A proposal to remove the $250,000 salary cap for the state superintendent of Hawaii’s public schools and allow the amount to be set by the state Board of Education passed out of a divided state House Education Committee on Monday, despite opposition via dozens of pieces of testimony and “no” votes by two former teachers on the committee.

Senate Bill 3207 in its original form had proposed a new $350,000 cap for the position, but Senate committees subsequently cut it down to $300,000 and then shifted to supporting giving responsibility to the state school board to determine the superintendent’s pay, before sending the measure to the House side.

State schools Superintendent Keith Hayashi currently earns $240,000 as lead administrator for the state Department of Education, ranked the 13th-largest school district in the nation by the National Center for Education Statistics. The Hawaii DOE, the nation’s only statewide school district, comprises 295 schools (258 traditional public schools and 37 public charter schools), employs nearly 40,000 full- and part-time workers, and serves 167,649 students this school year.

The board in December deferred a proposal to raise Hayashi’s salary to $250,000 but approved a separate proposal to expand the criteria used to evaluate him.

State Board of Education Chair Warren Haruki, testifying Monday in support of the measure, said the cap was last revised about 10 years ago and that inflation has since boomed. Of six superintendents around the country leading similarly sized districts, Hayashi earns the least, Haruki added. The others ranged from $280,000 to $597,000.

Haruki said the board plans to use an independent consulting firm to create compensation recommendations to the board for various DOE leadership positions.

State Rep. Scott Matayoshi (D, Kaneohe-Maunawili), a House majority whip and member of the House Education Committee, countered, “Why are we giving an unlimited cap to someone who’s already making more than the governor?” He and other lawmakers said Gov. Josh Green’s paycheck as governor is in the neighborhood of $180,000.

“When I was a classroom teacher, we had a lot of complaints from the line teachers in the classroom like me that the DOE was just too top-heavy — I mean, we saw ourselves in the classroom getting kinda screwed,” Matayoshi said. “Our pay was bad. Our conditions were bad. Everything was pretty bad, and a lot of teachers were leaving.”

The average Hawaii public school teacher salary is $73,319, according to the Hawaii State Teachers Association.

“I do feel deeply uncomfortable with removing an additional layer of oversight that we could provide for the Board of Education,” added state Rep. Amy Perruso (D, Wahiawa-Whitmore Village-Mokuleia), a majority whip and committee member who also was a DOE teacher. “I think that if we are going to address inadequacies in salary that we should start from the bottom and not from the top.”

House Education Committee Chair Justin Woodson told the committee, “I concur that we need to pay our teachers more. We need to pay our principals more. We need to pay more across the board, and hopefully that’s something that we can work together on.”

Woodson recommended passing the measure and was joined by Vice Chair Trish LaChica and six others, with state Reps. Jeanne Kapela and Rose Martinez voting yes with reservations, while Perruso and Matayoshi voted no.

Other measures that were advanced by the House Education Committee include proposals to establish a “harm to students registry,” dissolve the relatively new School Facilities Authority and make emergency appropriations to the school meals program and the charter schools to cover unexpected costs such as rising food prices and utilities.