In a year it hit several educational and financial milestones, Kamehameha Schools rewarded Chief Executive Officer Dee Jay Mailer with a $17,437 pay increase.

In its annual tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service, Kamehameha Schools said it paid Mailer $591,677 in salary, benefits and other compensation during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2007.

That pay package was up from Mailer's year-earlier compensation of $574,230.

The $9.1 billion trust's highest compensated executive was Kirk Belsby, vice president of endowment. He received $689,560 last year, which was up nearly 3.9 percent from his 2006 compensation of $663,724.

Mailer's and Belsby's compensation were on the high end of what large Hawai'i foundations and trusts pay their top executives. But it was well below the $820,000 average that the state's largest healthcare nonprofits pay their CEOs.

Kamehameha Schools spokesman Kekoa Paulsen said the trust's compensation policies are performance based and reflect the credentials and qualifications of its executives.

The estate's endowment grew by a record $1.4 billion in its 2007 fiscal year, paving the way for future expansion of its educational programs.

Founded by the 1884 will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, Kamehameha Schools educates children of Hawaiian ancestry.

The trust, the state's largest private landowners and one of the nation's wealthiest charitable trusts, spent a record $250 million on its educational programs last year and reached 35,000 Native Hawaiian students and families last year.

Kamehameha Schools said it expects to spend another $270 million to $277 million this year. And under a longer-term plan, Kamehameha Schools aims to increase the number of students it serves to 55,000 by the year 2018.

According to its tax filing, two dozen Kamehameha Schools employees and trustees received more than $100,000 in compensation last year.

Two former trustees —Henry Peters and Matsuo Takabuki — also receive six-figures payments through a decades-old deferred compensation that was discontinued in the early 1990s.

Peters, who resigned in 1999 after the IRS threatened to revoke the school's tax-exempt status, took home $488,619 in deferred pay last year while Taka-buki, who retired in 1993, received $307,806 in deferred pay.

A deferred compensation plan is a tax-savings strategy that allows an executive to postpone the payment of part of his or her annual compensation until a later date, when the executive is in a lower tax bracket.

Among its officers and managers, Kamehameha Schools said it paid Vice President of Strategic Planning Christopher Pating $422,088, Financial Assets Director Elizabeth Hokada $325,864 and Commercial Assets Director Paul Quintiliani $302,111.

Special Projects Director Susan Todani earned $231,756 last year while Michael Chun, headmaster of the Kapalama campus, received $237,888.

Kamehameha's board members Douglas Ing, Nainoa Thompson, Diane Plotts and retired Adm. Robert Kihune earned between $97,500 and $113,500 each last year while Constance Lau, who stepped down from the board during the 2007 fiscal year after she became Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc.'s CEO, received $73,500.

Her replacement, First Hawaiian Bank executive Corbett Kalama, earned $27,000. Trustee's pay is set by the state Probate Court.

Others executives listed in the tax filing included: