The city’s public school board quietly posted a report on its website late last month that details a controversial pay hike for senior staff — a move made two days before the school year ended and one week after the board was legally required to release the document.

The report reveals that trustees with the Calgary Board of Education met in secret in March to allocate $1.5 million to increase pay for top executives, mid-level managers and other exempt staff while it grappled with lower-than-expected provincial funding.

Based on a survey of other Calgary employers done by a human resource consulting company, the report called for an average increase to the salary grids for 220 non-unionized staff of about six per cent.

But some positions saw salaries hiked by 22 per cent over 2011 levels.

For example, an area director position can now earn a maximum $205,156, up from $167,500 two years ago.

The chief superintendent can now take home as much as $311,300, up from the previous maximum of $300,000. That figure does not include vehicle and other allowances normally provided to the board’s top bureaucrat.

The new salary ranges will “enable the CBE to be more competitive within the Calgary labour market” by allowing the board to “attract and retain the highest quality exempt employees,” the report said.

Keith Peterson, human resources director for the CBE, apologized for the delay in releasing the report, adding it took the school board months to determine how much of the $1.5 million would ultimately be spent.

“We didn’t know that number until mid-June when the process concluded,” Peterson said in an interview with the Herald.

But Sheila Taylor, one of two school trustees who voted against the report and fought in vain to have it debated in public, said the pay hike and attempts by the CBE to withhold the report send a terrible message to taxpayers.

“Bottom line, it was a bad decision, and now we’re seeing a report that was supposed to be made public be unreasonably delayed,” Taylor said.

The size of the salary hikes for senior staff, she added, is concerning “at a time when class sizes are increasing and high schools are being cut 11 per cent.”

Trustees approved the release of the report on April 23 after details of the pay raises leaked to the media, but Taylor suggested the full document was kept under wraps until the school year was nearly over and public board meetings had wrapped up for the summer.

“The board approved this being released months ago,” Taylor said. “So the question remains: Why did it take months for a report that is of great interest to the public to be released?”

The Calgary Herald filed an access to information request on April 18. That request was declined, in part, because the CBE said it would release the report within 60 days of the request, June 18. The CBE posted the report on its website on June 25.

In an internal July 10 email, obtained by the Herald, the CBE’s chief communications officer, Richard Peter, tells trustees and superintendents that the report was posted that day “according to a pre-set plan.”