Cleveland schools District pays $5M for accrued time off

By Thomas Ott

Cleveland Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND

The Cleveland School District, scratching for every penny, could use the nearly $5 million paid to employees who have retired since last summer.

Records show 269 employees cashed in that amount of accumulated vacation and sick leave since the fiscal year started July 1.

Topping the list are two administrators who each collected about $83,000, one after working in the system for four years.

Nearly 70 percent of the employees picked up at least $10,000 in what the district calls severance; more than 40 percent received $20,000 or more.

All redeemed the time based on their final pay rates, no matter when during their careers the leave was accumulated. At least 24 employees who retired were rehired, a practice popularly known as “double dipping.”

The severance equals more than 10 percent of the deficit the district faced before making cuts for the 2011-12 school year.

A majority of the payments — nearly $3.7 million — went to union employees who by contract received 30 percent of their sick time, up to $30,000.

Forty-seven teachers, represented by the district’s largest union, got the maximum.

But nonunion administrators received the biggest individual amounts, per terms of their personal agreements.

The district paid them 100 percent of vacation not used in their last three years and, in most cases, 30 percent of accrued sick leave, subject to the same $30,000 limit as the unions.

Three aides to Eugene Sanders, the former chief executive officer, got 50 percent of their sick time.

Ohio’s new collective-bargaining law, if it survives a likely referendum, would cap sick-leave payments for the district’s union employees at 50 percent of their pay rate, up to 1,000 hours.

Whether the provision can save the district any money is uncertain. Had the new limits been applied this year, union employees receiving the $30,000 maximum would have seen modest decreases, but many below them would have gained, a Plain Dealer analysis shows.

Meanwhile, administrators and other nonunion employees might not have been affected at all.

For them, the statute requires only that the school board have a written policy regarding payments for accrued leave.

Michael Dittoe, spokesman for House Speaker William G. Batchelder of Medina, said the House’s ruling Republican caucus had not discussed limits for administrators.

The city school district is not the only government agency paying for sick and vacation time.

For example, the Columbus school system, Ohio’s largest, has paid more than $2.9 million to 220 employees this fiscal year.

State and local government workers in Ohio who cashed in sick time last year received an average of $17,000, according to the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions.

Institute President Matt Mayer favors strict caps on payments for all leave, with no exceptions for administrators or other nonunion employees.

“They’re driving costs, too,” he said. “If you’re going to say teachers should share the burden, so should administrators.”

The Cleveland school board votes on labor agreements.

But because the district is under mayoral control, the CEO, appointed by the board in consultation with the mayor, signs off on administrators’ contracts.

Interim Chief Executive Peter Raskind, a banker by trade, has decided that the district will quit paying administrators up to $500 a month in car allowances and stop paying their employee pension contributions, effective June 30.

School board Chairwoman Denise Link said Raskind will evaluate vacation and sick-leave policies as the district rewrites contracts before that date.

Sanders, who retired Feb. 1, was in line to receive the largest retirement payout but fell to fourth when the district deducted for expenses it says should not have been paid on his behalf while he was CEO. Sanders, whose contract did not permit him to collect for sick time, put in for 100.5 vacation days worth $110,000; he received $59,000.

The No. 1 beneficiary, Omega Brown, worked for the district 11 years. He collected $83,811 for unused vacation and sick time when he retired Jan. 1.

Brown, 64, was vice president of a school bus company in Milwaukee before moving to Cleveland in 2000 as transportation director for former district chief executive Barbara Byrd-Bennett.