School district accidentally posts employee salaries
The Orange County school district accidentally posted the salaries and birth dates of all its employees on an internal website Tuesday, then removed the data hours later when the “glitch” was discovered, school officials said.
The information that was posted was public under Florida law, except in the case of the “small number” of employees who have public records exemptions that keep their birth dates confidential, the district said in a message sent to employees Wednesday. Those employees will be contacted in the coming week, the message said.
The data released did not include teachers’ social security numbers or home addresses, the message added.
But the posting of salaries on the employee-only site — as Orange teachers debate whether to approve a new, and controversial, compensation package this month — prompted lots of online discussion and angst, some said.
“OCPS teacher friends: doh!” one person wrote on a Facebook post about the incident. The message then addressed the district and said, “You’re really losing points.”
What the district described as a “glitch” occurred when it decided to post a “teacher salary increase calculator” on the website, its message said, so teachers could figure out what their pay would be with the raises proposed in the new contract.
The document included a “hidden worksheet” with salaries that required employees to enter their I.D. number to access their information but wasn’t meant to show all the information to everyone, the district said.
“It was discovered after launch that the file could be opened in other applications and the hidden worksheet revealed,” the message said.
That made all salaries viewable, and some people downloaded the file before the documents were removed from the site.
A teacher who asked not to be named said some colleagues on social media worried about their personal information becoming public, and others were disturbed by what the salaries revealed, particularly that some more experienced teachers weren’t paid that much more than colleagues still new to the profession.
The documents included 25 fields of employee information, such as work location and gender, according to information shared with the Orlando Sentinel.
The district, in its message, said it would be posting a new calculator for staff Wednesday, one that will rely on employees entering their current salary themselves.