An 'A' in Militance
Inside a trailer with teachers at Camp Beaudry
Teachers union representatives crammed into a trailer parked outside the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters. A television hanging from the ceiling flickered at low volume. Some munched on little goodie bags of food. The topic of conversation among the United Teachers Los Angeles members invariably returned to the reason they were still camped out here in the early evening hours last Friday at what came to be called Camp Beaudry, named for the street harboring district headquarters. They want the district to solve the nine-month-old payroll crisis, which continued to cause problems for thousands of teachers last week. Their demands hit high-profile mode.
"I'm not going to say at this point whether there will be job actions," said UTLA President A.J. Duffy. "I will say that we all visit schools and we hear from many, many quarters that people are angry and ready to walk out."
Superintendent David L. Brewer and the school district's top attorney, Kevin Reed, warned against any actions. "Job actions are not going to solve anything," said Brewer. "It's not going to help us because it becomes a distraction, and what does work is for unions to come to the table and stop posturing."
Reed has said that any job actions may breach labor agreements, a view Duffy dismisses. "It's illegal to not pay your employees accurately and on time," he said. "You pay them accurately and on time, and there will be no illegal actions."
Blame the payroll debacle on an ambitious, $95 million attempt to upgrade the district's technology. The district hired Deloitte Consulting to help set up what is known as the SAP Human Resources and Payroll modules. The unintended consequence: tens of thousands of certificated employees (mainly teachers) have been underpaid, overpaid, or not paid at all. The initial outlay of $95 million has now spiraled to at least $130 million as, among other additional costs, the district hired consultants to help clean up the mess. UTLA is urging the district to sue Deloitte, an option that it is still considering.
This isn't the first SAP-related controversy for Deloitte, which was involved in a high-profile flame-out in Ireland a couple of years ago, when Irish Health Services pulled the plug on the program after their initial $10.7 million investment ballooned into $180 million during a decade of mismanagement. Other similar payroll problems have been reported by the Los Angeles Community College and the city of San Antonio.
For UTLA, Deloitte should be shouldering much of the blame, but it's not the only one. "They're all to blame, as far as we're concerned," said UTLA Director of Communications Marla Eby. "All of the decisions were really kind of fatal, so there's plenty of blame to spread around."
In a district employing 48,000 certificated employees, headache after headache hampers thousands of teachers who have had to hire substitute teachers as they traipse down to the district headquarters to seek a solution to their paycheck woes. One of these employees is Sarah Arroyo, a first-grade teacher at Florence Griffith Joyner Elementary School. Arroyo had not been paid in two months - until she received a direct deposit of a laughable $9 last week.
"I'm very, very frustrated ... I just want to get paid," she said with a laugh. "I'm going through my savings, I've had to cut back a lot ... It makes me think that maybe I should be at a different district. I think that this is really hurting the students."
While many are underpaid, the district says that most of the errors are overpayments, a problem growing in importance as the time to issue income tax forms approaches. Teachers accidentally overpaid could be pushed into incorrect tax brackets, adding more confusion to the current financial nightmare.
"I think virtually every district employee will be unsure about whether their tax statement is accurate, and they've lost any faith in the district's ability to produce that accurately," said UTLA Vice President Joshua Pechthalt.
Amid all of the gloom, district officials are optimistic that most of the problems will be solved soon. "We're on track to have the bulk of the problems resolved by the end of November," said David Holmquist, the district's interim chief operational officer. "We're sorry that this problem hasn't been resolved more quickly ... We just ask for [the teachers'] patience to continue to bear with us."
Teachers aren't sure whether to buy the rosy predictions. "Right now I'm trying to be optimistic, but I don't know," said Arroyo. "I haven't been paid in two months."
Pechthalt worries about long-term problems that will fester, from low teacher morale to a financial crunch caused by the district having to spend tens of millions of dollars to fix the payroll problems. "That's an issue that's going to continue to linger for a time after the payroll system has been resolved," he said. "This is money that is essentially going to come out of what could be additional resources for the classroom, reductions in class sizes, money for salary increases... That will be an issue for us for quite some time."
Published: 10/11/2007
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