SAN DIEGO – The San Diego Unified School District is constantly scrambling to try to balance its books.

Entering the 2017-18 budget year, the school board was faced with a massive $124 million deficit. More recently the district has been trying to deal with a $34 million budget shortfall.

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News reports say that in recent years, the school district has responded to the financial challenges by offering big buyout packages to veteran teachers, and laying off hundreds of teachers and other non-administrative employees.

In 2017-18, for example, 167 teachers lost their jobs.

Obviously, layoffs are necessary is such a dire situation, but we wonder if the district has been targeting the wrong groups of employees.

Perhaps the school board should take a close look at its extremely top-heavy administrative payroll the next time it decides to hand out pink slips in order to save big bucks.

In the 2016-17 fiscal year, the top 300 earners on the San Diego school payroll all made at least $150,000 per year in base salary plus benefits.

The total compensation (salary plus benefits) for those 300 employees came to $51.3 million. That breaks down to an average of $171,063 per employee.

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Their combined base salary came to nearly $40 million. Their pension contributions cost the district nearly $5 million, while their health coverage cost a combined $5.5 million.

Only nine of those 300 high-end employees were teachers, and only four were classified as “regular teachers.”

The rest were highly-paid administrators, and they were very expensive.

First came Superintendent Cynthia Marten, who received a $271,167 base salary, a health benefit worth $33,361, and a retirement contribution worth $31,391. Her total compensation for the year came to $345,919.

Then there was the General Counsel (total compensation $267,661), one deputy general counsel ($220,700), and four assistant general counsels (two at $221,456,one at $209,459, one at $208,388).

Then came the many chiefs, with all but one making at least $200,000 per year in salary plus benefits.

There was the chief financial officer ($271,269), chief of staff ($265,903), chief human resources officer ($259,723), chief facilities planning officer ($252,965), chief innovation officer ($227,353), chief operations officer ($220,060), and chief public information officer ($180,450).

There were two chiefs of police services ($224,507 and $222,532), along with a school police captain ($209,040) and school police sergeant ($204,561).

There were eight executive directors – of leadership and learning ($231,574), facility planning and design ($211,301), financial ($207,646), information technology ($202,775), human resources ($202,063), secondary schools ($200.905), online learning ($196,180), and quality assurance ($182,249).

Finally, there were 29 directors, all making at least $100,000 in base salary.

Does anybody really believe there isn’t room for some serious trimming on the incredibly bloated top end of this payroll, particularly in a district that has reached the point where teaching jobs are in serious jeopardy?