An El Paso Independent School District union is accusing the district of wage theft after several speech language pathologists — or SLPs — were not given accurate raises after the board voted to increase their salaries.
The El Paso Federation of Teachers president submitted the collective grievance to Superintendent Diana Sayavedra on Jan. 10, alleging Deputy Superintendent Administration Vince Sheffield and his staff did not follow the district’s compensation guidelines, resulting in a lower raise for SLPs.
El Paso Federation of Teachers president Ross Moore said he believed this was done in retaliation after several SLPs complained to the EPISD school board about their low salaries and growing workloads.
Ross Moore, a retired Army officer and teacher and current president of the union that represents EPSID employees, points out the district’s lower rate of pay compared to neighboring districts and argues that there is an intentional effort to push out older, more experienced teachers, Friday, Sept. 8. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
“Denying them their pay was an emotional response and a retaliatory response on the part of HR and Mr. Sheffield,” Moore told El Paso Matters.
Now the federation is asking the district to correct these raises with back pay and to implement new safeguards to prevent issues like this from happening in the future.
EPISD and Sheffield did not immediately respond to El Paso Matter’s request for comment.
According to EPISD’s grievance process, the superintendent or a designee has 10 days from the day the complaint was submitted to hold a hearing and another 10 days to respond. If they are unable to resolve the grievance or the time for a response has expired, the federation can bring the complaint to the school board.
The issue started in June when the board approved a new pay schedule which gave staff a 2% raise and moved SLPs from a 105 to 106 pay schedule.
Moore said this should have resulted in a 10% pay raise under the district’s compensation guidelines, but Sheffield and his staff claimed the pay schedule move was “in name only” and raised their pay by 2% of the new salary schedule.
After the federation brought the issue to the board and superintendent’s attention in August, they promised it would be resolved.
Community members attend a meeting of the El Paso Independent School District Board of Trustees, Monday, Dec. 13. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
Eventually, several SLPs discovered they still had not gotten the 10% raise they were promised. The federation found that in some cases SLPs got less than a 7% raise, according to the complaint.
This is not the first time EPISD has been accused of wage theft.
In December 2019, the EPISD board voted to settle a grievance alleging that two dance instructors had not been paid stipends for work they did over several years, awarding them $14,000. On another occasion, a staff member was awarded $9,800 after being asked to work extra time without pay.
The district also faced public backlash after an “administrative error” caused several dual-language teachers to miss out on a stipend for teaching in two languages. The board voted to update the policy in September 2023, giving dual-language teachers up to a $2,500 stipend, to correct the issue. Previously, the policy gave teachers a stipend if at least 50% of the class spoke another language besides English at home.
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