The Richmond School Board has decided not to change the practice immediately, which, according to an auditor’s study, results in the school division spending $1.8 million annually on bus driver overtime.
Meanwhile, the school board’s auditor reported that more than 700 emails sent to the school district’s fraud, waste and abuse hotline remained unopened for ten years.
The Richmond School Board meets in Richmond on Monday.
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At its meeting on Monday evening, the school board approved a motion to take up one of the auditor’s recommendations on the issue of school bus driver overtime: to ensure that school bus drivers clock in for their shifts.
The board has not implemented other recommendations, including a suggestion to pay employees for the hours they actually work. According to a report by Richmond School Board Auditor Doug Graeff, bus drivers and bus attendants receive their regular hourly rate for hours not worked, overtime for hours not worked, and overtime when they actually work their regular hours. This is the school division’s practice.
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According to the audit, first presented to the board in April, inaction could result in continued misuse of school funds, RPS violating its own overtime policies and violating state and federal wage laws.
According to the audit, some school bus drivers receive over $30,000 a year in overtime pay on top of their regular salary.
On Monday evening, school board members expressed reluctance to make a decision that would create financial hardship for bus drivers.
The committee asked the administration to come back at its next meeting in August and provide more information on how the auditor’s recommendations would affect bus drivers’ salaries.
“Hundreds of transportation workers are turning to us for help and support, and we want to make an informed decision,” said Shavonda Dixon, who represents the 9th District.
“I still haven’t received any information about the consequences this will have, other than what we already know, which is that transport workers will be affected.”
Dixon
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District 3 School Board representative Kenya Gibson said the council should not make any decisions about changing transportation salaries while the union is still in the process of negotiating the contracts. If the council makes a decision Monday night, it would nullify the collective bargaining, she said.
“I voted for collective bargaining. Pretty much everyone at this table supports collective bargaining. We’re all Democrats and that’s why we should continue the collective bargaining process,” Gibson said.
A bus driver earned $124,000 last fiscal year, according to salary records obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. A recent job posting for an RPS bus driver lists the salary range as $33,856.00 to $52,068.00.
One problem is that, due to school scheduling practices, any bus driver who takes on a ride after school automatically gets two hours of overtime for each ride, regardless of how long the ride is.
After receiving the audit report, the administration decided to change this policy. However, the Board of Directors instructed the administration to wait to make the change until the Board of Directors could review the results in more detail.
Gibson
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Gibson claims the only reason for the pay raise was the administration’s decision to change drivers’ working hours from six-hour contracts to eight-hour contracts.
“Period. That’s all that’s changed. And we still have very little information about it. That makes no sense to me,” Gibson said.
Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras told the board Monday night that he was not making a judgment and that the board would have to decide what to do.
“It’s just a basic policy question. Regardless of what caused the increase (in wages) in the first place, does the board want to maintain the policy of paying two hours of overtime for a ride, whether it’s 15 minutes, 30 minutes or two hours, or not?” Kamras said.
“There are good arguments on both sides… I cannot say what headlines will appear in the media. The board has to answer a fundamental question: Do we want to continue this practice or not?”
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Kamras said that switching to a system where drivers are paid only for the time they actually work will cause financial difficulties for them.
“If the board wants to maintain this practice to avoid financial difficulties and it is legally permissible, they can certainly make that decision,” Kamras said. “But I think it is clear that if the board goes in the direction of ‘we only pay for the work done,’ it will definitely result in drivers earning less.”
Some school board members have clashed in recent months with Graeff, the school board’s auditor, who filed complaints against Gibson and Mariah White, the school board’s 2nd District representative.
Graeff accused them of unprofessional behavior and hostile communication. Some board members said Graeff did not include the information they requested in his report.
White
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In a June 9 email to Gibson, Graeff wrote, “Your defamatory comments and public admonishments of me and my work are uncalled for. I urge you to stop.”
Gibson apologized and said there may have been a misunderstanding regarding her comments.
“I want to acknowledge that you are doing important work and that as an elected representative of this government body, it is my responsibility to ask difficult questions,” Gibson said in an email.
LaTonya Holloway, an internal auditor who reported to Graeff, filed a complaint against him earlier this year, emails show. She resigned in May, according to the emails.
Whistleblower report
Graeff, who was appointed in October 2023, found more than 700 unopened emails sent to the fraud, waste and abuse email address dating back to 2014, according to an internal report.
The majority of these emails were spam, according to the report, and about 30 emails that were more than a year old did not detail a significant problem or were not related to fraud, waste or abuse. The emails have since been updated and are monitored daily by Graeff.
The account had not been monitored for over a year before Graeff was hired because the person responsible was no longer there. It is unclear why some emails were opened and others were not.
After cleaning out the whistleblower’s email account, voicemail messages and department files, Graeff set up a tracking log. The log tracks older matters that may be of interest, as well as matters reported through April 23. The log includes 16 whistleblower complaints and “none of them were actionable as fraud, theft or abuse cases.”
Those complaints include two allegations of embezzlement from 2020, as well as allegations of theft during food distribution from 2020, a sex offender who may have gained access to a school, a bus driver who exhibited poor driving skills, a child who was placed in a “recovery room” for too long, a substitute teacher who made racist comments on social media, residency fraud and a transitional housing facility being too close to Dogwood Middle School.
