Teachers manage to beat the system when district admin tries to install a time clock and control their work hours til the last minute

Author image for Giuliana Tiscioni
Giuliana Tiscioni • Writer
Sep 10, 2026 1:00 PM EDT

Sometimes we forget that teachers are also humans with their own lives, issues, and responsibilities outside of school. 

Oftentimes, we demand from our teacher what we wouldn't demand from any other type of worker or employee. They not only have to deal with the school board, but also with their own students (who don't make their lives any easier) and with those students' parents, who sometimes show up at the school demanding things from the teachers as if they were their own personal employees. 

Teachers have a life outside of their work, and many of them have families to take care of and children of their own. They do their best with the material and the tools they have, and it's even silly on our part to demand things that are beyond what they can do. 

In some weird situations, it's not us who demand too much from teachers; it's the district administration. In this case, some teachers at a school sometimes chose to clock out 10 minutes early once the kids had already left to avoid traffic and even pick up their own children from school, and no one seemed to have a problem with that. That was until someone up high took issue with it and installed a time clock to ensure that teachers were leaving not a minute before their contract hours. The teachers accepted it, but they also read the full contract and found out that all their extra hours that were not absolutely essential had to be paid extra. So they started having grading parties in the school bleachers after hours. They submitted so many requests for payment for extra hours that the administration finally had enough and left them in peace. 

The great part is, they were abiding by their contract just fine until the admin started messing around. If all teachers needed to stay only the "necessary" hours, and the children were no longer there, it was not necessary for them to stay, so technically, they were already doing extra time without pay. Apparently, the lesson here is to never get into a conflict with teachers. They know their way around it. 

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  • "We're going to add a time clock, and teachers need to start clocking in and out, because too many are leaving 5 - 10 minutes before contract ends."

    This was about 8 years ago. I worked at a middle school in the DC suburbs. Nice district and super supportive parents, but high
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  • up admin caught wind that teachers would periodically leave about 10 minutes prior to the end of "contract hours". Keep in mind,
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  • A B
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    A teacher's classroom. 

    Image for illustrative purposes.

  • this is after kids are all mostly gone for the day, and we didnt really have a negotiated "contract" because VA was a right to work
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  • state with zero union protection. No principal took it super seriously unless ot was being abused, but for some reason, some high up
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  • decided to make this his crusade. So district admin decides to install a time clock, because a few teachers would occasionally leave
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  • 10 minutes early to try and beat the worst of the bus traffic (and for those of you who know the DC area, you know the difference
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  • Cheezburger Image 10662867456
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    City traffic. 

    Scene shown is a visual representation.

  • between leaving at 250 and 300 can be massive). It was mostly parents with kids of their own they
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  • had to pick up, and all of us already work obscenely long hours, so this micro managing doesn't go over well.
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  • A few of us dig around and realized the district had language in our employee handbook about requesting reimbursement for
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  • work "beyond the duties of a typical contracted school day" and figured, if the "contract hours" are that critical, then every other hour
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  • must be "beyond the duties of a typical contracted school day". So a few of us started having "grading parties", where we would
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    School bleachers.

    Photo is a representation of scenes.

  • meet at the school after a happy hour, clock in, and sit in the bleachers, grading. It turned into a nice form of bonding and team
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  • building, ironically. We started flooding the district office with requests for reimbursement for these extra hours (plus the extra
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  • hour plus that most of us worked daily before contract hours began). None of them were approved, obviously, but it didnt take long for admin to remove the time clock.
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  • Hammon_Rye Just the concept of this sounds funny to me. My best friend used to be a public school teacher. The LAST thing the school district(s) around here would want to do would be to actually track and be responsible for the amount of hours the average teacher puts in.
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  • jellymanisme Our school had a policy to compensate teachers who worked as subs for other teachers during a planning period, but it was a manual process and nobody ever submitted the paperwork.
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  • Bet my first year there I submitted one every single time no matter how inconvenient it was.
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