Down the Rabbit Hole

by Donna Schoenkopf

I was sitting innocently at my dining room table, opening my mail. The sun shone in through all the windows, flooding my house with light. It was one of those really nice days, slow and easy, full of perceptual pleasures—glowing cottonwood tree full of fluttering leaves, intelligent chatter coming from the television, the smell of percolating coffee wafting through the house.

As I gave the mail a perfunctory look over, my eye fell on the return address of one of the envelopes ... hmmmm. It’s from LAUSD, I realized. Trouble? Good news? I stuck my pen under the unsealed edge of the flap of the envelope, tore it neatly open and unfolded a two page letter.

And fell headlong down the rabbit hole, as full of complications and dead ends and confusion and insanity as anything in Alice in Wonderland.

If you, Dear Reader, have ever run into a crazy land of mismanagement and horror and the left hand not knowing what the right hand doeth, then read on and commiserate with me. And the tiny percentage of you who have never had that experience, beware. You, too, will eventually have to deal with it in one form or another.

To begin:

The letter was dated September 8, 2010.

It was a form letter. From Los Angeles Unified School District. No signature. Just a crappy form letter.

The letter told me that I owed the Los Angeles Unified School District $2,750.68 because they had overpaid me!!!!

I reread the letter, this time more carefully.

“Dear SCHOENKOPF, DONNA:

Our records show that you have an outstanding overpayment that was not resolved while still employed by LAUSD. The total gross amount of your overpayment is $2,750.68. This letter is intended to advise you of your options in repaying the identified overpayment.

While we have an obligation to recover taxpayer funds that have been improperly disbursed, we are committed to doing so in a considerate and thoughtful manner. We deeply regret the inconvenience that the collection of an overpayment represents. (Italics mine.) 

I italicized this part of the letter myself because it stuck in my craw.

I also angrily underlined it in ink.

There was no signature. There was no phone number to call. There was just a return envelope and a second page with three boxes from which I was to choose one “option:”

(I) agree to remit the entire amount of the overpayment;

(II) agree to remit payments according to the repayment plan set forth below;

(III) request a different repayment plan.

And how did I want to repay it? Lump sum? Half now, half later? $200 a month? Check one.

Then I was supposed to return the form with my hefty check within ten days.

Sitting there stunned, my mind curled around my options and none of them, none of them, were good.

As I went through my monthly nut and my monthly income and plugged in the three alternatives, I realized there was no way in HELL I could repay my “overpayment.”

And who said I’d been overpaid, anyway?

I decided to get some facts.

First I called three of my teacher friends who had retired about a year or so before I had. No, none of them had gotten The Letter.

But one of my friends said another teacher had gotten a letter and he had not retired. She told me that when he got his letter he gathered up all his pay stubs, made the appointment to make his case, got a substitute to cover his class, went down to District headquarters, and was told when he arrived that they had made a mistake and to disregard the whole thing.

He must have left with a huge smile on his face.

When I heard this, my hopes soared. Heyyyy. Maybe they will realize they have made a mistake with me and that will be that.

But ... but ... I am way out here in Oklahoma. What to do? Oh, I know! My UNION!

I must proclaim, here and now, that I am a union maid. As far as I’m concerned, the injustices of the workplace, of the society, of the world, can be (mostly) rectified by the union. O, Friend of the Working Man and Woman, let us walk together (metaphorically) through the door of the District and open the blind eyes of those who have laid woe upon my heart.

So, the first actual action I took was calling United Teachers of Los Angeles. I call, get transferred a couple of times around here and there, and finally am told to e-mail Paula Parr, who is handling all “overpayments.”

Now, I have been the unpaid, longtime (more than a dozen years) union rep at my school, and a mighty fine one, I might add, having gotten a huge percentage of our school’s teachers to various mass demonstrations, gone to every one of the Central Area’s monthly meetings, had a morning union meeting the next Monday of every month (with coffee and donuts in my classroom with real cups that I washed with my own dainty hands), gone to almost every single training and development provided by UTLA, sat with, held hands with, was witness for, the beleaguered teachers of my school, and faced down the principal on many occasions.

So I knew Paula Parr. From afar.

I went to her class on reading your paycheck at our yearly Leadership Meeting years ago.

There is a reason you need a whole class (and, it turns out, that wasn’t enough) to learn how to read your paycheck. The reason is because the District has an insane accounting system with hours and minutes and rates and illness days and furlough days and odd tax deductions and if you get yourself involved with after school, summer, and special tutoring, you can just about go crazy trying to figure the damn thing out.

Not one of us teachers ever mastered it. And trust me, we all tried.

And to make matters worse, the District has spent over 300 million dollars on a new payroll/HR system they bought from Deloitte and Touche, which has proven to be a boondoggle of a mess, causing 35,000 of the 40,000 teachers in L.A. Unified to be sent erroneous paychecks or NO paychecks the first year it was in operation.

Lots of us stood in payroll offices for hours, days, weeks, trying to get out financial lives straightened out. All the while, substitute teachers staffed our classes, doubling the money spent each day on classroom teachers.

And now, three years later, the damn system is still on the fritz.

Ai yi yi!

So ... Paula Parr.

I began trading emails with her. She said that 1600 retired teachers had gotten the same letter on September 8th as I had and that I would have to start paying at least $200 a month, even if it was the District’s fault, while the process to worked itself out.

Excuse me?

I cannot not even tell you how mad that made me.

I wrote a comment about it on Facebook and got a bunch of replies, among which was a teacher from my school who said she has a monthly deduction coming out of her check every month—a hefty one—because of an “overpayment.” Another teacher told of getting The Letter and never responding and nothing happened.

There is no rhyme. There is no reason.

I started researching the fiasco at LAUSD and Deloitte and Touche on the Internet. What I found out would make your hair curl. It’s like an End of the World scenario. Complete chaos.

Deloitte failed to tell LAUSD that it should have someone who knew about computers in order to put the new system in place. So, LAUSD used an HR guy who knew nothing about computers. Deloitte had software problems. LAUSD had antiquated payroll systems. Note the word “systems.” Plural. (No wonder we couldn’t read our paychecks!)

And LAUSD is not the only entity that has been devastated by Deloitte. Levi Strauss, Marin County, Fannie Mae, Delphi, Adelphia, all have had problems. I stopped counting after a while.

One wonderful article told of a 20,000 person company that encountered problems with a new system and couldn’t make payroll in a timely manner. “The CEO had to hand sign checks and he made the executive responsible hand deliver them to the people in town,” said Gary Reece, Northgate/Arinso in Houston.

I liked that solution. A lot.

Finally, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to say that rectitude of the problem should not rest on the backs of the teachers. WE should not have to pay ANYBODY while the truth is sorted out.

I want to be shown exactly where the mistakes are. I am not taking your word for it, Deloitte and LAUSD. Are you nuts?!!

The persons responsible, just like Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and his boys, Michael Milken, and all the other crooked and incompetent folks who made messes of our country’s finances, should be hand-delivering a letter of apology and a handsome check to replace the money our dear and heroic teachers have put into the bottomless coffers of the powerful and add in a nice compensation for personal anguish.

How I would love seeing a large, black car maneuvering down my long and graveled driveway through the trees. A gray haired, slightly paunchy guy steps out with an envelope in his hand and an apologetic look on his face. Diego Rivera and Angela Davis, my two dogs, are barking and jumping, making the man cower. They get their muddy footprints on his silk suit. He tries to put on a brave face.

“Ms. Schoenkopf?” he asks.

“Yes?”

“I have a check for you and my personal apology for having put you through undue pain and anguish.”

Justice.

We didn’t do it.

Not us.

Not me.

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