Where’s the urgency on Gaston County Schools' payroll problems?

This article originally appeared in Ann Doss Helms' weekly education newsletter. To get the latest schools news in your inbox first, sign up for our email newsletters here.

Anyone who’s ever had a glitch in their pay or benefits knows how much anxiety that creates. So it was hardly surprising to hear the angst in the voices of Gaston County educators last week when they chastised the school board and district administrators over payroll problems that have persisted for more than a year. In some cases, employees have gotten W2 income tax statements based on under- or overpayments that happened months ago and haven’t been corrected.

I don’t pretend to understand the technical challenges that arose when the district switched from a 33-year-old payroll system to Oracle Cloud in January 2022. But I’m baffled by several elements of the response as these problems drag on.

For starters, Superintendent Jeff Booker said nothing about the payroll problems at last week’s meeting. How does the leader of a school district sit silent through something that big? As board member Robbie Lovelace said, the payroll debacle is creating a “dark cloud” that threatens to define Booker’s legacy — and make it tougher to hire and keep teachers. I emailed the district’s communications chief the morning after the meeting asking if Booker was available and willing to talk about the matter.

I got no response.

Lovelace hinted at accountability for top administrators, but others defended the district’s work. Chair Jeff Ramsey called Booker and Chief Financial Officer Gary Hoskins “the best of the best in the state of North Carolina.” Board members seemed saddened by the anguish their employees are going through and dismayed that it’s eroding trust in their own leadership, but didn’t articulate a vision for making it better.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction designated Oracle as one of two options approved for districts to modernize their finance and payroll systems. A state team worked closely with Gaston staff to prepare for the transition, which was delayed twice as they tried to work out the kinks. Now DPI seems eager to assure me that everything’s going well in Gaston County, even as local officials and employees say otherwise. Setting aside questions of blame, doesn’t the state have a technology team that could help Gaston schools dig out from under these problems?

After all, Gaston is piloting a program for statewide use — and according to Hoskins, it’s a system that DPI itself is about to adopt.

Gaston board members talked about the challenges posed by staff shortages on the district’s finance and payroll team. They talked about outsourcing, recruiting volunteers, even finding “a smart kid” to help. Just across the river, the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council has sent about a dozen executives to help Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools with business and support functions. Doesn’t Gaston County’s business community have anyone who could send reinforcements?

Payroll is one of those things no one notices if it’s working right. Surely there’s someone who can help Gaston County Schools’ payroll system do the job so educators can focus on helping students learn.

North Carolina’s school calendar craziness continues

Last week’s Gaston school board meeting also showed once again how bizarre things get when public officials decide to break what they consider a bad law — and try to be stealthy about it in a public meeting.

The law in question is North Carolina’s school calendar law, which tries to force most districts to wait until late August to bring students back. That’s popular with the tourism industry and some individuals, but a wide and bipartisan swath of educators, politicians and the public think local districts should be able to set their own calendars. Some, including Gaston, decided to ignore the law this year and more followed suit for 2023-24. Starting earlier allows high schools to synchronize with community colleges and give first-semester exams before winter break.

Last week the Gaston board saw survey results showing parents, students, employees and community members prefer sticking with the early start forbidden by the law. What followed was a vote that looked more like a silent auction: The board chair asked for a motion, one member wordlessly raised a finger to make the motion and another did the same for a second. Everyone raised their hands to vote for an unspecified calendar. Only after the board had ended its public meeting and spent almost an hour in closed session did Ramsey come back into the chamber to announce which calendar the board had approved.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have introduced a spate of local bills that would allow select districts to start classes earlier (at least one includes Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools). There’s also one sponsored by a bipartisan group of House members to move the state’s earliest starting date back to Aug. 10, and another sponsored by House Democrats to leave the decision to school boards. This kind of thing happens every year, and so far those bills have all crashed against the wall of Senate opposition.

As Kris Nordstrom of the progressive North Carolina Justice Center pointed out, all of these maneuvers should have been superfluous by now. In response to rulings in the long-running Leandro lawsuit, the governor’s office, state Board of Education and state Justice Department created a Comprehensive Remedial Plan outlining actions the state would take between 2021 and 2028 to provide the sound basic education mandated by the state constitution. Most of the public attention has focused on the dramatic increase in funding the court has ordered — an order the Republican-dominated General Assembly continues to fight.

But on Page 53 of the 57-page plan, there’s a cost-free step that the state agreed to take in fiscal 2022: “Adopt the necessary policies to allow school calendar flexibility to ensure that local schools can align with community college and university schedules.”

The challenge, of course, is that the General Assembly wasn’t part of crafting the plan. And some powerful members, including Senate leader Phil Berger, don’t seem eager to comply.