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Partial payment and no payment continue
to be the story for the former employees
of the DuBois Center, and the North
Carolina Department of Labor is
continuing to investigate the situation.
Heather Crews, a spokesman
for the labor department, said it made
no difference if people had received
partial payment. The investigators would
“determine if the people who had gotten
paid are owed additional money.” Crews
also said the investigation was on
behalf of all the employees whether or
not they had filed a complaint.
The DuBois Center, which is
being operated by interim director
George C. Jones Sr. and Lawrence
(Eugene) Perry, president of the
National DuBois Alumni Association that
owns the 17-acre campus, has not paid
the 35-plus young adults who were
enrolled in the HopeBuilders program in
February.
“We paid the HopeBuilders”
late last week, Jerry Wright, the deputy
director for the W.E.B. DuBois Community
Development Corporation, said. A staff
meeting last Wednesday resolved who had
been paid and for what time period.
Wright and the other 100 DuBois Center
staff members resigned in a body at the
end of February to join the center’s
former director, Bettie Murchiso, in the
CDC.
HopeBuilders are young
adults, 17 through 21, who have either
not finished school or are unemployed;
some have young children. They earn
their GED and receive counseling and
training for employment; as part of the
program they intern in local businesses
and are paid $7 an hour or more. The
money comes from a contract between the
CDC (formerly with the center) and the
Wake County Work Force Development
Board. Again, there is a gap of a month
between the work and the payment.
Wright said a meeting is
planned for today, April 26, between
Murchison, Jones and the work force
board to try to clear up matters.
The CDC staff, most of them
part-time and full-time counselors, case
managers and support personnel for the
mental health counseling program that
was at the center and is now operated by
the CDC, submitted vouchers for their
work in February, Wake County Mental
Health Department sent a check for
$142,777 to the center, and the staff
members expected to be paid at the end
of March.
Wright said the first checks
were for the week of Feb. 20-24. They
were paid the week of April 10-14, and
not all employees were paid. After Jones
and Perry had what Wright described as
“an epiphany,” some employees received
checks for the week of Feb. 13-17, but
no one has been paid for the first two
weeks of February.
“I do not expect they will
pay me,” Wright said. None of the
administrators have been paid.
Neither has Phaedra Taylor,
a case manager, who has begun substitute
teaching at a Raleigh charter school to
make ends meet. She had expected a check
of $2,500 for her work in February. She
is also still working as a case manager.
Jones did not return
telephone calls this week about the
situation. Murchison was at a retreat in
Salter Path Monday and Tuesday.
Jones and the current DuBois
Center employees were paid in early
April with Jones explaining, “The county
provides most of this money.” |
