Richmond School Board delays action on bus driver overtime issue

In the meantime, the school board’s auditor reported that more than 700 emails to the school district’s fraud, waste and abuse hotline went unopened for 10 years.

The school board at its Monday night meeting approved a motion to take up one of the auditor’s recommendations for the school bus driver overtime issue: ensuring school bus drivers clock in and out for their shifts.

The board did not implement other recommendations, including the proposal to pay employees for actual time worked. According to a report produced by the Richmond School Board’s auditor, Doug Graeff, bus drivers and bus monitors are paid regular time for time not worked, paid overtime for time not worked and paid overtime when actually working regular time. This is the school division’s practice.

The audit, first presented to the board in April, says inaction could result in school funds being at risk of continued misappropriation, RPS acting contrary to its own policy on overtime, and RPS acting contrary to state and federal wage laws.

Some school bus drivers receive more than $30,000 in overtime pay per year on top of their regular salaries, according to the audit.

School board members on Monday night expressed hesitancy to make a decision that would cause financial hardship for bus drivers.

The board’s action asked the administration to come back at its next meeting in August with more information on how bus drivers’ pay would be affected with the auditor’s proposed recommendations.

“We have hundreds of transportation workers who are reaching out to us crying out for help and assistance and we want to make a well-informed decision,” said Shavonda Dixon, who represents the 9th District.

“I’m still not hearing what the ramifications of that would be outside of what we already know that transportation workers will be impacted.”

Kenya Gibson, the 3rd District School Board representative, said the board should not make decisions to alter the transportation department’s pay while their union is in the midst of negotiating their contracts. If a board made a decision Monday night, it would negate collective bargaining, she said.

“I voted for collective bargaining. Pretty much everybody at this table supports collective bargaining. We’re all Democrats and so we should let the collective bargaining process continue,” Gibson said.

One bus driver made $124,000 last fiscal year, according to salary documents obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. A current job listing for an RPS bus driver lists the salary range as $33,856.00 to $52,068.00.

One issue is that any bus driver who picks up an after-school route automatically gets two hours of overtime for each route, no matter how long the route takes to complete, due to school division practice.

Upon receiving the auditor’s report, the administration moved to change that policy. But the board then directed the administration to hold off on making the change until the board could further consider the outcomes.

Gibson maintains that the only reason for the uptick in pay was the administration’s decision to move drivers from a six-hour contract to an eight-hour contract.

“Full stop. That’s all that changed. And we still have gotten very little information on that. It defies logic to me,” Gibson said.

Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras told the board Monday night that he is not making any judgments, and the board needs to decide what to do.

“It’s just a basic policy question. Regardless of what initially caused the surge (in pay), does the board want to maintain the policy of paying for two hours of overtime for a run whether it’s 15 minutes, 30 minutes or two hours, or not?” Kamras said.

“There are good arguments to be made on both ends of this … I can’t speak for what headlines are written in the media. There’s a fundamental question the board needs to answer: Do we want to continue this practice or not?”

Kamras said that moving to a system where drivers are only paid for the exact amount of time that they work will cause financial hardship for drivers.

“If the board wants to preserve that practice to avoid any financial hardship, and it is legal to do so, the board can certainly make that decision,” Kamras said. “But I do think it’s clear if the board goes in the direction of ‘we’re just going to pay for the amount of work,’ it will absolutely cause drivers to get less pay.”

Some school board members have butted heads with Graeff, the school board’s auditor in recent months. He filed grievances 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 that Graeff did not include information that they had requested in his report.

In a June 9 email to Gibson, Graeff said: “Your slanderous comments and public admonishments of me and my work are not appropriate, I ask that you cease and desist.”

Gibson apologized and said there may be a misunderstanding about her comments.

“I want to affirm that you are doing important work and also that as an elected representative of this governing body it is my responsibility to ask tough questions,” Gibson said in an email.

LaTonya Holloway, an internal auditor who reported to Graeff, filed a grievance against him earlier this year, according to emails. She resigned in May, according to emails.

Whistleblower report

Graeff, who was appointed in October 2023, found more than 700 emails sent to the fraud, waste and abuse email dating back to 2014 that had not been opened, according to an internal report.

The majority of those emails were spam, according to the report, and about 30 emails more than a year old failed to detail a substantive issue or were not related to fraud, waste or abuse. The email has now been brought current and is monitored daily by Graeff.

The account had been unmonitored for over a year before Graeff was hired because the person in charge was gone. It is unclear why before that, some emails were opened and some were not.

After cleaning up the whistleblower email account, voicemail messages and department files, Graeff put a tracking log into place. The log captures older matters that may be substantive and matters reported as of April 23. In the log are 16 whistleblower complaints and “none were actionable as fraud, theft or abuse matters.”

Those complaints include two allegations of misappropriation, dating back to 2020, plus allegations: of food distribution theft dating back to 2020, of a sex offender possibly gaining access to a school, of a bus driver exhibiting poor driving skills, of a child being placed for too long in a “restorative room,” of a substitute teacher making racist comments on social media, of residency fraud and that a half-way house was too close to Dogwood Middle School.