EX-LAUSD TEACHER TO REPAY BUREAUCRATIC INSENSITIVITY WITH CHUMP CHANGE; HUMAN FACTOR WAS ABSENT IN TIME OF GRIEF.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

``Dear Mr. Kanter: This is to remind you that reimbursement for your salary overpayment of $159.86 is now due. Please send your remittance in that amount to the Los Angeles Unified School District immediately.''

The stubbornness is finally wearing off, and the reality is sinking in for Stephen Kanter.

Soon, very soon, he will have to pay this bill, or it will be sent to a collection agency. His credit rating would suffer, he knows.

So, he lines up the pennies, nickels and dimes he has collected, and throws them in a box at home, preparing sometime soon to march the box over personally to the accounting and disbursements division of the LAUSD.

``Here,'' he will say. ``Here's your money. Don't you want to count it?''

Kanter realizes that he's probably only taking his frustration out on some low-level clerk who will have to stand there and count out $159.86 in pennies, nickels and dimes, but he doesn't know any other form of civil disobedience to take anymore.

Reason never worked.

He'll be damned, the former teacher says, if he pays the district off in paper bills or a check. Too easy, he says. Way to easy.

``It's not the money,'' Kanter says. ``It's never been about the money. It's about the one-on-one human factor that's completely lacking in this big, cold bureaucracy.''

The one-on-one human factor that wasn't there when he returned home from burying his mother and found a bill for overpayment of illness hours from his ex-employer, LAUSD, in his mailbox - not a condolence card.

``I started working for LAUSD in 1994 as a substitute, then entered the district's interim program full-time at Horace Mann Middle School near downtown L.A. in the fall of '94 as a reading and English teacher,'' Kanter says.

``In February of '95, my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer and chose to begin getting chemotherapy treatments anyway. My sisters and I worked out a schedule so that one of us would be with her at all times at home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to help her.''

Kanter says he went to administrators at his school and was told the only way he could get time off was to use sick days. So he did - a week here, a week there, always leaving behind student lesson plans for the substitute who would take his place. Finally, he ran out of sick days to use.

``The stress began getting to the entire family, and I knew that I'd have to take a leave of absence from the job to go home permanently for a while to take care of mom,'' he says.

But because he had been with the district for less than a year, Kanter was not eligible for family leave.

``My only option was to resign, which I didn't want to do,'' he says. ``In May (1995), I resigned from the interim program. A little more than a month later, mom died.

``I came back to L.A. to find out that not only did I owe LAUSD money, but that I was ineligible for unemployment insurance,'' Kanter says.

``When the unemployment people called the district to find out why I had left my job, they were told that I had just quit for no reason,'' he says.

That's when Stephen Kanter got stubborn about paying a $159.86 bill to a school district he figured didn't give a damn about him so why should he care about it?

``I felt adamant that if they were going to get this money, it would have to be a human being looking me in the face to tell me, not a letter,'' he said.

But it was letters, not humans, he dealt with for the next year.

Letters saying the overpayment resulted from the payment of full-pay illness hours in excess of the number of hours Kanter had actually earned.

Sorry, the letters said, but ``we are required by law to recover this overpayment.''

Nothing in them about being sorry for the loss of Kanter's mother or best wishes during these tough times.

Only pay up.

Officials in the district's accounting and disbursements division said Thursday they could not comment on personnel matters, adding only what the letters said - they were bound by law to collect the money.

So now, two years after coming home from burying his mother to find a bill in the mailbox from LAUSD, not a condolence card, the stubbornness inside Stephen Kanter is finally giving way to the reality.

He's paying up - in pennies, nickels and dimes.