Swampscott school panel decides not to recover $30G in erroneous overpayments

SWAMPSWCOTT – The School Committee voted unanimously Wednesday night to not recoup approximately $30,000 the schools have overpaid teachers, and to give $40,000 to teachers who have been underpaid dating back to the 2003-04 school year.”We looked at what the options were for getting the money back,” said School Committee member Rick Kraft on Thursday. “After looking at that and what the impact of that would be, it was our evaluation that there would be far more negative impact to the district than the amount of money that we would recover and that would have a far more negative impact on the students.”Schools Budget Director Ed Cronin attributed the payment errors – which he said affected 50 teachers currently in the system – to miscalculations of teachers’ longevity payments.Teachers receive longevity payments based on the number of years they have worked in the district and if they take courses beyond a master’s degree, Cronin said.But he said the language in the teacher’s contract appears “contradictory” and “unclear” about these payments. Cronin said administrators were aware of the contradictory language since he began in spring 2007.He said the schools learned they were underpaying teachers recently, however, and looked to correct the problem.The money is “a couple of hundred here, couple of hundred there that, over time, has added up,” Cronin said. But he said the money involved represents less than 1 percent of the school district’s $26 million budget.School Committee members said that trying to recoup the money would also be difficult.”We all felt we weren’t going to go after this or that teacher over, for example, $1,500,” School Committee Chair Jacqueline Kinney said Thursday.Kraft agreed.”It’s not like this was equally spread over all the teachers and to try to pull that money out of a teacher’s pocket was really difficult and unfair,” he said. “And we’ve made great strides over the past couple of years to build a cooperative environment with the teachers.”Committee Member Marianne Hartmann said the vote “was the right thing to do.”Cronin said the error was corrected so that teachers were no longer being under or overpaid. Teachers who were underpaid will receive a lump sum to correct the mistake, he said, which would probably be paid from a revolving account in the budget. The language in the teachers’ contract will be clarified in the fall during contract negotiations, he said.Several teachers and representatives of the teacher’s union attended the meeting Wednesday night to thank the school district for working with them, Kinney noted.”It was very nice,” Kinney said.Cyrus Moulton can be reached at [email protected]