Apr 4, 2008 12:13 am US/Eastern
Double Dipping Discovered In Miami-Dade Schools
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
Marta Zayas pulls up in her old Ford Explorer. On the side is her phone number with an advertisement for tutoring. Tutoring is one of five jobs for the Miami Dade school teacher.
"I sell books online," said Zayas, "I sell Avon, I work full time as a teacher and I work as a part-time professor at Miami Dade College, because I wouldn't be able to afford living just on my teaching position at the district."
Zayas makes $41,000 a year. That is less than half of the salary of one assistant principal at her school. That administrator is retired and then the district rehired her, making more than her original salary. She's one of 27 school administrators who retired and then got rehired by the district. Its costing Miami Dade School district 3.2 million dollars. In most cases the district brought the administrators back from retirement at a higher salary. In one case the district doubled the salary. Many of those administrators also receive a pension.
It's an issue Miami Dade School Board member Ana Rivas Logan has been looking into.
"The state of Florida gives them a huge golden parachute," says Logan. "Sometimes upwards of a quarter of a million dollars when our employees retire. Depending on how long you've been in the system and how many years you were in the drop."
The D.R.O.P is the state's Deferred Retirement Option Program. It was originally designed as an incentive to get some of the most highly paid to retire. The idea was to make room for some of the younger cheaper people to advance.
"We have a list of assistant principals ready to become principals, a huge list--people that have gone through our own assessments," said Logan.
In fact, the district has an executive training program designed to do just that. Records obtained by the
CBS4 I-Team show the district also paid 1.2 million dollars to send management hopefuls to the Harvard institute for special training. So why does the district keep the retired rehired employees and pay them more?
"Well I looked through some of the names in here and some of the names in here are definitely friends of friends," said Logan. "I see some cronyism in here. I see a lot of cronyism in here, friends of friends."
Some call it double dipping. In some states it is illegal. But not in Florida. In fact, there are a lot of state employees who do it. That's because state legislators reworked a law to accommodate one of their own who was retiring at the time. But while legal, some Miami Dade school board members and members of the teachers union say its an outrage to have this going on as the district struggles to slash its budget by the millions.
"We feel that rehiring administrators is not the most efficient way to spend dollars," said Fedrick Ingram, of the United Teachers of Dade. "These decisions that they're making are maybe not in the best interest of teachers."
A spokesman for the Miami Dade School District initially agreed to an interview with
CBS4 News and then later changed his mind.
Broward County School district also does the same thing. Broward tells us it has 17 retired but rehired administrators.
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