When the bulk of your $358M School budget is in Salaries & Benefits - failing to provide a headcount schedule lacks transparency

 Well, whatever you want to say about this year's constantly changing school budget, there's one thing you can say with certainly.

You can't really understand the staffing levels since they won't tell you how their staffing breaks down by title, what the staffing requirements are this year, how that has changed from the prior year and why. Not only that but they also fail to show you how many non-budgeted heads were hired between July 1 and February 1 when they update their budget numbers to actual. Also known as the 'Staffing Shell Game'. Throw in 'Breakage' and other salary line games and you can see why letting them get away without producing a headcount schedule for the budget is critical.

Be that as it may, I just asked for and received the school districts salary file. I summarized it so you at least see what we're talking about in terms of magnitude. This file came with 2,603 names of which 2,406 had salary numbers. 

The total salaries are a whopping $191,230,525.

Here's a breakdown of the heads and dollars:

Also, created a table so you can see each person by name, location, department and title. This allows you to sort the file anyway you want to see it and to see how many of each position there are on the payroll.

Here's a picture of one of the breakdowns. this shows the top 25 salaries:

Here's another showing the Central Services department:

Information is important. This is an Excel file and if anybody wants to see it, you're welcome to it. Jut drop me an email.

Anyhoo, the Board of Mythomania should insist that the School Budget come with a headcount schedule by department showing last year's budget, last year's budget updated for actuals and this year's budget.