 "Photo: Kimberly Peticolas | Daily Trojan")
Los Angeles Unified School District teachers demonstrated outside the district office and other locations Tuesday, protesting a payroll glitch that has been affecting teachers' paychecks for the past eight months.
The protest marked the beginning of LAUSD teachers' boycott of all unpaid after-school functions, such as faculty meetings, that will continue until the school district's payroll system has been fixed, said Marla Eby, director of communications for the United Teachers of Los Angeles union.
Teachers at eight of the 10 schools in the USC Family of Schools are participating in the boycott.
"We're boycotting after-school faculty meetings because we're trying to find actions that won't affect the kids," Eby said.
The protests come after eight months of LAUSD teachers reported being either underpaid, overpaid or receiving no check at all because of errors with the district's new payroll software.
The problems started when the school district put in place a new $95 million system in February that was supposed to streamline payroll and other tasks like purchasing, Eby said.
Since then, some of the payroll glitches - which Eby said have mostly affected the district's certified teachers whose pay system is more complicated than that of other employees - have been fixed. The LAUSD Board of Education also voted to hire an independent consultant two weeks ago to provide frequent updates on the progress of rewriting the problematic computer software program that has caused the payroll controversy, the Los Angeles Times reported.
"This is a crisis for the district. We are in a crisis, and I expect you to resolve it immediately," board member Marlene Canter told District Superintendent David L. Brewer, who is expected to manage the payroll problem that began before he was hired earlier this year, the Times reported.
Eby said the problems with the payroll system are more than an inconvenience; there is an insecurity in not knowing whether you can make your car payment, your mortgage payment or even buy groceries each pay period.
"Obviously, getting paid should be a basic thing you can count on," Eby said. "To have to worry about getting a paycheck is really incomprehensible."
Some teachers at Lenicia B. Weemes Elementary School, a member of the USC Family of Schools, say they have been hit hard by the recent payroll problems.
"They've lost their homes and lost their cars due to this payroll fiasco," said Shirley Crout, the UTLA representative at Weemes Elementary. "Weemes is going to support this [boycott] 100 percent."
After-school programs at schools like Weemes that get support from USC will suffer slightly less than other LAUSD schools during the boycott because programs such as Joint Educational Project and Para los Niños augment the school services LAUSD provides.
"After-school programs are going to be and up and running because USC uses students," Crout said. "Right now, we won't feel the impact here."
Principal Frances Goldman of Norwood Elementary, another USC-supported school, said long-term planning and development would suffer.
"It's going to make it harder to do professional development until this is all over," Goldman said.
But union leaders said giving unpaid time to after-school programs when teachers aren't receiving correct paychecks isn't fair.
"Teachers give up a lot of their time planning and working with students after school unpaid, and now we're saying, 'No,'" Crout said.
The teachers were not the only school district employees that were affected by the glitches. The employee unions came together in a news conference where leaders discussed the effects of the problems on their members, Eby said.
Since the problems began, teachers have conducted demonstrations, filed a lawsuit against the district and started working on legislation in Sacramento to prevent a similar crisis in the future.
"[District officials have] asked us to be understanding, and we have been," Eby said. "I can't imagine most employees of companies still working after this many months."
