Administrative salary studies are subject of ongoing court battle

By Sam Strike
Main Line Suburban Life

The Radnor Township School District has released two sets of documents that it has maintained for nearly two years were not public records.

The documents were released to Main Line Suburban Life after a Right-to-Know request it filed last month under the state's new open-records law. It received the documents in the mail last week.

A copy was also sent to Newtown Square resident Judy Sherry, who has been embroiled in a Right-to-Know petition with the district for nearly two years in the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas.

In the summer of 2007, after her Right-to-Know request was denied by the school district, Sherry filed a petition with the court over an in-house compilation of collected administrative-related data from other area school districts and an administrative-compensation report crafted by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

Sherry argued that the former influenced the latest administrator's salary and benefits agreement and that the latter directly resulted in the increase in two district administrators' salaries in 2007.

Michael V. Puppio, solicitor for the Radnor School Board, said last week that he reviewed the entirety of the new law and believed it was appropriate that those documents be provided.

When asked what specific change in Pennsylvania's open-records law caused that decision, he said, "Part of that response could have an impact on the pending Sherry litigation, and therefore that's not a specific matter I would comment on."

When Main Line Suburban Life requested the same documents it reworded the request from Sherry's original request. In a response letter from the district's business adminis Sharon Learn, she stated that further review of the requests was necessary.

Learn stated that one of the two requests was "confusing, at best."

"What exactly are you asking for?" it was asked.

But despite confusion, last week the newspaper got exactly was it was asking for, apparently. Sherry was also carbon-copied on the letter from Puppio.

Sherry and her attorneys maintain that they never got to see the documents they were requesting, so Puppio verified that they were indeed the documents that were in response to Sherry's request and submitted previously to the court for the court's in-camera review.

One person who had seen the documents and held one of them in his hands in the courtroom as Sherry and the district fought over them is former school-board member Richard Booker.

"It was plain to me that these documents were properly requested and should have been released in accordance with Pennsylvania law. The administrative salary study was paid for by taxpayer dollars, and was used to justify various levels of compensation for the district's employees," he wrote in an e-mail earlier this week. "There was no compelling rationale for keeping it secret from the public."

Booker had testified that then-board president Kathy Fisher had stated in an executive session that providing Sherry, a former school-board member and scrutinizer of school-district affairs, the documents would cause a "slippery slope."

Fisher has denied that personal relationships had anything to do with Sherry's Right-to-Know denial.

This was the first-ever Right-to-Know request that Sherry made, she said.

Pennsylvania's new open-records law came into effect Jan. 1 and states that all agency records are considered public unless they fit into 30 exceptions.

"A general review… and intent of the law… and the charge of the Radnor Township School District to engage in open and transparent government factor into the reason the documents were provided," said Puppio.

Special counsel Michael I. Levin served as the school district's attorney in this case.

So why did Main Line Suburban Life get documents that have been fought over for nearly two years?

"You submitted a Right-to-Know request, and procedure and processes were followed," said Radnor School-Board president Steve Gerber.

Gerber said he never saw neither the request nor the documents themselves.

"It's not a board issue," he said. When it was mentioned that these documents are the very ones Sherry and the district have been tussling over, Gerber said, "I can't comment on current litigation. I can't comment on anything until it is over."

"Until litigation is over, it is ongoing," he said.

The Sherrys extended a settlement offer to the district in January. It was their second settlement offer, they said.

But with the documents released, is the Sherry case ostensibly over?

"I anticipate at the next [school] board meeting this case will be finalized," said Daniel Sherry Jr., one of Sherry's attorneys.