Sioux Falls Hides Superintendent’s Five-Year Contract from Taxpayers

Sioux Falls isn't looking so shiny lately. Mayor Huether is making City Hall look more like the Führerhauptquartiere. And the Sioux Falls School District is making a joke of open records laws.

Josh Verges reports that the Sioux Falls School District has declared Superintendent Pam Homan's five-year contract a confidential document.

Now wait a minute: five years? How many of you have a five-year guarantee of employment? Not even Governor Daugaard gets that kind of a deal... and we get to see all sorts of his papers.

The Sioux Falls School District claims that a superintendent's contract is personnel information that the superintendent herself can't even legally publicize, since the document belongs to the school district.

Mitchell superintendent Joe Graves disagrees with that assessment. He happily handed his contract to the press:

Mitchell Superintendent Joe Graves didn't hesitate to turn over his contract. He knew employee evaluations were not public but figured the details of his employment contract would be no different from his salary, which plainly is public.

"I mean, it's a public document," he said. "That would be a public document for any of the employees we have" [Josh Verges, "District: Homan's Contract Not Public," that Sioux Falls paper, 2011.09.17].

I don't have a scan of my contract handy, but ask me, and I'll show you. Of course, my contract isn't terribly exciting. The Spearfish School District is paying me $35,500 to teach French this year. That's about all it says.

Apparently administrator contracts are a lot mroe intersting than teacher contracts. Yankton superintendent Joe Gertsema tells the press that superintendent contracts can include information about health problems, security issues, and disciplinary plans. I've never had such intems included in a teacher contract.

But even if superintendent contracts do include such remarkable, complicated, personal clauses, they still work for the taxpayers. Taxpayers have a right to know how the schools are spending their money... especially when they are giving one public servant a five-year guarantee of employment.

If Sioux Falls won't show Homan's contract, Bob Mercer wonders how long it will take the Legislature to force the district to do so. Senator Al Novstrup from Aberdeen says, not very long:

Sen. Al Novstrup, R-Aberdeen, was the lead sponsor on legislation last session that created a financial penalty for public entities that act in bad faith by denying access to public records. He said he intends to bring another bill next year that would make it clear that school administrators' contracts are public.

Novstrup called the Sioux Falls decision "outrageous."

"They're saying, 'We are spending the taxpayers' money in a way that we don't want you to know,' " he said. "We're still not to the point where the elected official or the bureaucrat understands that the citizens own the government" [Verges, 2011.09.17].

Senator Novstrup gets some other issues wrong, but he's right on this one. The Sioux Falls School District has a chance to preserve public trust and submit to some taxpayer accountability. Show that contract, Sioux Falls.