Skip to main contentLast week, WW ignited a debate about salaries among top officials at Portland Public Schools with its story about salary raises for Superintendent Carole Smith's close advisers. Other media outlets followed, using data from 2012-13 and 2013-14 that was originally requested by a PPS activist parent, Kim Sordyl.
Separately, WW requested salary data stretching back to Smith's first year as superintendent, 2007-08. PPS provided the data to WW in locked PDF format, making year-to-year comparisons difficult.
But WW has now compiled all the data into a single searchable spreadsheet, which we're posting here for public consumption. The spreadsheet contains salary info only for central-office administrators earning more than $70,000. It doesn't included building administrators such as principals.
The data show a 52 percent increase in the number of central office employees making more than $70,000 a year between 2007-08 and 2014-15. (That's 195 central-office employees today.) The data also show 63 central-office employees make more than $100,000—a 70 percent increase from when Smith became superintendent.
Update on Tuesday, April 14: Here is a revised spreadsheet that removes high school business managers erroneously included in PPS's initial information release; they're not central-office employees. The new spreadsheet also removes several administrators who acted as principals and shouldn't have been included by WW. The changes don't alter the fact that there's been a big increase in the number of central office employees making more than $70,000 and another jump in the number of people earning over $100,000.
PPS's chief spokesman, Jon Isaacs, argues that a few dozen employees counted among the original 195 employees making over $70,000 in 2014-15 should be excluded, because they worked only part of the year. Taking his new number of 169 and comparing it to the figure for 2007-08, the data still show a 50 percent increase in the number of employees making over $70,000 annually.
WWeek 2015