The Los Angeles Unified School District is to be praised for the seriousness with which it's attempting to address its personnel problems. As I chronicled here, the district was caught flat-footed earlier this year when a scandal involving a teacher sexually abusing students revealed that, under the terms of a contract negotiated with United Teachers Los Angeles (the local union), complaints against educators that don't result in disciplinary action are disregarded after only a few years (unsurprisingly, the teacher in question had a long paper trail). In reaction, the district has now initiated a massive audit of teacher personnel records ... but the cost at which it's doing so is truly phenomenal.
Here's the report from Barbara Jones in the L.A. Daily News:
When it's not incompetence, it's excess. Such is life in California's public sector.
Los Angeles Unified plans to spend up to $400,000 to review at least 8,300 employee files unearthed in a search for misconduct that may have gone unreported over the past 40 years, officials said Tuesday.
Principals at 941 of the district's 1,222 campuses met Superintendent John Deasy's deadline of June 22 to sift through the files of teachers and other employees for letters, complaints or other reports of inappropriate behavior, district spokesman Tom Waldman said. Any files found at the remaining 281 schools and LAUSD offices are expected soon.
... The files have been scanned into a computer system, and plans call for them to be scrutinized over the next three months by a team of eight retired supervisors and administrators, Waldman said.It's great that the district is taking teacher discipline seriously, but the spending here defies belief. $400,000 for three months' work from eight retirees? That breaks out to $50,000 each for 90 days worth of work -- from people who are already receiving state pensions (and pensions for former administrations are among those that often run into the six figures). Perhaps there's some other cost-driver here, but from the outside it's hard to deduce what it could be -- after all, all this really involves is a document review.
When it's not incompetence, it's excess. Such is life in California's public sector.
