The city Department of Education has been forced to shell out millions of dollars to pay teachers for overtime unintentionally created when they were put on a slow and faulty computer system.
The DOE has agreed to pay nearly 1,800 staffers a collective $2.6 million — but still has about 28,000 teachers left to compensate for their unexpected overtime work.
If that pattern of payment continues, the remaining bill could rise as high as $30 million by the end of the month.
An independent arbitrator mandated earlier this year that the city pay the OT because its special- education computer system, known as SESIS, was so slow that it took teachers hours outside the regular school day to get required work done.
The work included logging attendance and the types of services rendered to special-needs kids.
“It’s a very cumbersome system,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.
The turtle-paced system, which was designed to replace paper files with electronic records, has cost the city $80 million to develop since 2008.