A majority of the Orange County Board of Education has been butting heads with Orange County Department of Education Superintendent Al Mijares for years, taking him to court and, recently, endorsing a candidate to run against him in the June 7 election.
Now, some board members want to lower Mijares’ salary.
On Wednesday, the board is scheduled to consider a resolution that could reset the salary of the superintendent beginning July 1. Mijares’s current annual salary is $382,387, which includes a 10% stipend for his years of service. His benefits package, including health insurance and contributions toward retirement, adds about $85,000 more.
It’s not yet clear how much of a reduction might be considered.
In an interview this week, Mijares noted that the board set his salary in 2012, when he became superintendent. Since then, his compensation has grown with cost of living allowances and other increases.
Mijares was cautious to not criticize board members or discuss what prompted the proposed resolution.
“I don’t want to speculate on their motives,” he said.
In recent years, the conservative majority on the five-member Board of Education has engaged in a power struggle with Mijares. Board members Mari Barke, Lisa Sparks, Tim Shaw and Ken Williams want to have more control over the department’s budget and other matters.
In 2019, the board sued Mijares over who should have final say in the county’s education budget. That lawsuit is pending. Another lawsuit board members filed against Mijares – over the hiring of an attorney – was settled by both sides a year ago. The legal bill, paid by taxpayers, was $3.2 million.
Williams, who has served on the board since 1996, has long been at odds with Mijares. Williams has led efforts against state mandated programs and rules – including sex education and, in recent years, face masks – that Mijares has been legally required to enforce.
Mijares, like the board members, is an elected official. Only voters can remove him from his post. And the four board members who oppose Mijares have made it clear they want someone else in the seat.
They’re officially endorsing Stefan Bean, Mijares’ first electoral opponent since he became superintendent. He ran unopposed in 2014 and 2018.
Bean, a former superintendent of a charter school chain in California, has connections to Barke, the board’s president. Bean sits on the board of the Orange County Classical Academy, a conservative charter school in Orange founded by Mari Barke’s husband, Jeff Barke. That public charter, which recently won approval from the OCBE to expand, is a member school of Hillsdale College, a Christian institution in Michigan that promotes conservative ideology and, according to an investigation in Salon magazine last month, promotes an “overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution.”
Meanwhile, the board majority has been discussing the superintendent’s salary for several months. By law, the board can set a salary before the superintendent assumes office but it cannot retroactively decrease it, according to the board’s attorney, Greg Rolen.
The resolution under consideration Wednesday has a blank space for how much the superintendent of schools would make during the 2022-2026 elected term. Board members are expected to come up with that figure on Wednesday.
In a presentation to the board last month, Rolen said that Mijares is the highest paid county school district superintendent in California. The next highest, he said, is the Santa Clara Unified superintendent, who earned $352,827 in 2020. Williams compared Mijares’ salary to Gov. Newsom’s and other state officials, whose salaries are lower.
“Should the superintendents be making more than the governor who makes $210,000 a year here in California, or a congressional congressman of $174,000. Should these superintendents be making these huge salaries?” Williams said at the board’s Jan. 5 meeting.
Mijares’s annual salary is $347,625, but like other managers, teachers and classified employees, the superintendent receives a longevity pay for his years in education. With more than 30 years of service, that adds an extra 10% to his salary.
Those longevity stipends were approved by the board in 2017 as an incentive to retain and recruit employees. The only current member who was on the board then was Williams, and he voted against granting Mijares the longevity pay.
In his role, Mijares provides guidance and support to 28 school districts plus the county department’s own programs for students in alternative and special education schooling. Orange County has approximately 475,000 students in more than 600 schools. The county school district does not oversee or control other districts within the county.
Superintendents of the bigger school districts within Orange County make base salaries that are comparable to Mijares’. In 2020, according to the most recent data from the State Controller, Capistrano Unified’s Superintendent, Kirsten Vital Brulte, earned $374,539 and Santa Ana Unified’s Superintendent, Jerry Almendarez, made $336,815. That doesn’t include their retirement and health contributions and other benefits.
Board member Beckie Gomez was the lone trustee to repeatedly ask in recent months for more information about Mijares’ benefits package, pointing out that he doesn’t get all the benefits other area superintendents receive.
Unlike many other superintendents in Orange County, for example, Mijares does not receive a mileage allowance while driving within the county or medical benefits after retirement. She also questioned how fair it is to do salary comparisons to other county districts across California, where the cost of living is not as expensive as it is in Orange County.
“If we’re going to do comparisons, we need to be getting the full measure of their compensation, including any for their retirement, moving expenses, auto allowance and other benefits,” Gomez said in an interview this week.
As for the board’s motive behind the move to lower Mijares’ salary, Gomez said of her colleagues: “I don’t know what their goal is. It hasn’t been clear.
“If the goal is to reduce costs, there are other things we can do, like look at the board’s benefits,” she said.
Is there a personal vendetta against Mijares?
“It gives the impression that it’s personal because there’s no stated goal as to why this agenda item has appeared,” Gomez said.
Barke, the board president, declined to say Tuesday why and how the resolution came about, adding that she will address the topic during Wednesday’s meeting.
Mijares, at an earlier meeting, said he has never made an issue of his salary, which was set by the board when he was first appointed to the job in 2012 after the department’s previous superintendent stepped down. At the time, he told board members recently, he was making more money at his previous job, which offered him full tuition for his children. “So I lost that.”
Now, the board appears poised to lower the superintendent’s salary for whoever wins the elected post come June 7.
The board meets Wednesday, April 6, at 2:30 p.m., at the Department of Education office in Costa Mesa. The meeting also can be viewed online. A vote on the resolution is scheduled after 5 p.m.
Source: Orange County Register
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