CASHING OUT
Trenton pays out $1.7M to for unused vacation amid budget problems
TRENTON >> A month after Trenton Public Schools outlined its doomsday budget earlier this year, the top brass of the district received fat bonuses.
According to documents obtained by The Trentonian, 55 administrators received a combined $1.7 million in unused vacation time in February and May, and kept working for the district.
That type of payout is generally only made to retiring employees, but this time around, a one-time payment was agreed upon between the Board of Education, the state Department of Education fiscal monitor, and the Trenton Administrators & Supervisors Association (TASA) in the union contract.
Under the terms of TASA’s contract from July 1, 2015 until June 30, 2018, a provision allowed for the one-time payment to occur before June 30, 2016 for all accumulated vacation days above 20 at the employees’ salary that year.
Shortly before the payment was made, Trenton presented its budget for the upcoming school year, and due to a shortfall of $5.9 million, resulted in 164 layoffs, privatization and the closure of Stokes Early Childhood Learning Center.
Theoretically, the vacation time pay could have been used instead to save jobs or keep Stokes open.
“I still think there’s some questions of ethics here for the board to agree to pay out administrators a one-time payout,” Trenton Councilman Alex Bethea said last week. “Somebody cut the deal behind the curtains. That’s unprecedented for a board of education to pay out bonus checks while people were still working, and you’re laying people off.”
Bethea, who was a member of TASA before retiring as a vice principal at Robeson last year after 40 years of service, blames the school board for approving the contract. Due to his re-
tirement, Bethea received a payment of $155,518 for unused vacation and sick days, but he contends that payment occurred upon separation.
“TASA’s not going to say, ‘It’s not in the best interest, we’ll save this money for the kids,’” Bethea said of the vacation
payment. “That’s not what they do in a bargaining unit during negotiations. It’s cognisant upon the board of the education to make that decision that this is not in the best interest of the students. It’s their job. They have a fiduciary responsibility to watch the money. They can’t be rubber-stamps.”
Defending the board’s action, President Jason Redd said last week that the district
was still contractually obligated to pay the money when the administrators retired.
“Their unit asked for it and we looked in terms of exposure for the district now versus the exposure for the district then,” said Redd, a city lobbyist. “So I think that if we’re able to at least start to alleviate those large payouts sooner, then at the end of the day it saves the district money in the long run.”
Like Redd, interim Superintendent Lucy Feria said before the start of school that it was “actually a smart thing to do.”
“The payout would be at the higher rate when they retire,” Feria said. “It’s actually in the district’s benefit to do it at the current rate.”
Asked if he had any regrets of the timing of the
payouts given the budget crisis, Redd responded, “I regret having to make those cuts.”
“In terms of running the district, there’s a lot of moving pieces,” he said. “I don’t think you can isolate one item and say because of this, we were able to do that.”
But the president of the union that lost the most members during the last budget shortfall doesn’t see it that way.
“I do think that was the wrong time to do that when you’re laying off 92 people,” Betty Glenn, president of the Trenton Paraprofessional Association, said Monday. “I respect everyone’s contract but I think that it was just the wrong time.”
To make up the loss, the district has hired a contractor
to provide outsourced paraprofessionals to the district.
“The contractor, Source4Teachers, is not working,” Glenn claims. “Now all we have in split classes because the people don’t come and the ones that they send, they’re not qualified. The board is paying an awful lot of money out to Source4Teachers and the people aren’t there. I’m getting steady calls all day about teachers not having any coverage.” To make matters worse, many of the paraprofessionals that previously worked for the district, live in Trenton, Bethea said.
“They lay off the unit who has the most people that live in Trenton,” the councilman said. “The administrators, most of them, do not live in Trenton. They all got paid and laughed at Trenton all the way to the bank.”
In a statement, the New Jersey Department of Education (DOE) said local school boards generally make decisions on local employee contracts, but the state fiscal monitor signed off on the TASA agreement.
“The Trenton School Board passed the contract that reduced the number of days – from that of the previous contract – departed employees would be paid for earned vacation time that had not been used,” DOE spokesman David Saenz Jr. said in an email “The state monitor reviewed the contract with the lower cap before it was passed by the Trenton School Board.” Redd said the one-time vacation payout will never happen again.