More than 100 teachers at Front Range Community College did not receive their salaries for the first two weeks of summer school as scheduled, due to “human error.”
About half of those affected received their missing pay four days late, on June 18, and the other half didn’t get it until the next payday, on June 28, said Jessica Peterson, FRCC communications director.
“As of that date, all FRCC summer teachers were paid in full,” said Peterson, who noted that those affected also received stipends and grants of $500 each — with some receiving both — as additional compensation.
But that didn’t happen before many of those teachers, most of whom earned just $3,000 per class for standard, three-credit courses, were late on their mortgage, rent, car, student loan and credit card payments, said Laura Wally, a chemistry teacher at the Larimer Campus in Fort Collins.
“It was very difficult,” said Wally, who filed for unemployment benefits with the state when she didn’t receive her expected paycheck. “Paying late on any amount is completely unacceptable and puts you late on your payments to creditors. You set things up under the assumption that your paycheck is going to come.”
A pattern of problematic salaries at Front Range Community College
If this were the first time this year that FRCC instructors haven’t been paid their salaries, it would be a little easier to accept, Wally said.
However, Cory Reinking, chair of the FRCC Larimer Campus Faculty Council, and Melinda Myrick, co-president of the FRCC chapter of the American Association of University Professors on the Westminster Campus, said some adjunct faculty also missed out on pay during both the fall and spring semesters.
According to Peterson, those incidents involved far fewer instructors than the incident this summer.
According to Peterson, 12 teachers received delayed paychecks in the fall because they had new supervisors and “had difficulty getting the necessary approvals to approve paychecks in the system.”
According to Peterson, two teachers experienced delays in receiving their salaries during the spring semester due to problems with an upgrade to the payroll computer system used by the Colorado Community College System.
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Low staff morale and low trust problem have been resolved
“We raised this issue in the fall semester, when it first happened,” said Reinking, a history professor. “We raised this issue with the administration and the faculty were assured it wouldn’t happen again, and it happened again this spring. And now, in its most dramatic form, it happened again this summer.
“There is therefore little confidence that this problem has been solved.”
Morale among faculty at all three FRCC campuses was already low amid concerns about the college’s efforts to merge the three into a system that he and others fear will remove the “community” from the community college name, Reinking said.
According to Peterson, adjunct faculty make up 62% of FRCC’s teaching staff.
How exactly were no salaries received?
The missed salaries this summer, including 33 for faculty at the Larimer Campus, were the result of a “human error” involving a manual override that FRCC regularly makes in the Colorado Community College System’s automated payroll system, Peterson said.
According to Peterson, the measure will allow teachers to receive their first paycheck two weeks after they start teaching, instead of the system’s default of one month.
“A few years ago, FRCC said it was too long to keep people waiting,” Peterson said.
“What has happened this year is that the manual change that FRCC has to make to get them that extra pay, which would have happened on June 14, has not been reflected in some of the bookings,” Peterson said.
FRCC has approximately 325 faculty members teaching courses this summer at FRCC’s three campuses — Larimer, Boulder County and Westminster — and 105 of them did not receive their first paycheck, as scheduled in the university’s published salary calendar, on June 14.
About half of them didn’t get a deferred payment until June 18, Peterson said. The other 50 had to wait until the CCCS standard payday of June 28.
Grants and subsidies paid to those affected
FRCC provided $500 stipends each to all 105 teachers affected by the delays, and those who had to wait until June 28 also received $500 emergency grants through the FRCC Foundation. The stipends and grants were not advances on salaries and do not have to be paid back, Peterson said.
“FRCC leadership recognizes that the college would not function without our faculty,” Rebecca Woulfe, FRCC’s vice president of academic affairs and provost, said in a statement released by Peterson. “Our leadership team acknowledges the error and apologizes to our impacted faculty for the delay. The college deeply regrets the inconvenience and stress this error has caused.”
“Teachers are critical to the success of this institution, to the success of our students, and to the work we do. The university is taking immediate and comprehensive steps to prevent such delays in the future.”
Measures are being taken to prevent further problems
FRCC is adding two new positions to its team responsible for teacher and faculty contracts and compensation and is “conducting a comprehensive review of our payroll processes and systems to identify any vulnerabilities and implement robust safeguards,” Peterson said. The college is also working with CCCS, the statewide system, to discuss potential improvements to the payroll process.
FRCC had 28,805 students enrolled at its three campuses and in concurrent enrollment programs with local high schools during the 2022-23 school year, the most recent year of official attendance figures available, she said. Nearly 11,000 of those students took classes on or through the Larimer Campus.
Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest to the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, x.com/KellyLyell And facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Payments delayed for some Front Range Community College teachers
