They’re cashing in on COVID cases.
The city Department of Education has agreed to pay five hours of overtime to school administrators for every COVID-19 case that required extra work to track and inform infected students and staff — a payout that will run into the millions, The Post has learned.
The Council of Supervisors & Administrators, CSA, filed a grievance last year, complaining principals and assistant principals had to field night and weekend calls from the DOE’s COVID-19 “Situation Room” — and then had to work hours on end to determine which classrooms had to close and which students or staff had to be quarantined and notified.
The payout will come under an unprecedented agreement hammered out between the principals’ union and the DOE in November. It will be at least partially funded with federal COVID-19 aid.
The administrators will see the pay bump for each “actionable” case — meaning those that triggered partial or full classroom closures or quarantines — retroactive nearly a year-and-a-half to Sept. 14, 2020, when the Situation Room launched.
“They were contacting principals at all hours of the day and night,” a Brooklyn school chief told The Post. “We’d get calls at 10, 11 p.m.” about a classroom or building closure the next day.
“It was a very daunting task,” the principal said. “In the beginning we had to quarantine all close contacts. If a staff member was the computer teacher and that teacher saw five classes during the day, you had to notify all those close contacts.”
This school year, the rules on whether to close classrooms and who to quarantine kept changing. Variables included whether the students or staff members were within three feet of each other and for how long, whether students faced each other in the cafeteria, whether the contact was outdoors, whether the kids wore masks, and finally whether they were vaccinated.
“It became a whole mess of trying to figure this out,” the principal said. “Trying to keep track of this was another job.”
Each school will get a list of COVID cases deemed “actionable” by the DOE. The administrators will then divvy up the funds, based on who handled the cases.
DOE principals start at a salary of about $170,000.
Peter Warren, director of research at the government watchdog Empire Center, said top managers shouldn’t get overtime payouts.
“With highly-paid professional managers of any organization, it’s virtually unheard of to be paid overtime,” he said. “Whatever funds are used to do this are not in any way furthering students’ education. I’m sort of at a loss for words, other than that. It’s something that seems extremely hard to justify.”
Since the current school year started on Sept. 13, 2021, the DOE’s Situation Room has tallied 176,156 positive COVID tests, including 135,805 students and 40,351 staffers.
In response, the DOE fully closed 4,931 classrooms, and partially quarantined 20,665 classrooms.
But it’s unclear how many such cases will qualify for OT.
The hourly “per session,” or overtime rate for principals, assistant principals, and other supervisors is now $56.50 or $57.18.
The DOE last fall allocated $6.4 million for the OT expense but that’s only for the 2020-21 school year.
CSA president Mark Cannizzaro said in a statement: “Throughout much of the pandemic, school leaders worked around the clock because the de Blasio administration struggled to establish a comprehensive process to contact trace and identify positive cases within schools and quickly communicate results to families. Though there is no way to adequately compensate them for the additional time they have spent and the sacrifices they have made to keep their communities safe, we are glad that the DOE has agreed to acknowledge their immense efforts and dedication.”
The DOE would not say how many COVID cases would generate the extra compensation or what it would cost.
Spokeswoman Sarah Casasnovas said, “Our principals and administrators have gone above and beyond to keep their school communities safe during this pandemic. They are receiving this compensation based on an agreement from 2021 for their work contact tracing and communicating real-time updates to families. We’ve shared information with principals for processing payments, as well as their actionable cases, and have allocated funding to schools so that staff are compensated accordingly.”