Los Angeles School District Payroll Dept. Becoming as Incompetent as Teaching Staff

The Los Angeles spent $95 million on a new computer payroll system. Ever since the new system has been in use many employees have not been paid the correct amount or been paid at all. One teacher died and she is still being paid. Her daughter has been unable to get the school district to take the money back. The head of payroll, after 5 months of checks sent to a deceased teacher, acts like he never heard of the problem. That seems to be much of the problem: the people in the payroll department have a real fuck you attitude. The trouble shooters will not return calls, promise follow ups that never happen, make agreements and then unilaterally change the conditions mutually agreed to. And the head of the payroll department apparently still doesn’t think there is a problem. His employees don’t care if the problems get solved and he won’t own the problem. Looks like the problem is nowhere near going away.
If present trends continue the work output of the payroll department will be as bad as literacy and education in the children whose future apparently is of no concern to the teachers. Maybe some of the difficulty arises from the payroll department hiring graduates of the LA school system. You can have a $95 million computer system but if you can barely read, write or cipher you might not get much help from a computer. Maybe the guys in trouble shooting are just displaying as little interest in teachers’ pay as the teachers displayed in their education.
One of the elementary school teachers mentioned in the coverage makes $90,000 a year. There’s little discipline and the kids can’t read or write but this woman is being paid as if productivity were going on. Obviously good pay does not equal good teaching.


The bigger picture: all of this is good for the Democratic party. The less educated the voters are the better it is for Democrats. If you have no fund of knowledge, lack the skills to get any and lack the ability to think clearly the more likely it is that you will be susceptible to the emotional appeals and guilt bombs that are the stuff of Democratic campaigning.