The superintendent of Gilbert Public Schools is a witch smeller! Christina Kishimoto is going to sniff out that hapless low-level employee who single-handedly screwed up the GPS payroll system and kept it screwed up for more than a year! <sarcasm> This so-called superintendent apparently never heard the expression, “The buck stops here.” It’s always the fault of someone else when things go wrong in GPS.
In a shocking example of buck passing, Christina Kishimoto told the GPS governing board that she would need six to eight more weeks to sniff around for that witch. Never mind the fact that this Great Payday Melee has been a staggering failure since her *alleged* boyfriend the former ‘Executive’ Director of Technology Services got caught with his did not run the old and new systems in parallel until the bugs could be worked out and employees could be paid properly. That seems to have been what happened when the *alleged* boyfriend bugged out after the superintendent’s *alleged* inappropriate relationship with him became public knowledge. It sure looks like the ill-fated payroll software project and the *alleged* superintendent misconduct were the proximate causes of the GPS wage theft caper.
Watch the GPS *Fearless Leader* confound the board with such statements as, “Our proactive communication was inefficient and insufficient.” Do you think she even knows what “system crossover and fidelity implementation” means? (If you don’t see the video, use this link: https://youtu.be/f66hM3Lwdno
We all know what’s going to happen with Christina Kishimoto’s promise that all supplemental payroll runs will need her personal approval. Suddenly, employees who have not been paid properly will be threatened with retaliation if they tell GPS, “I need my full pay and I need it now!” What’s so important about a rent payment or a car payment if the GPS Payroll Department has to tell the superintendent they screwed up again? You know the pattern and practice in GPS: threats, retaliation and anything else the Top Dogs can do to humiliate their underlings.
The reality is that payroll is not a priority for Kishimoto. Thus, her top level administrators haven’t managed to solve GPS payroll problems for more than a year after the new software came on line. Employees are not paid properly and tax reporting has not been accurate. GPS has blamed the software vendor, difficulty in locating paperwork <snort>, short staffing and lack of training as causes of problems. Anyone familiar with payroll in a business setting knows there are laws about paying employees for all time worked and accurately reporting, withholding and remitting taxes. But GPS seems to be either ignorant or willfully blind. How do you think this is going to play out? “So sorry, it was that witch’s fault…”
The problem isn’t a few little minor blips … each month, hundreds of payroll errors proliferate throughout GPS. Each error means that an employee was not paid properly. The circular issues result in supplemental payroll runs to get checks to some employees, while other employees are told to wait to receive their full pay, and inaccuracies multiply. So what did Business Services under the *watchful* eye of Chief Financial Officer Tom Wohlleber do? They started a ticket system like the one used by Tech Services. Sure, that solved the problems. <eye roll> Look at the number of errors each month and weep for how long GPS employees subsist without their full pay:
The arrogance of Christina Kishimoto is astonishing, and it translates into similar hardheartedness and cruelty among her staffers, as one of the reports to the irascible boss shows. That report appears at the bottom of this post. Why should staffers in the White Castle care if GPS employees aren’t paid properly? Their top boss, the superintendent, has been accepting their sloppy staff work for two and a half years! What would you bet that Christina Kishimoto and her acolytes have ALWAYS been paid correctly and on time? Most likely, their records are flagged so any potential error is fixed before payday.
It’s perplexing that sloppy staff work in the financial realm seems to be not just tolerated, but celebrated in GPS. A reasonable person would expect that financial matters involving public funds would be closely watched at every level. Nope. One example that began while Silly Jilly Humpherys was the board clerk, the person tasked with reviewing GPS vouchers before the board ratified expenditures:
In the GPS culture as it exists today, administrators and staffers in Gilbert Public Schools do whatever they want, and they don’t give a flying flip about who gets hurt. Green Bar reports, also known as vouchers, are published into the public sphere, and the GPS governing board approves those vouchers, most often without comment. In recent months, GPS has been releasing the public records in those green bar reports in ways that violently trample personal privacy.
Silly Jilly Humpherys did not do her job of reviewing those vouchers because *numbers are hard.* So, for two years, Christina Kishimoto and her minions had free rein to spend without any real accountability and indulge in sloppy staff work. No one was watching … except Westie, it seems. Even though Westie watches and sometimes works behind the scenes to head off public humiliation for GPS staffers [they know who they are and what we did to help], it doesn’t do much good to try to fix GPS problems.
Nonetheless, we’ll try again and we’ll submit a most specific complaint to the board about how GPS, under Christina Kishimoto’s so-called leadership, continues to violate privacy of students … and this time, a top-level administrator. Surely Christopher R. Stroud, principal of Gilbert High School doesn’t care that his name, date of birth and cell phone number have been online for weeks.* His drivers license number, too … sweet! Maybe it’s more scary that Westie knows his flight numbers for his fancy trip to a resort location on the taxpayers’ dime.
How long do you think it will take some enterprising GHS students to find the same information Westie has? That personal data is really, really valuable to hackers and identity thieves. What could go wrong?
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Big Fat Asterisk: Don’t bother getting indignant … Westie notified the GPS governing board about the problem before this post was made public. There was time to remove ALL the personal information of student victims and Good Ole Chris Stroud on the latest Voucher Report for ratification on February 28, 2017. With any luck, someone will have the presence of mind to go back and clean up the past six months or more of student privacy violations in the vouchers. But this is GPS, so who knows what will happen?
Here’s the Payroll Status Report that shows *business as usual* in GPS. Sheeeeeeesh.
