By Esther Wickham
The Center Square

Arizona school superintendents are inflating taxpayer costs with salaries, lavish benefits and secretive compensation packages, a new report reveals.

A Goldwater Institute report, “The Hidden Ways Arizona School Superintendents Are Paid,” looked at Arizona superintendents’ contracts collected over four months from 41 of Arizona’s largest school districts. The report also graded the transparency of school districts in disclosing this requested public information.

The report’s findings are that superintendents’ total compensation, including benefits like performance pay and deferred compensation, significantly exceeds their publicly reported base salaries.

“The true level of compensation for a superintendent is not that base salary that gets published. It’s in adding up all of the benefits that come with that contract … In some circumstances, it was 35, 40% higher than the actual base salary that was published,” Christopher Thomas, Goldwater’s director of legal strategy for education policy, told The Center Square.

Districts pay up to $1,250 in taxpayer money for stipends that some superintendents receive monthly as “car allowances,” the report says.

And because of perks and benefits, taxpayers are being double-charged for retirement packages, according to the report.

Some superintendents receive both a pension and a personal retirement account and get a total of 15 weeks off when combined with school holidays.

For example, one superintendent, Jeremy Calles of Tolleson Union High School District, was making $362,000 a year. But with additional perks, his salary grew to $491,000, Thomas said.

The report also notes school districts made it difficult to access public records and attempted to block access to superintendents’ contracts.

All but one of 41 surveyed districts failed to publicly disclose the provisions of their superintendent pay packages, according to the report. Ten districts received an “F” grade in public transparency based on the schools’ responses to public records requests for superintendent contracts.

Currently 40 school districts do not publicly disclose superintendent contracts online, the report says.

“We got a significant amount of resistance, some of which wanted to charge us a commercial rate for receiving the documentation. One district flat out refused to give it to us, period,” Thomas said.

With rising compensation for these superintendents, academic performance is at an all-time low in America.

In the latest Arizona Department of Education School District Report Card, 26% of students were proficient in English Language Arts, and 21% of students were proficient in math. These numbers were below both the statewide averages.

“It’s deeply concerning that while academic performance continues to slide, some superintendents are pulling in pay and perks that add up to nearly half a million dollars a year,” Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen said in a statement Monday to The Center Square. “Taxpayers have every right to ask why so much money is going to bureaucracy instead of the classroom.

“When families see declining results but rising salaries, it erodes trust in the system,” Petersen, R-Gilbert, said. “We need full transparency and accountability to make sure education dollars are delivering real outcomes for Arizona students.”

The report offers some potential solutions, such as simplifying pay structures, requiring every district to post superintendent contracts online and publishing full compensation numbers that include every perk and benefit.

“After all, Arizona taxpayers deserve to know how much school superintendents are really being paid,” the report states.