Nurses in Aurora Public Schools claim they have not been paid fairly for overtime this school year

AURORA | Nurses in Aurora Public Schools have filed two grievances against the district claiming that they aren’t being compensated fairly for the extra work they’ve done this school year to mitigate the effects of the pandemic.

If the dispute isn’t resolved, some nurses worry the district will struggle to retain high quality nursing staff going forward.

Sharon Niebuhr, an Aurora Public Schools nurse, told The Sentinel that a group of district nurses filed a grievance against the district in February asking it to fulfill a promise it had made to compensate nurses for the extra hours they had worked since the start of the school year.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Niebuhr said that school nurses have worked hundreds of extra hours to keep students safe and balance all the extra responsibilities that the coronavirus brought, such as managing contact tracing. 

In the 2020-2021 school year the district compensated nurses for the overtime with a supplemental contract, she said, but this school year there was not an additional contract and nurses were essentially doing overtime for free. 

Niebuhr said that after initially refusing requests for a supplemental contract so that nurses could get paid for overtime beginning in August, the district had promised in January to compensate them retroactively but had yet to honor that, leaving a group to file the grievance in February.

In an email, district spokesperson Corey Christiansen said that the district provided information to nurses and principals about reporting hours for approval and submission in March, and that so far five nurses have submitted their hours using the new procedure.

“We have extended the deadline multiple times and continue to work with the teacher’s association to address the matter,” he said.

All licensed APS staff are eligible to be a part of the Aurora Education Association, including nurses, and AEA president Linnea Reed-Ellis said the union has been supporting the nurses in their efforts.

“Our nurses work extremely hard keeping our students and our community safe and they’re owed respect for the amount of time they’ve put into that,” she said.

Reed-Ellis said the March communication was a memo from APS director of student services Rachael Browning to principals and nurses with a resolution to the grievance, but that it did not resolve the issue because it didn’t provide sufficient information about how to get appropriately reimbursed.

Reed-Ellis said the district has acknowledged that the nurses have worked a lot of additional hours but keeps “moving the goalposts and the timing as to how to get paid for those hours.”

Niebuhr said that several nurses’ attempts to get reimbursed under the procedure outlined by Browning were rejected by the district.

That frustration led to the nurses filing a second grievance earlier in April. The district has through Monday to respond to the second grievance within the allotted time frame.

During public comment at the April 19 board of education meeting, Niebuhr said that APS is in a very competitive market for nursing due to the proximity of the University of Colorado Hospital and other facilities and that refusing to compensate nurses fairly could lead to students suffering from a staffing shortage. Three experienced nurses are planning to leave the district at the end of the school year, she said. 

There are currently five open positions for licensed school nurses on the district’s hiring website.

“We have six weeks to go in the school year,” she said. “No remuneration has been made to nurses for the hours worked outside the union contract from August to January. This is not an effective strategy to retain nurses. It’s not an effective strategy to recruit.”