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In response to
"Houston schools have been taken over by the state. How's it been going? Blaming tech errors, some teachers were sent emails saying they'd been fired. "
by
Qale
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And others? Well, this week, due to those technical errors, didn't receive pay.
Posted by
Qale
Jul 5 '23, 14:45
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School district officials could not give an exact number of employees whose payment was delayed, but the error is believed to have affected significant portions of the district's roughly 27,000 employees.
In a statement, the district said its IT and payroll departments were "working diligently to resolve the technical errors causing this delay, and to prevent this from ever happening again."
The district gave unpaid workers two options: get a paper check from the district on Wednesday or wait until late Wednesday or possibly Thursday for the money to be deposited into their bank accounts.
A district spokesman said the cause of the technical error was unknown.
Multiple community leaders, however, said they suspected that turnover at the HISD central office could have led to repeated issues such as the payroll delay and mistaken termination notices. New state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles has pledged to trim what he calls a "bloated" district headquarters to pay for his "wholesale systemic reforms" at a segment of struggling HISD schools.
"People who normally take care of those things, and know how these systems function, are probably no longer working over there," said Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers.
Ruth Kravetz, co-founder of Community Voices for Public Education, also suspected switching between four- and five-day work weeks, and changing the last day of summer school from July 3 to June 30, may have caused confusion. HISD usually operates on a four-day work week during the summer, but Miles announced plans to revert to a five-day week for the central office last month.
Kravetz noted that she was always paid on time in her 30 years as a teacher at the district.
"HISD is calling each of these mistakes a system glitch. This should really be called a system failure. Miles is treating HISD like his personal fiefdom instead of an urban district with close to 200,000 students, it should surprise no one that things are falling apart," Kravetz said.
The district did not immediately return a request for further comment.
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