Richmond Public Schools will pay its hourly workers who aren’t under a contract with the division for the unplanned week out of work that occurred earlier this month as a result of the city’s water crisis.

Noting that the unanticipated time off “presents a significant hardship for our team that’s paid hourly,” RPS Budget and Finance Director Lynn Bragga said the division will pay non-contracted hourly employees the average of the weekly hours they worked over the past five pay periods for the period between Jan. 6 and Jan. 10. 

Those hours will be paid out in employees’ Jan. 31 paychecks. 

RPS employees were scheduled to return from the winter break on Monday, Jan. 6, but a snowstorm and the failure of the water treatment plant ultimately kept schools closed for the entire week. 

Tax withholding error

Bragga also said the chaos caused by the water crisis, coupled with shortages in RPS’ payroll department and a transition to a new financial management system, contributed to an error the department made that resulted in too many federal tax dollars being withheld from more than 1,300 employees’ Jan. 15. paychecks.

“It was our oversight,” she told the School Board Tuesday. “It was human error.” 

The problem affected employees who were hired in 2019 or earlier and was the result of payroll staff accidentally removing the standard deduction from the system when they updated the federal tax tables to reflect the new Internal Revenue Service tables that went into effect Jan. 1, Bragga said. 

Of the 1,308 employees who had too much tax withheld from their paycheck, 778 saw less than $50 incorrectly deducted. However, almost 3% of affected employees had between $200 and $434 incorrectly withheld. 

Bragga said she and the department “deeply regret” the mistake and that affected employees were notified on Jan. 16 with options on how to proceed. 

In addition to requesting two new payroll workers to fill the current vacancies, she said the new payroll system is expected to go live later this month and will cut down on “an inordinate amount of work” employees are facing during the transition. 

“Obviously this is not something that we would have hoped to have happened, but we just appreciate you all being proactive and ensuring that this type of scenario doesn’t happen again,” Board Chair Shavonda Fernandez said.