Mayor Adrian Fenty and schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on Tuesday toured a city schools building where crucial personnel records were piled in boxes haphazardly on a file room floor, in what the mayor called yet more evidence of a school system in disarray.
Fenty labeled the effort to clean up the file room mess and digitalize the records part of his and Rhee’s campaign to “turn around decades of a lack of sense of urgency and a lack of attention to detail.”
The effort to organize and organize and computerize the files is engaging dozens of contract workers.
When they’re finished in mid-September, some 4.6 million pieces of paper — human resource documents dating back a decade or more — will be filed alphabetically and scanned into computers. The workers, who have logged 26,000 hours so far, are about halfway done with the job, officials said Tuesday.
“We’re taking that file room and taking it to the digital world,” said Vivek Kundra, the District’s chief technology officer. The work, which will cost the District roughly $2 million, is critically important, officials said.
Rhee said the workers have found files organized alphabetically by first name, among other issues, symbolic of an agency “lacking leadership and management.”
The documents include the 16 papers found in an individual’s personnel file, including where they work and how much they’re paid.
Once scanned and digitized into searchable pages — an ongoing process in another room on the sixth floor — the papers are filed, their many duplicates shredded off-site. Kundra said every record will have both a hard and electronic copy.
Human resources staff will be trained to scan and file records immediately to avoid future problems, officials said.
An outside auditor flagged the schools’ failure to keep ordered personnel records, including those tied to payroll for new and past employees, as a major weakness that could affect the District’s finances and its good standing on Wall Street.
“Without this documentation on file, errors in payroll may not be detected in a timely manner and may result in improper payments to current and terminated employees,” auditor BDO Seidman reported.
Tuesday’s tour came less than a week before school commences and marked the latest effort by Fenty and his education team to illustrate why they say it was necessary to take charge of the education system this spring.
