Portland High School on August 1, 2019. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer, file
The Portland Public School District has paid $70,000 to 392 employees who were impacted by the district’s fall payroll issues in which hundreds of the district’s 1,500 employees went unpaid or underpaid for days to months.
Payments to employees were a condition of a memorandum of understanding between the state’s largest school district and its teacher and education technician union regarding the payroll issues of fall and winter 2022.
In the MOU with the Portland Education Association, the district agreed to rectify all payroll issues by Dec. 2, 2022, and to pay $100 per pay period to employees whose pay was not corrected by that date.
Payments sent out on April 3 ranged from $100 to $700.
Portland Education Association leaders Kerrie Dowdy and Jen Cooper did not respond to a request for comment on the payments and the district’s response to its payroll issues.
The payments to employees who did not have pay concerns rectified by Dec. 2 come following an audit of the school district’s payroll system by Portland based business advisory firm Spinglass Management Group and two reports issued by the firm.
Spinglass found that understaffing, software issues and lack of internal controls caused the district’s payroll problems. The firm also outlined what the district has done to remedy its payroll issues and what it still needs to do, and verified and logged all payroll and benefits issues and their status as resolved or not.
In investigating the district’s payroll system, Spinglass interviewed district staff, met with the union and participated in group calls. It also reviewed logs of payroll concerns, timekeeping systems, payroll reports and third-party payroll processing capabilities, the firm said in its final report, which was sent to the district in early March and shared with the greater community later that month.
The report said Portland staff have been diligently working to resolve payroll issues and should continue to do so.
“It is critical that this effort is maintained to resolve the remaining issues and ensure that employees are paid correctly in the future,” the report said.
Moving forward, the district is working to increase staffing and outsource its payroll department to ADP, a human resources and payroll management company. The district says it is on schedule to have the transition completed by the coming school year.
In a message to the community, district interim co-Superintendents Aaron Townsend and Melea Nalli apologized for the payroll issues of this school year.
“We want to reiterate our deep regret for the hardships that this situation has created,” they said.
“We will continue to resolve all outstanding issues as quickly as possible and work toward ensuring that our systems are as reliable as possible so that you can focus on the core mission of all our jobs: serving our students.”
Townsend and Nalli have led the district on an interim basis since January, weeks after the previous superintendent, Xavier Botana, resigned amid the payroll turmoil.
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