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On October 29th, all Philadelphia school district teachers were notified that the district would be transitioning to a new timekeeping system. The new system, Kronos, is planned to eventually replace the old timekeeping system tied to teachers’ payroll.
“Once there was the closure in the spring, every school got a Google Form [to sign in daily]. That was another adjustment. If you didn’t sign in a certain number of times, you would be notified by the principal,” reflects Ms. Lerer, Masterman’s Digital Literacy & Technology teacher. The Google Form system continued through October, with frequent technical difficulties and complaints from teachers.
Ultimately, the district announced on October 29th that they would be switching to Kronos, but that it wouldn’t go live until November 9th. “So for those, approximately, 10 days, we would have to do both. So in that time period, and shortly after November 9th, I did get quite a few messages from teachers,” says Ms. Lerer. Kronos introduced a new slew of technical difficulties (according to Ms. Lerer, the mobile app for Kronos “crashes every day” on her phone) in addition to the confusion that comes with a new process. Teachers are not hourly workers; their job doesn’t stop outside of the classroom. According to Madame Heimann, the time she spends working outside of Zoom can vary from “at least half an hour up to several hours for any given class period.” Because of this, many teachers said clocking out was just not intuitive. “If we’re doing our jobs, there’s no need for us to sign in. Doing it online doesn’t make sense, either, because if we weren’t showing up to class, people would know.” According to Ms. Lerer, “some of the sentiment around this is, why implement this new thing when what we’re all going through is new?”
On paper, using Kronos doesn’t sound like it should be complicated. “There are two buttons: one that says ‘clock in’, and one that says ‘clock out’”, said Ms. Lerer. But this hasn’t stopped the confusion from spreading throughout the district, with many teachers forgetting to clock out: even some members of The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) post reminders on their Facebook page for teachers to clock in and out. In the wake of the chaos caused by Kronos, an online forum has emerged, where tech teachers discuss how to remedy the confusion in their respective schools. “Sometimes I think that when people find something that’s unfamiliar to them, technologically or otherwise, and it doesn’t work the way they expected it to….initially, they may be afraid,” says Ms. Lerer. “There’s an apprehension towards messing something up, that someone feels like they could get in trouble if they do not do it correctly. It’s similar to when the new grading system was implemented, there were glitches, and people were getting nervous.”
Mr. Tannen is a member of Masterman’s Building Committee, which among other duties monitors the teachers’ contract for any violations. According to him, the PFT feels the need to address the Kronos system with legal action. “[The PFT] told us that they were going to take it to arbitration, which to my understanding means that they’ll sit down with a third party arbitrator to discuss, because they feel that with the Kronos system we're going to have to sign out, which is not something that we’ve had to do in the past.” The main concern of the PFT is that the clocking out feature of Kronos violates their Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).
Another concern that Mr. Tannen has been hearing about is privacy-based. “When you use the Kronos website remotely, it also asks for your location. There are many people who are more lax about [sharing their location], but there are also many people who don't want to share that information because they’re not necessarily aware of how it’s going to be used in the broader scheme of [the information] being collected.” Mr. Tannen has read online that in order to maintain their privacy, some PFT members have opted to use a virtual private network (VPN) when clocking into Kronos. Using a VPN could allow someone to trick a computer into thinking that they are clocking into Kronos from anywhere in the world.
Photo courtesy of Jennifer Gentlesk
According to Mr. Tannen, Kronos was originally meant to be used for in-person school. Kronos was implemented early, with the hope that it would help teachers become accustomed to it before their return to the building. But Mr. Tannen describes the plan for in-person Kronos as “totally different” than the way it is being used currently. “When we’re in-school, there’s going to be something in the office that we can use our school district IDs to scan in. That makes sense. We won’t have to sign in on the books anymore.”
“The books” refers to the school District's paper sign-in module of the previous Enterprise Resource System (ERP) system, which handles everything related to time and attendance tracking, budgets, and purchases. When Uri Monson, the school district’s current Chief Financial Officer, first came to the district five years ago, the ERP system at the time was 22 years old, “very outdated,” and “in danger of no longer being supported.” Now, along with the school district’s IT and HR departments, Monson is “the spearhead” of modernizing the ERP system. According to Monson, “no one likes to do ERP redoes because they are extremely costly, tens of millions of dollars over time. They are painful. A lot of work hours. A lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, and no one likes to take the blame, but [they are] necessary.” The Kronos system is a part of the current ERP system’s much needed renovation process. Despite the bumps along the way, Monson has hopes for the future of Kronos. “I believe that it will be a more effective, efficient system, fundamentally... Principals will be able to manage and see their staff and what’s going on in the school at a glance, which is really hard right now.” This is a step up from the previous ERP system, when budget analysts had to build budgets, and principals had to order supplies, while “typing on old-school green screens.” Something else that Monson hopes Kronos will improve is creating a cohesive system for staff members who travel from building to building. “We have a number of staff that are in multiple buildings. You may have a specialist psychologist that goes from school to school. Right now, where is the paper that they would sign in on? Whereas here, they can just sign in remotely, electronically, wherever they are.”
Kronos is planned to be directly linked to the payroll of all school district employees, but not until July 1st. The school district is holding off because they “...want to make sure that the Kronos system is working and that folks understand how it works… but it’s a pandemic. We’re going to see how that plays out with the schedule… if there has to be a delay, then it’ll be delayed. It's not going to be forced.” Monson heeded the importance of maintaining the integrity of payroll. “The number one rule of being a CFO is: don’t mess with payroll. Never screw up payroll.” In order to protect everyone’s payroll, “[Kronos] will be tested as much as possible. And once it’s ready to go, it’ll go live. If it’s not ready to go July 1st, it won’t go July 1st. It’s very important that the payroll system works, that people are being paid accurately and timely.”
Monson acknowledges the issues, but nevertheless is hopeful about the future of Kronos. “The ultimate goal is to pull the district, like in many other ways, to the 21st century. We are a complex organization and we have to be able to figure out ways to take advantage of what’s there to make us work more efficiently and effectively, and this is part of getting there.”
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