The Carmel Pine Cone posted the salaries of the top administrator's and teacher's salaries in a recent edition of their local newspaper and one of the teachers was upset with the information made public criticizing the newspaper for waging a vendetta on the Carmel Unified School District's employees.
The Pine Cone defended their right to publish the high teacher and administrator's salaries based on a well established California law which states that government records -- including the names and salaries of government employees -- are public information.
The Public Records Act of 1968, the adoption of Proposition 59 in 2004, and continuing up to the California Supreme Court's 2007 decision in the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21 vs. Superior Court of Alameda County, were the Pine Cone's defense for publishing the salaries, where the Supreme Court explained that "openness in government is essential to the functioning of a democracy. If corruption exists in government, how would it be exposed and rooted out of government if officials were allowed to keep what they did hidden?"
The Pine Cone stated that it is necessary to disclose names in connection with individual's salaries to find inefficiency, favoritism, nepotism and fraud with respect to the government use of public funds for employee salaries. They went further to explain that in recent history, government payroll corruption is very common in the state.
It may be a commonsense legal argument, but can they really compare local teachers with international engineers? Perhaps teachers should be able to maintain a higher level of privacy than international engineers.
Read the April 5, 2013 Pine Cone article for yourself, and the next issue's response to see if you agree with having individual teacher's salaries made public.
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