The District’s public schools failed to pay nearly 100 professionals a promised $4,000 stipend for their work during an intensive summer training program, The Examiner has learned.
D.C. Teaching Fellows, a highly competitive program in which mid-career professionals commit to teach for two years in troubled city schools, had chosen 92 participants for the rigorous six-week summer institute. Graduates, who are now full-salaried D.C. teachers, were to be paid $4,000 for their time, but September came and went with no stipend.
“The last few months have been very difficult to say the least,” one fellow wrote in an Oct. 6 letter to the schools system’s chief financial officer. “The added stress that DCPS has caused due to mismanagement, slowness in processing necessary paperwork, and the lack of concern from the Human Resources Department has made my first month as a new teacher in DCPS almost unbearable.”
While the fellows were told the delay was due to a “loss of federal grant funding,” it appears the money got lost in red tape. Patricia Alford-Williams, DCPS spokeswoman, said the checks had togo through a “process to be approved by a number of people in the system for safety and quality control.”
“Somewhere in the programming there was a delay,” she said.
But Alford-Williams confirmed that the paperwork has “gone through all of the authorizations it needs to go through,” and all that’s left is to “input the information and cut the checks.” DCPS, she said, “regrets any inconvenience this might have caused.”
In the letter, the teaching fellow claimed the school system “has lost the trust and respect of many of its employees,” and demanded the full stipend by Oct. 25.
All of the fellows have now received at least one-third of the stipend, said Tara Mahnesmith, site manager of the D.C. Teaching Fellows program. Half have received a second check, and the third should be delivered soon. The fellows program also helped participants secure loans while they bided time. But even Mahnesmith couldn’t explain the delay. DCPS, she said, is responsible for all teachers’ salaries.
“We aren’t privy to those conversations,” she said. “We don’t know what happened.”
