Monroe City School District Human Resource Department Takes Heat from Study

A salary study for Monroe City Schools was conducted by the Management Advisory Group, and the group’s final draft of the survey has been released. The final draft puts the majority of the responsibility for misrepresented working hours of 144 employees and various other payroll problems on the head of the human resource department for the district.

The study was organized by the Monroe City School District shows that those who claim they work full-time hours should actually be working full-time hours. Should those employees actually work full-time hours, the district will be in the position to gain 12,672 hours of staff time. This number is equivalent to 7.3 full-time administrators at no added cost to the district.

“The laxity of this department in not raising the alarm concerning the level of leave time taken, excessive compensation paid to administrators, which was meant for teachers, and the general disarray of compensation information is indicative of either a lack of professional competence or a lack of corporate leadership responsibility or both,” the report states, according to thenewsstar.com.

The study released by the Management Advisory Group also says that extra pay for principals in the district should be discontinued. It also says that administrators should no longer be allowed to take part in the sales tax bonus checks that are sent to teachers and other classified personnel. The study then suggests that those individuals be handed a one-time adjustment that would compensate them for any loss of sales tax supplements.

“The sharing of a larger portion of the sales tax with “teachers” has resulted in some administrators retaining an active teaching certificate for the apparent sole purpose of receiving a larger piece of the sales tax pie. For these administrators, the teaching certificate is not relevant to the work performed. The additional sales tax money received by teachers and certificated administrators is significant, resulting in several thousands of dollars a year,” the study said.

The study showed to the district that its full-time administrative personnel were working only 7.5 hour days, which is the same as teachers. The administrators were also taking the exact same holidays as the teachers in addition to vacations while they were being paid as year-round employees. Year-round employees work only 262 more hours each year than those who work 9 months out of the year.

“Should the board decline to adopt an 8-hour schedule … MAG should be requested to re-run the proposed pay plan … which would reduce the proposed salary and the implementation cost to reflect the number of hours actually worked,” the study states.

The study from MAG also criticizes the human resource department for the district in regards to how it handled compensation information and job descriptions for its employees.

“The employee compensation information is so inaccurate and inconsistent that the final spreadsheet provided to MAG after almost 4 months of waiting, calling, and phone conferences was so inaccurate it was almost unusable,” the report states. “The job titling system was among the worst MAG has ever encountered.”

The report concluded with the following:

“With the correct leadership selection for Human Resources, Monroe City Schools has a bright future,” the report said. “While the MAG report is critical of the HR functions as being inconsistent and lacking in professional support, employees have received a pay check on time. It is not totally broken; the system just has the potential to be excellent and the board should not have to settle for less.”