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Ithaca school employees left unpaid over holiday weekend; union presses district for fixes
Summary
At the May 27 Ithaca City School District board meeting, union leaders described a payroll error that left employees without pay over a long weekend. Superintendent Dr. Brown said all 1,000+ employees were not paid on time and promised system changes and recommendations to the board.
At the May 27 meeting of the Ithaca City School District Board of Education, Patty Sitman, president of the district’s ESP union, said a payroll error over a holiday weekend left some employees unpaid and caused “ruined” weekends and financial hardship for staff who “live hand to mouth.”
The matter drew extended public comment and a response from Superintendent Dr. Brown, who said the district’s payroll submission had been filed on Thursday and that “our folks should have been paid on Friday,” but bank protocols and other failures extended the disruption. “The entire organization, all thousand plus employees, no one got paid,” Dr. Brown said.
The union president, Patty Sitman, told the board that some members still had not received pay and that pay stubs lacked legally required detail under New York rules, including employer contact information, pay period dates and the rate of pay. “Our check stubs are woefully inadequate when it comes to information according to the state of New York,” Sitman said, and urged the district to correct pay-stub formatting and communication
Dr. Brown acknowledged the district should have communicated more directly with union leaders and families and said the district will bring recommendations to the board to prevent recurrence. “We will be bringing some recommendations to the board to make sure the systems are in place to make sure this doesn't happen again,” he said. He also asked the public not to vilify individual staff, saying an investigation showed no deliberate withholding of pay.
Board members and the superintendent described multiple channels of updates over the weekend — texts, emails and meetings — and said the district will propose operational changes. No formal board action was taken at the meeting; the matter remains a district management task with forthcoming recommendations.
Board members urged affected employees to follow district communication protocols if they believe they have ongoing issues, and the union president said she would work with district staff to prepare a memo to help employees read their pay stubs.
The district did not offer a detailed timeline for the recommendations at the meeting; the superintendent said he and his team worked through the weekend and will return to the board with proposed fixes.
