In belatedly releasing more details about former executive director Scott Plotkin’s pay, the California School Board Assn. board of directors fessed up last week that they really didn’t know how much he made in total ($308,000 in 2006, $384K in ’07, $517K in ’08 and $403K in ’09).

“The Board reviewed the executive director’s compensation incrementally, and determined the level of compensation based on snapshots of information – rather than looking comprehensively at compensation history and the long-term implications,” said a statement posted on the organization’s web site.

The immediate consequence is a serious setback in the leadership of a critical organization representing  K-12 education  at a time when all interest groups in Sacramento are scrapping over every penny. CSBA is facing  a swarm of   school board members who are angry over how their taxpayer-funded dues, which comprised about 40 percent of CSBA’s $16 million budget, have been handled.

At the same time that Plotkin was being rewarded double-digit salary increases four years in a row, in two straight years he doubled an already inexplicably rich bonus, from $39,000 in 2006 to $81,000 in 2007 to a whopping $175,000 in 2008. (Someone please tell what did he do to deserve THAT much?) Last year, with a base salary of $329,000, the bonus dropped to $13,000. During all four years, 2006-09, Plotkin also received between $52,000 and $66,000 in “other compensation,” which the board said constituted additional temporary work, cell phone allowances and employer-paid group term life insurance.

The statement didn’t explain which of the pieces of compensation board members explicitly authorized and which they didn’t. CSBA President Frank Pugh has acknowledged that he and the board didn’t know that Plotkin reneged on his pledge to take a 4 percent pay cut two years ago. Other executives in the organization took 3 percent reductions.

Judy Hannemann, a school board member from Los Altos who represented Santa Clara County on CSBA’s board of directors from 1994 to 2008, told the Mercury News that the 32-member board relied on the four-member executive committee for information about executives’ compensation. The committee consists of the president, president-elect, immediate past president and the vice president.

Plotkin retired, effective Sept. 1, after admitting that he lied about the pay cut he didn’t take and about misusing the organization’s credit card for $11,000 in cash advances at a casino.

Looking ahead, CSBA is promising more rigorous check and balances on compensation and better communication so that board is kept in the loop, not embarrassed. The board is pledging independent reviews of its financial systems and its compensation structure and to do a more comprehensive performance review of the executive director.

It’s also set up a financial accountability page on its website that includes the compensation of CSBA’s eight-member executive staff, who, beside Plotkin, earned from $93,000 (assistant executive director) to $199,000 (deputy executive director) in 2009.