Thank you for this article. Very informative.

It is very unfortunate that the Pleasanton Unified School District has not increased the teachers' salaries to keep up with the inflation and other increases in the cost of living. Worse is the fact that the lowest salaried district administration makes 150% more than the average pay of a teacher in Pleasanton (pay range typically falls between $56 - $83K. The highest salaried district administrator makes close to $400K, not including other benefits, such as housing/car/phone allowances. Feel free to google "salaries of pleasanton unfied school district" and select transparent California site.

Before readers become teary-eyed indulgent over local teacher salaries and benefits, they should undertake their own assessments of available salary and benefit data. An excellent source is Transparent California’s School District compilation ( Web Link ).

Districts there are organized by county — e.g. Alameda County, with links for Dublin Unified (latest = 2021), Livermore Valley Joint Unified (2022), Pleasanton Unified (2021) — and Contra Costa County, with compensation data there for San Ramon Valley Unified (2022 and earlier years). I’m most familiar with the last of these, SRVUSD.

Embarcadero Media’s recently unionized young reporters emphasized “Single-Status Benefits” in the bar graph above. That made me curious.

So I downloaded the SRVUSD 2022 compensation table, and selected “Total Pay” dollars (most to least) as the ordering criterion. I then ran a Benefit-cost average for the 2463 SRVUSD employees with pay alone exceeding $40,000 (realizing meanwhile that these direct dollar-pay numbers show only a partial-year effect of SRVUSD’s 8.5% increase and connected benefit boosts).

The table in the article above shows Single-Status Benefits ranging from $5,000 to $10,900 for the four school districts mentioned. The SRVUSD benefit-cost average for the tabulated 2463 employees with “Total Pay” (salary, overtime, and “other pay”) exceeding $40,000 was $30,904 (!) — including a number of employees being supplied zero benefits (presumably due to spousal benefits derived elsewhere).

Beyond all that, realize that benefits are provided 365 days and 52 weeks per year, though work years for SRVUSD personnel (with similar patterns in other districts) range from just 186 days (teachers) to 225 days (upper-level administrators). That contrasts with workaday employees (average Joes and Jills) in business and industry, typically with 240 work days per year. See Web Link .