Pay discrepancies and possible sabotage found at La Joya ISD

The La Joya school district found a history of questionable compensation practices from the previous administration, including seemingly deliberate obstruction of pay increases and limited documentation to provide an explanation.

For the past two years, the chief staff has been working to correct more than a decade of financial issues. Although external auditors reported improved financial practices since the Texas Education Agency installed the board of managers and Superintendent Dr. Marcey Sorensen in 2024, the district continues to uncover new and curious information regarding the customs of previous La Joya ISD leadership.

Chief of Business, Finance & Administrative Services Mirgitt Crespo reported that her team found data integrity issues and potential pay inequities.

One of the more unusual findings is the coding “don’t increment” in some employee files; a code that a human would have had to manually type into the system. However, its true meaning remains a mystery. According to Crespo’s budget presentation at the Feb. 11 school board meeting, the coding implies blocked step movement for more than 900 step-based salary employees.

“I’m being honest, we don’t know what the ‘do not increment’ means,” the chief said during her presentation. “We have assumptions, and I’m not going to explore those here.”

She continued.

“This is a hard conversation because for me, this was a little uncomfortable morally,” Crespo said. “We found a lot of unverified number of years of service. We had discrepancies on what we found in [the Public Education Information Management System]. We couldn’t trust some of the data because we didn’t have documentation on how the data was gathered or how the processes worked.”

The chief explained that there are various combinations of employees with incorrect or correct years of service, salary step data and actual pay that could result in inequities that compound over time. The administrative staff is still combing through all the information to verify which specific employees this issue affected and by how much.

When the district provided a 4% raise for all employees ahead of the 2025-26 school year, Crespo said she firmly believes it helped cover some of the pay discrepancies. But she and her team still need to go through every single step-based employee to verify the impact.

Step-based employees include teachers, librarians and nurses, and they are the only type of employee that these findings impact. Additionally, any employee hired in the 2025-26 school year should be fine, but the district will still thoroughly review everyone.

The district developed a process to correct the data integrity issues, which requires staff to verify their years of service with the district and provide proof.

“Employee voice matters to us,” Superintendent Dr. Marcey Sorensen said. “…we already said the documentation here varies. So we want to also give our employees a voice to say, ‘Do you have these two data points? Here’s my data points, and also here’s my evidence of said data points.’ Our employees have to feel part of the process to verify their years of service, and so we wanted to make sure that they were included. So at the end of the process, they felt like, ‘Yes, I was taken care of.’”

Once the district has corrected all discrepancies, the finance and human capital teams will review data and conduct a cost analysis to determine the fiscal impact and potential actions. From there, they will submit the compensation manual and budget to the superintendent and the board for approval.

Regardless of the findings, the district cannot retroactively revise compensation plans from prior years. Per state law, prior board-approved compensation decisions are binding. However, the district will apply any corrections or adjustments to the budget and compensation plan for the 2026-27 school year, which the board of managers must approve first.

La Joya ISD administration assured the board that the discrepancies in the district’s system do not affect the Teacher Retirement System (TRS), as the state uses its own separate structure to calculate years of service.

Board Vice President Alyssa Peña said learning this information is “very unsettling.” In response, the chief staffer reiterated that she couldn’t speak to why the previous administration had these financial practices.

“There is no documentation in writing. We have history, we have some former employees that tell us what they believe happened but we don’t have proof,” Crespo said. “We don’t have any way to validate if the employee [received a stepped salary] or not. We can assume but I don’t like that word so I don’t do that.”

However, she assured the board that the current administration already has systems and documentation in place to avoid issues like this in the future.

Crespo estimates that the district will be able to present the financial impact of the salary adjustments to the board by mid-April and integrate them into the budget plan for next year. La Joya ISD must approve the budget and compensation plan for 2025-26 by July.