Schools flunking payroll

By Michael Stoll
Of The Examiner Staff

    Because Angie Marshall is an honest schoolteacher who believes you shouldn't take pay for work you didn't do, she exposed a curious problem in the San Francisco Unified School District.

    In the summer of 2000, Marshall applied for a job in a San Francisco school, but turned it down for a better position in San Bruno.

    But in September that year, she got a paycheck from the San Francisco school district anyway.

    In October, she got another one. In November, she got a raise.

    Marshall forgets how much she was paid, but, based on calculations of her pay scale, the three checks amounted to a little more than $13,500.

    She sent back the checks, politely informing the district she didn't work for them and never had. She washed her hands of the incident and forgot about it.

    In September 2001, she got a bonus.

    What was going on? Was the district's accounting really that sloppy?

    Why couldn't the matter be resolved after repeated phone calls?

    And why on Earth, if the district believed her to be working in The City, were they sending her paychecks to her old address in Spokane, Wash.?

    "I know that what happened to me is most likely indicative of a much larger problem," said Marshall, who for a year and a half has been happily employed as a speech pathologist at Crestmoor Elementary School in San Bruno.

    "I have no clue what's going on (in San Francisco)," she said. "I'm just glad I didn't accept a job, because if I did, maybe I wouldn't be getting a paycheck."

    School district officials say her's was an isolated incident, and that no one else was paid accidentally.

    The district certainly has had a few glitches in its payroll system, but those were cases of established fraud -- a mother working in the district who falsified employment records for her son, a full-time sewing-machine repairwoman who reported visiting an average of two schools a day, though only three of 162 schools had sewing classes. In both cases, the guilty party made restitution to the district.

    The Board of Education has been aware of past systemic problems, but new leadership at the district has greatly reduced fraud and errors, said Jill Wynns, the board's president.

    "In a system this size, there are probably cases of people who have been paid before they started working, (or) after they stopped working," she said. "There are a few that I know of where they were corrected. But just as often we don't pay people we should have."

    Marshall moved here from Washington in the summer of 2000 and interviewed for a speech pathologist position in five Bay Area districts. She got five job offers, but turned down San Francisco in part because she got no assurances she would be working with autistic middle school students -- her specialty.

    She also got a better salary offer from San Bruno. Little did she know she would start receiving two paychecks.

    She sent back the San Francisco checks by return-receipt mail, and was assured the problem was solved. But the following September, when her bonus arrived, she was afraid her record had not been expunged from SFUSD records. In fact, the check bore her old Spokane address, but had her San Bruno address handwritten on the envelope.

    She called a woman in payroll who assured her the check would be canceled. A few weeks later, she called back and spoke to a man who said her records hadn't been removed from the system and she might owe taxes on the accidental pay.

    She left messages for the man, but he never called back.

    Kent Mitchell, president of the teachers' union, United Educators of San Francisco, said part of the problem was the district's computer system. Two years ago, the district replaced the system installed in 1978 with modern computers, in anticipation of Y2K programming problems. But the district did not buy enough tech support, and has been slow to make the databases talk to each other.

    "It's disturbing, but not shocking," Mitchell said. "The number of payroll problems is much less than it used to be, but that doesn't excuse even one. Doing payroll is not exactly rocket science."

    Mitchell stressed the mistake was unlikely to be related to other, more pervasive financial blunders that affected the district under previous superintendents, Ramon Cortines and Bill Rojas.

    An independent audit found the district misspent $140 million in bond money meant for school construction -- much of it instead finding its way into paychecks of support district staff.

    Frustration with the pace of reform within the school district led the Board of Supervisors to put Proposition F on the March 5 ballot.

    Prop. F, the brainchild of Supervisor Mark Leno, would create an oversight committee that could halt spending bond money if the committee suspected funds were being used for other purposes.

    One of the priorities of the new superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, has been to clean up procedural glitches. Her new technology director, Nasser Azimi, has been working on ironing out many of those problems.

    "Rebuilding public trust and creating a fiscal management system -- that has been one of her main priorities," Said Eric Mar, a member of the Board of Education.

    Some of the school district's biggest boosters fear stories such as Marshall's will stain the district's reputation, making it hard to raise bond money for schools in the future.

    "There has been a long history of financial irregularities and fiscal problems, and I believe that they're going through tremendous efforts to fix it," said Margaret Brodkin, executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children, a research group in The City. "It doesn't happen overnight."

The Examiner

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2002