New York City school administrators have been confirmed by the Department of Education to receive payment for five hours of overtime for every COVID-19 case that required extra work to track and inform infected students and staff.
The administrators will see the pay bump for each “actionable” case — meaning those that triggered partial or full classroom closures or quarantines.
“They were contacting principals at all hours of the day and night,” a Brooklyn school chief reported. “We’d get calls at 10, 11 p.m.” about a classroom or building closure the next day.
“It was a very daunting task,” the principal said. “In the beginning we had to quarantine all close contacts. If a staff member was the computer teacher and that teacher saw five classes during the day, you had to notify all those close contacts.”
This school year, the rules on whether to close classrooms and who to quarantine kept changing. Variables included whether the students or staff members were within three feet of each other and for how long, whether students faced each other in the cafeteria, whether the contact was outdoors, whether the kids wore masks, and finally whether they were vaccinated.
“It became a whole mess of trying to figure this out,” the principal said. “Trying to keep track of this was another job.”
Each school will get a list of COVID cases deemed “actionable” by the DOE. The administrators will then divvy up the funds, based on who handled the cases.
DOE principals start at a salary of about $170,000.
Spokeswoman Sarah Casasnovas said, “Our principals and administrators have gone above and beyond to keep their school communities safe during this pandemic. They are receiving this compensation based on an agreement from 2021 for their work contact tracing and communicating real-time updates to families. We’ve shared information with principals for processing payments, as well as their actionable cases, and have allocated funding to schools so that staff are compensated accordingly.”
