Sac City food worker’s paychecks delayed amid confusion over fiscal solvency plan
A nutritional services employee at one of Sacramento City Unified’s high schools served 140 students breakfast Tuesday morning, and in return received 140 “thank yous.”
“Everyone says ‘good morning’ or ‘have a good day,’” she said. “I really enjoy it.”
She loves her job as a “lunch lady,” which she said has allowed her to connect to her community .
The only problem is that she has not been paid for most of her work due to the Sacramento City Unified School District’s ongoing financial crisis.
Her situation is one of the first visible effects of the cuts being made to respond to a worsening budget outlook.
“It feels like I showed up for the district and they’re not showing up for me,” she said. “I show up every single day to feed these kids while I’m at home having a hard time feeding my own kid.”
The employee asked to have her name withheld due to concerns about maintaining her employment with the district.
Going without pay
While she works as a lunch lady an average of 33 hours per week, she has only been paid about half of her wages since she took the job in November. Her position is contracted for just 15 hours a week from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. each school day, but when she was offered extra duty hours, she jumped at the chance to earn more money for her single-income household.
They may be called “extra duty hours,” but the work is necessary for the school to provide meal services. She arrives at the school at 6 a.m. almost every weekday to provide 1,000 meals for students at the high school and a nearby elementary school — “receiving deliveries, getting all the machines set up, prepping fruit, prepping breakfast items, lunch items, serving both meals, clean-up, taking inventory.”
The employee has received paychecks for her 15 contracted hours each week but hasn’t seen a dime from any of the additional hours due to the district’s fiscal solvency plan, which was created to control spending to avoid a state takeover by this summer.
Facing mounting bills as a single mother of a high school student, she reached out to union representatives and department supervisors who didn’t provide much information beyond the fact that the process to approve per diem payments had been put on hold due to the financial crisis.
“I’ve been having to pick and choose the things that I pay, whether I can afford to drive to my second job or not,” she said. “Things are not cheap right now.”
The first attempt at a fiscal solvency plan, passed in November, included the instruction to freeze per diem work unless required for “operational compliance.” Since former Chief Business Officer Janea Marking, who drafted the plan, left in December, district staff members have been struggling to implement the plan’s directions.
“What we had in the system was some lack of clarity and confusion around how we were implementing a number of those pieces (in the fiscal solvency plan),” Chief Human Resources Officer Cancy McArn said.
McArn said that per diem payments are again being processed after receiving more specific direction from the school board at a recent special meeting and that 10 employees waiting for payments will receive a check Feb. 15.
McArn did not say how many employees were affected by delayed payments for work already performed.
“It’s not my fault that they did not do their end of the work to process the payment,” the nutritional services employee said.
She had not been informed by anyone at the district or her union that payments would resume soon and is still frustrated by the district’s treatment of lower-level employees.
“This is on the backs of the lowest-paid workers,” she said. “We show up for them but they don’t show up for us.”
