When Jill Gildea became superintendent of Park City schools in 2018, she reorganized the district office, creating a new COO position and tapping a former colleague from her Chicago days, Mike Tanner, to head it.

Tanner started in 2019 with a salary of $130,000 and responsibilities including “directing leadership, administration, and supervision of Park City School District with a focus on … daily operational functions,” duties previously divided between the superintendent and business administrator, who worked entirely in Park City. The COO role is second in command to the superintendent.

Since his hiring, Gildea let Tanner work partially remotely from Illinois to continue military work and help care for a parent. Under that arrangement, Tanner spends his summers mostly in Illinois, and during the school year he’s regularly out of the office as well.

She also crafted a second contract giving him a yearly stipend of $55,000 (now over $77,000) for “special assignment” duty as district security director, bumping his pay to $185,000. His COO job description calls such oversight an essential function. District officials declined to explain how his special assignment extends beyond regular duties.

Tanner’s compensation including salary and benefits is now $394,000 a year — the highest in Utah K-12 schools for that role, according to Transparent Utah. And he said recently his work as a contingency airlift director for the Air Force Reserves is ongoing.

“Our area is responsible for all the global Department Of Defense airlifts and has about 1,600 aircraft within the DOD that we can use to support the nation’s wartime needs, plus we have the ability to rent about 1,000 commercial aircraft,” Tanner said from Chicago during a phone interview with KPCW in July. “The operations have been very busy during this time supplementing the work in Ukraine and Israel. That’s what our unit does and we’re very good at it.”

He declined to specify how many hours that involves, saying only that he spends a majority of his time in Park City. He also said he’s nearing retirement from his Air Force Reserves role and is working to extract his duties from being operations-based to personnel-focused.

Tanner’s Park City home deed and property taxes list his name and an Illinois address. Three social media accounts identified him as an independent contractor in greater Chicago, though one was updated after media questions, replacing his Air Force Reserves title with his Park City School District title while still identifying his physical location as Illinois.

He doesn’t appear to be registered to vote in Utah, and his local car sports Illinois plates.

Tanner didn’t respond to emailed questions about how he divides his time and fulfills COO duties remotely.

Routine out-of-state remote work for an operations role appears uncommon. Surveys of other Utah school districts and local governments didn’t turn up any examples of it occurring elsewhere.

Park City School Board President Andrew Caplan, who with the school board hired Gildea and has defended her leadership through multiple investigations and findings of legal violations at all levels of government, called questions about employee remote work and pay “harassment” and declined to answer them. 

More than 90% of the school district’s $111 million budget comes from property taxes, which the school board in August increased more than 5% to fund raises. 

Interim district Superintendent Caleb Fine said he was unaware of Tanner having other work. 

“I’ve had full confidence in Mr. Tanner’s professionalism and capability,” Fine said. “He has successfully overseen six construction projects, implemented significant security improvements, and has been consistently reliable and highly responsive in operational matters.”

Former Human Resources Director Shad Sorenson worked with Tanner for nearly three years in the district office. He said Gildea informed him Tanner had residences in both Utah and Illinois, Tanner and his family spent summers in Illinois, and Tanner had military responsibilities outside the office. 

Sorenson said Gildea told him Tanner could work remotely as needed. Sorenson described being surprised that a high-level cabinet position had such flexibility, but said Tanner was always accessible by phone when not in the office. Sorenson said he didn’t track Tanner’s remote work, but estimated he was physically present two-thirds of the school year, and considerably less over summer break. 

Summer means construction, and Tanner oversees the district’s $150 million bond-funded facilities projects, which have been plagued by missteps and delays, missing permits and unlawful storage of harmful contaminants on school grounds.

“The school district’s internal controls are insufficient to reasonably assure compliance with environmental regulations,” Utah auditors wrote in a 2023 report. “This is concerning given the increased risk of financial liability and negative impacts to health and safety …”

In other words, storing dirt containing harmful levels of lead and arsenic for six years where students walked and played could prompt future lawsuits if people develop diseases linked to exposure to those contaminants. 

Flawed construction oversight also caused delays and higher costs to taxpayers, the report found. 

Three months ago, construction snafus nearly derailed the start of classes at Ecker Hill Middle School.

Utah Deputy Fire Marshal Ryan Nelson inspected that campus three times over the final week of summer vacation. Nelson said during the first two, so much was unfinished he didn’t even write reports. Then on Aug. 19, Nelson spent seven hours on-site overseeing last-ditch efforts to pass inspection. Crews finished a few hours before the doors opened.

