Elementary school principal Anthony Forst Jr. was rarely, if ever, sick in his 35-year career with the Chicago Public Schools.
But he collected $129,000 in sick pay his last year, bringing his total salary to $247,000 - significantly more than the mayor or governor makes. And it was all legal.
That $247,000 figure appeared on the top of one of the first sorts of teacher salary data Sun-Times education reporter Rosalind Rossi and I received from the state.
It led us to a story detailing how, under a little-known provision in their contract, Chicago teachers and principals can collect up to 315 days of unused sick pay in their last year of service, a practice unheard of in private industry.
We also found that 244 of those sick days could be added to their service time for pension purposes, a double-dip that was unheard of even in government. As a result, principals could get bigger pensions.
Rossi and I were relatively new to this sort of thing, as our paper had just lost both of our computer-assisted reporting specialists and decided to hurl us into the breach.
Fortunately, the paper sent us to an IRE and NICAR Boot Camp where we learned the tricks of the CAR trade. We were much better prepared to tackle the story than if we had tried to teach ourselves.
As a warm-up, we did the annual school report card, which involved mostly importing school test score data into Microsoft Access and formatting it for a special section. It was mind-numbing work, importing and boiling down 11,000 columns of data for 3,900 schools. But it helped hone our CAR skills.
We had to learn to select and import large chunks of delimited text files and make sure we assigned the correct heading to each column of data. Then we found ways to check its accuracy. We also learned to link the tables we had generated to tables that had been created by another reporter the year before.
We ran queries that calculated the difference in school scores between the years for several grade levels in several subjects.
In the course of all this work and while we were going back and forth with the State Board of Education on discrepancies in the data (the boot camp had prepared us well to expect this), Rossi thought to ask them if the latest teacher salary data was available.
It was, and it arrived on a CD by courier the next day, free of charge. When we finished the report card, we felt ready for anything, and decided to tackle the teacher salary data, which was technically a lot simpler.
Now the challenge was to get something interesting out of this data containing 159,000 records of the salaries of every teacher and school administrator in the state.
The teacher pay story had already been done to death.
The previous year our paper had written about the best-paid high school teachers and what they did to earn their salaries.
A Sun-Times investigative reporter no longer with the paper took it up a notch, doing the definitive story on school superintendent pay. He revealed that top-paid superintendents were getting retirement incentives that had the potential to cripple the taxpayer-backed state pension fund.
Our competition, the Chicago Tribune, borrowed that angle and applied it to elementary teachers.
So Rossi suggested we look at principals.
Our data had the name, salary, position and district information for all school employees in the state, but the state board had omitted the names of their schools.
We asked them to provide another disk with the school name information, which they did, and forged on, running simple queries for salaries of high school, junior high and elementary principals. To do that we selected the codes used for each position, which were provided in a separate text file that also contained the record layout.
The top ten ranged from $179,000 to $247,000, which was definitely very interesting. But the question arose, how do they make the money? Most were at or close to retirement age. Was it just another case of retirement incentives inflating pay?
The raw numbers only gave us total salaries.
We had to get the breakdowns the hard way, by calling each district. We made our jobs easier by focusing only on the top ten salaries.
But the district superintendents and business managers at first took advantage of the fact that we didn't know which questions to ask. They gladly broke out retirement incentives because they could make a case that this saved them money by enabling them to hire less-experienced, lower-paid replacements.
But accumulated sick pay, vacation pay and other benefits that we had no idea existed all were lumped into one category.
Gradually, by comparing notes between districts, we learned to ask for more specific breakdowns from everyone and kept calling until we got them.
Getting the numbers is sometimes the easiest part of the story.
As a result, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet we used to keep track of the salary breakdowns kept growing wider.
Three facts quickly emerged. All of these principals had retired, and in many cases retirement incentives had pushed them into the top pay brackets.
But only suburban principals got the retirement incentives.
Chicago principals got a different going away present. They were allowed to cash out nearly a year of sick days and apply a large portion of those days to their service time, thereby boosting their pensions.
We still weren't sure this was a story.
To put it in perspective, we called school districts in New York and Los Angeles. After wading through their complex retirement packages (nothing is simple in educational bureaucracies) we learned they were far less generous with accumulated sick pay than Chicago.
And a compensation expert at the Illinois Chamber of Commerce told us such benefits were unheard of in private industry.
So we finally had a story.
School and union officials defended the system, saying it provides an incentive for teachers (who eventually become principals) to show up every day and thus saves money spent on substitute teachers. It also rewards Chicago teachers who stick it out until retirement and don't make as much money as suburban teachers.
And it serves as a de facto retirement incentive, allowing quicker replacement of top-scale teachers and principals with lower-paid beginners.
But other experts pointed out that the Chicago teachers and principals also get another perk, that few, if any, in private industry get - a pension that pays 75 percent of their base retirement salary.
This project confirmed what Rossi and I had learned in the CAR boot camp. Getting the numbers is sometimes the easiest part of the story. Figuring out what they mean, putting them in context and then bringing those numbers to life is the hard part.
Contact Art Golab by e-mail at agolab@suntimes.com