Someone’s got to pay

THE LOBBY at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s headquarters looks a lot like an emergency room. Victims arrive each morning and take their places on hard plastic chairs. Front-desk clerks sort through complicated paperwork. Staffers try to stem the bleeding, but you can’t help but suspect that the wounded will soon be back with new injuries.

If only this were just a metaphor.

This is week 13 that the famously dysfunctional district has failed to pay its 78,000 employees properly. Instead of regular checks for predictable amounts, teachers, guidance counselors and support staff have been receiving too little (one cent in at least one case), too much ($5,000 in another) or no check at all. That’s 13 weeks of juggling mortgages, car payments and utility bills.

What happened? The district in February installed a $95-million software system to manage payroll, and it doesn’t work very well. While officials emphasize that 169 of the system’s 207 identified software glitches have been fixed as of last week, the bad checks keep coming, affecting thousands of employees. The LAUSD is the kind of organization, apparently, in which three-plus months of calamity is not enough for anyone to push the panic button.

The district says that it’s difficult to coordinate the solar system of pay schedules and job classifications for a payroll nearly as large as the population of Santa Monica. This is true. But it’s also true that many California universities have a similar constellation of employees -- cafeteria workers, school police, professors -- and manage to pay their staffs on time.

At healthy organizations, there are consequences for failure. The LAUSD is not a healthy organization. The district acknowledged as much after a report it commissioned last month lambasted its own confused operations and inability to solve problems identified many times before.

The district has blown through its April 5 deadline for fixing all the payroll glitches, and a new deadline has not been set. The teachers union, with good reason, filed suit against the LAUSD two weeks ago, but it should never have come to that. If Supt. David L. Brewer is as serious about accountability as advertised, he should find those responsible for the fiasco and make them suffer the consequences.