a spreadsheet to you listing employee name, FTE, and Unit as requested above.
AACPS is denying your request for “Medicare Wages as reported in box 5 of the W-2.” That information contains, in part, numerical data that reflects employee choices with regard to medical plans and health care. Such choices and information are private, personal, and part of a personnel record. It is therefore not disclosable under § 4-311.
If you have further questions, please feel free to contact me at 410-222-5312 or by email atrmosier@aacps.org.
I agree that it is most unfortunate that we (and many other citizens who have requested public data from your office) continue to talk past each other.
The Capital reporter, who has no expertise in either school finance or statistics, merely asked for “annual salary.” But there are many ways AACPS has defined “annual salary,” including by the salary schedule you linked to in your Public Information Act response. As a point of contrast, that definition of annual salary has little relation to, say, what is reported to the IRS as annual salary on a W-2 form for tax purposes. The IRS includes in its definition of annual salary all the pay codes that are taxable.
To be fair to you, now that I’ve seen the Capital’s request for data, the Capital’s use of your annual salary data to generate average salary statistics, including its equal weighting of part time and full time employee salaries, is absurd. Until I saw the data the Capital was working with, it was hard for me to believe that they could have conducted such a data analysis.
I look forward to either your rejection of this request within the ten days required by law or to your fulfillment of this request within the 30 days required by law.
My apologies for not attaching the original Capital PIA request you inquired about in your request. It was simply an oversight on my part, and is attached here.
With regard to the rest of your communication, it is most unfortunate that you continue to include erroneous recollections of facts in your requests to our office.
Specifically with regard to your follow-up to the annual salary data issue, I have explained the data as provided to The Capital (and provided to you on February 14, 2017) in my February 24, 2017, response to your inquiry.
Thank you for responding to my Public Information Act request, even if largely only to effectively ignore and reject it while seeming at first glance to do otherwise.
I requested from your office a list of the pay codes that were included in the total salary field for each employee provided to the Capital. From your response, I infer that you are claiming that the individual salary totals you provided to the Capital were solely based on one pay code: the individual’s position on the salary schedule. If that’s not the claim you intended to make, please correct the record now.
Although your implicit claim about the FTE status of the individual employees is more ambiguous, I infer from the lack of FTE data associated with the salary data provided to the Capital that it was a comprehensive list of the requested employees rather than one limited by full-time FTEs. If that’s not the claim you intended to make, please correct the record now.
But your answer was indirect at best and did not specifically respond to my request. Since you didn’t formally reject this request within the required 10-day deadline, technically it falls under the 30-day deadline, and you are still legally obliged to comply with it.
Since you didn’t reject this request within the required 10-day deadline, it also falls under the 30-day deadline, and you are still legally obliged to comply with it.
In your reply, I look forward to your complying with both the spirit and the letter of Maryland’s Public Information Act. In your previous comments about the Maryland Public Information Act Ombudsman’s report, you affirmed that is your intent in replying to Public Information Act requests.
Employees in Units 1, 2, and 5 (A-E): Annual salary is listed in salary scales publicly available on the Anne Arundel County Public Schools website here. The salaries on those charts are adjusted for the employee’s FTE. The salary reported on the chart assumes an employee works for the entire fiscal year. It is not adjusted, for example, for an employee who is hired mid-year or an employee who is a partial FTE.
Employees in Units 3 and 4: Annual salary is derived by multiplying hourly rate by the number of contracted hours worked per day, and multiplying that by the number of contracted days worked per year. Hourly rates for employees in Units 3 and 4 are publicly available on the Anne Arundel County Public Schools websitehere.
Employees in Units 5(F) and 6: Annual salary falls within the pay ranges publicly available on the Anne Arundel County Public Schools website hereand is based on years of experience.
Thank you for your timely response.
From the data you provided to me, it’s not clear what is and isn’t included in the total salary figure. First, are these retrospective data from FY2016 or prospective data (based on salary schedules) for FY2017? And if retrospective data, are the reported salaries based on all pay codes or a subset of them. If a subset, which subset exactly? Were all FTEs included or only a subset (since FTEs aren’t reported, it’s not clear from the provided data)?
The detailed methodology you used to calculate the individual “annual salary” data you provided to the Capital for its “Class Struggle” series. This should include the Fiscal Year the data covers, the pay codes included under the category of “annual salary,” and whether FTEs less than 1.0 were included in the list of employees and their salaries.
A copy of the Capital’s formal written request for the salary data you provided.
If fulfilling this Public Information Act request is expected to take more than 2 hours, then starting with 1) and moving to 2), each item should be costed out separately in your response to me. In addition, in the unlikely event that any information cannot be provided to me in an electronic format, it should also be costed out separately.
This email is in response to your request (below) under the Public Information Act, Annotated Code of Maryland, General Provisions Article (GP) § 4-101, et seq., seeking “average salary data” and the “detailed methodology you used to calculate the average salary data” provided to The Capital newspaper for its recent “Class Struggle” series.
Anne Arundel County Public Schools did not provide “average salary data” to the newspaper for the series. Therefore, there also was no methodology used by AACPS to calculate such data. The newspaper made those calculations on its own from employee salary data provided by AACPS. That data is attached to this email for your convenience.
The average salary data you provided to the Capital as part of its “Class Struggle” series.
If not included in 1. above, the detailed methodology you used to calculate the average salary data you provided to the Capital.

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