If our School District were forced to lay off David Mielke this year (not likely due to the seniority of the Teachers Union president) it would save well over $125K, not merely the $90K in salary he mentioned in a recent story.
The $125K is the School District’s cost for employing him as a high school health teacher, a union rep. That’s right. Our district actually pays the union reps salaries to negotiate with it. Our district also pays the cost of all of his health and medical benefits — medical, dental, vision, life and his increasing statutory benefits.
To make sure, I checked with Transparent California on Mr. Mielke’s past costs to the district. I also looked up the 2016-17 Salary schedule on the CCUSD website.
There, the highest paid step, Class 5, Step 23, was shown to be $98,430. The starting salary at Class 1, Step 1 was $50,625—much higher than the examples Mr. Mielke gave.
When the previous superintendent, David LaRose, joined the district back in 2011-12, there were only about 30 teachers costing the district over $100K each to employ them.
However, by the time Mr. LaRose left, he and our School Board members already had negotiated salary raises to where there would be over 120 teachers costing the district over $100K each—an increase of 400 percent to 1/3 of the teaching staff.
In another sign of the School District’s freer-spending over the last four years, Board members have agreed to almost 25 percent in raises for all district employees, while some teachers in the Step-and-Column program received as much as 40 percent in combined salary raises and step increases over the same period.
But I wouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Mielke for not accurately disclosing his salary as a teacher–even if he did low-ball it.
It is probably very difficult–what with all the past retro, mid-year and annual raises that have happened, along with the annual step increases given over the last four years–for anyone to keep track of them, let alone, remember one’s current salary.
Mr. Laase may be contacted a GMLaase@aol.com