The Orange County Register's education editor previously told Weekly readers to look for the Santa Ana daily's initial pieces that pull from the names, schools and salaries of all 72,000 public school employees in the county in mid-November.
Give William Diepenbrock this: He is a man of his word.
]
On Sunday the Register published “Public School Paychecks Hit Six Figures for 3,300” by Fermin Leal and Scott Martindale and a related database naming each of those employees.
That marked the first use of the public information whose release has riled local school teachers.
According to the Register analysis of the data, a Tustin Unified School District senior administrator ranked as the county's highest-paid school employee, with a total compensation package of $428,241 that included a one-time $165,844 payout upon retirement for accrued vacation time.
While understanding the information must be made available to the public, and even agreeing that exposing the outrageous pay some school administrators are bringing home while teachers are receiving pink slips, a state teacher union rep previously told the Weekly he still has a problem with printing teacher names in the database because of fears over personal safety and inappropriate interpretation of the information.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.