School representatives criticized the bureaucracy in the administration.
The schools in the canton of Zurich are dependent on vicars. Some are paid late.
Gabriela Rothenfluh is responsible for the education of 6000 children – and she is frustrated. “People are contacting us who worked in the summer and still haven’t received a salary.”
Rothenfluh is President of the Waidberg school district in the city of Zurich. And she has a problem: her vicars – temporary teachers on whom schools depend more than ever – often do not receive their wages from the canton of Zurich on time.
It happens again and again that those affected have not seen any money months after their employment, she says. “We immediately ask the cantonal elementary school authority. Sometimes something happens – sometimes not. It is frustrating.”
Teachers without money, frustrated school authorities and a sluggish canton administration: what Rothenfluh – himself a member of the SP – describes is apparently systematic. As the Tamedia newspapers report, vicars throughout the canton had to wait months for their wages. It is sometimes about significant amounts of several thousand francs.
How could this happen?
More and more helpers
Since the summer holidays, many schools in the canton of Zurich have been operating in a special mode: due to the ongoing shortage of teachers, the education department allows laypersons in the classroom in addition to trained specialists. Some schools have to go from absence to absence with vicars. In other words, teachers who act as substitutes: for a few days, several weeks or months. They are usually paid on an hourly basis.
Such substitutions are not uncommon. They are used, for example, when a teacher takes maternity leave or a teacher has to go into the military. What is unusual, however, is the number of vicariates. It has risen sharply in recent years: while it was 15,233 in the 2017/18 school year, it is currently 28,740.
According to the canton, the reason for the increase is regularly employed teachers who would have made up for travel or time off on a large scale after the end of the corona pandemic.
In addition, there is a trend that a deputy is divided among more and more people. This is partly due to the fact that it is difficult to find external help due to the shortage of teachers – which is why the existing teachers at a school often divide the deputy among themselves and are additionally paid for it.
The increase in vicariates is now apparently bringing the elementary school authority to its breaking point. But why are a few thousand additional wage payments causing such long delays? After all, the elementary school authority had to inform the school administrations in August that some wages would not be paid on time due to overworked staff.
Bureaucracy instead of digitization
On the one hand, the problem lies in the fact that the primary education authority had a staff shortage in payroll accounting, which it communicated back in August. Meanwhile, the staff in the relevant department has been increased.
On the other hand, the administration is also lagging behind in terms of efficiency and digitization. The process leading up to the payment of wages for a vicariate is lengthy, as the example of the Waidberg school district in Zurich shows: schools there have to report every deputy to the district school authorities. This must forward the report to the cantonal elementary school authority. This then generates a form that the vicar has to fill out and send back by post. And then the processing of the wage application only begins.
“The effort is absurd,” says district school president Rothenfluh. Your authority would have to employ a student on a 15 percent basis just to receive and forward the applications. “The processes are extremely lengthy. It’s as if we were only talking about digitization yesterday.”
Rothenfluh criticized the administrative bottleneck as “foreseeable”. The test also takes so long because the canton is far too precise with the control. “There is a basic mood of distrust towards us school authorities. As if we had an interest in cheating on the applications.”
When asked, Barbara Fotsch, President of the Schwamendingen school district, also spoke of a “mania of forms” on the part of the canton. About every two weeks, a temporary worker reports to her authority whose wages are a long time coming. The longest wait was four months. “It’s really a problem for those affected if the wages are suddenly missing at the end of the month.”
exhausted teachers
The administration has recognized the problem of the bureaucracy. They are now working on digitizing the processes, says Myriam Ziegler, head of the cantonal elementary school office. At the moment, the elementary school authority cannot even quantify the number of cases in which wage payments are currently being delayed.
Ziegler rejects part of the responsibility for the delays: “If somewhere in the process someone does not comply with the specifications or provides missing information, this affects the time of payment.”
In other words: the reasons for late payment of wages are not always the responsibility of the canton. There could also be delays or errors when reporting to the school authorities or temporary workers.
The Schwamendinger district school president Fotsch sees another reason: “We have a backlog of payments because a lot of teachers are currently absent and we have to replace them with temporary workers. And many are canceled because the teachers simply have too much to do and are exhausted after two years of the pandemic. »
The fact that many temporary workers are needed in Zurich’s schools is not likely to change much in the near future. The canton assumes that the number of representations will remain in a similar range in the next few years as before.