“It was very close to a disaster,” Nelson said. “[The district] was making plans for what to do the next day. The job super, who makes more money than anyone, was riding a floor cleaner at 1 a.m.”

Fine said Tanner returning to Park City from Chicago the evening of the 18th shouldn’t concern the community.

Ecker Hill parent Sarah Crockett said the school’s construction zone atmosphere detracts from teaching and learning, and wondered whether the work might have benefitted from more oversight.

“I’d assume if you have multiple projects going on that an on-site presence would be an asset, especially at such a highly compensated executive level,” Crockett said. “How many days is he working from here and how many days is he working out of state? The right response would be some transparency.” 

Despite emergency response oversight duties, an employee said Tanner wasn’t present in April 2023 during a close call near the district office, and didn’t communicate about it afterward. A supervisor confirmed a bus driver left a campus with a bus full of students after broadcasting alarming comments over a two-way radio, then turning the radio off, violating policy. Panicking colleagues devised a response, locating the bus using GPS and creating a truck barricade to intercept it, after which the driver was taken away by emergency workers.

Fine and Tanner declined to comment on that event.

Gildea left the district abruptly Sept. 16 amid reports she appeared to violate her contract by not disclosing her job search. School board President Caplan declined to comment at the time on whether she had informed the board of her search. 

Like Tanner, she was Utah’s highest compensated in her role. She announced she was retiring from Park City schools after a special board meeting that day, and Fine took over the next morning. Six weeks later, Gildea started a new job in Colorado.

Fine maintained that Tanner doesn’t have any special agreements, and said by email that no employees do. 

But Gildea told the school board in July that nearly two dozen employees — including Tanner and Executive Assistant Lorie Pearce — have formal remote work agreements that are reviewed annually by supervisors and human resources. 

In response to a public records request for Tanner’s agreements, Pearce said no records existed. Responding to another records request, Pearce provided compensation information for Tanner about $50,000 lower than what the district shared with Transparent Utah. District officials didn’t respond to multiple requests to clarify discrepancies. 

Other employees in Gildea’s inner circle also received higher pay and more perks than peers. 

Pearce’s compensation has doubled since she began reporting to Gildea in 2018. According to Transparent Utah, Pearce received a $50,000 raise in 2024 following a $20,000 raise in 2023. Her annual compensation with benefits now totals $249,000. That also is apparently the state’s highest, equaling superintendents’ executive assistants at the two largest school districts combined. Her compensation is higher than any Park City School District teacher and most principals, equaling the two highest-paid principals. Pearce could also work from her area home two days a week with Gildea’s permission.

Fine said he appreciated the school board prioritizing employee pay.

In another unusual arrangement, a former director of parent education and community engagement, Anna Stampfli, stayed on the payroll for five months with a $65,000 salary after moving to Tennessee. Gildea granted her fully remote work for a role that included helping families with paperwork and hosting district functions. 

And communications, a department that worked in tandem with Gildea, dwarfs larger districts’. Jordan School District, for example, is 10 times bigger than the Park City School District but spends about $200,000 less on communications annually, according to Transparent Utah. Park City’s district spends nearly $700,000 in compensation on three and a half communications people — and outsources some communications work, as well.

Park City School District ranks 23rd in size among Utah’s 42 school districts with about 4,100 students and 700 employees at seven campuses. Enrollment has declined about 20% since 2018. 

Josh Mann has a child in the district. He chronicled Gildea’s tenure in his blog, and dissatisfaction led him and fellow parent Karl Persson to launch a petition over the summer urging the school board not to renew her contract. It gathered 561 signatures, but Caplan and outgoing board members Wendy Crossland and Anne Peters prevailed, renewing an updated contract with a raise and more lucrative departure terms in a 3-2 vote shortly before learning about her job search. 

Continuing board members Nick Hill and Meredith Reed voted against renewing the contract. The incumbent majority had earlier quit their bids for reelection, and all but one remaining candidate for their seats asked them to leave the decision to the new school board taking over in January 2025.

The board didn’t answer questions at the time regarding contract updates, though one board member described being unaware it had been altered. Changes included extending the amount of pay Gildea would receive if she was terminated and inserting an automatic renewal clause that was later removed after the board learned such clauses appeared to violate Utah law.

“We need a reset at the top,” Mann said. “My hope is that with a new school board and superintendent, we can build a strong foundation that prioritizes our community, streamlines administration, and ensures accountability.”

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