Payroll Problems in DeKalb
District 65 Uses the Same Vendor (Tyler Technologies) for Payroll
Folks have been reaching out to me for stories out of Dr. Horton’s new District in Georgia - so here’s one with an Evanston connection.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported on a story that DeKalb County Schools, where Dr. Horton is the Superintendent, has been dealing with serious payroll issues;
The payroll delays were first reported by FOX 5 Atlanta on Friday. The district initially reported that 300 employees were impacted, and later amended that to more than 500. Most of the problems were resolved by Friday night, Porter said in an emailed statement. As of Tuesday afternoon, 29 “unresolved payroll discrepancies” remained.
According to WSB-TV in Atlanta, the teachers union representative, Verdaillia Turner, indicated the problem goes back back months for some staff.
Georgia Federation of Teachers President Verdaillia Turner called for an audit.
“Some of them have been owed money since June, some of them owed money as far back as May,” said Turner. “All this should have been straightened out before several hundred people weren’t paid.”
According to the AJC, Dr. Horton sent out a memo this morning, apologizing to employees;
Superintendent Devon Horton sent a memo to all employees Monday apologizing for the delays. “We recognize the distress this situation caused and promise to learn from it to prevent any recurrence in the future,” read the memo, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Both District 65 and DeKalb County use the same software: Tyler Technology’s Infinite Visions software, now called School ERP Pro. District 65 has had their own issues with transitioning to the same software, as recent as June.
June 28, 2024 - District 65 Screws Up June Payroll
Sept 28, 2022 - District 65 still having payroll issues
February 3rd, 2022 - District 65 mistakenly failed to deduct federal taxes from 33 employees’ paychecks
In June 2024, District 65 blamed the software vendor;
Unfortunately, the overall processing delay was largely the result of an outage this week of our financial software system that affected school districts across the country.
The software costs District 65 around $250,000/year.
In both Evanston and DeKalb County, Tyler Technologies predates Dr. Horton. I reached out to Tyler Technologies for comment in June and haven’t received a reply.
Tyler Technologies has acquired so many small government financial system firms, they are mostly the only software game in town for a lot of governments, including towns and judicial systems. If you google their name and “lawsuits,” you can see that they have kept people in jail longer than they should have been, messed up property assessments to huge financial costs, and more. Many governments have sued them for implementation issues related to contracts, but I have seen school districts mostly just extend contracts with them and pay them more to finish implementation instead of trying to recoup costs. Individual contracts are nuanced, so this is more a trend observation.