The latest report from Maryland’s Office of Legislative Audits finds that the Baltimore City school system struggles with paying for services on-time and tracking school police overtime work.

From 2017 to 2022, the report released last week says, 49% of the vendors working with Baltimore City schools didn’t get paid on time. More than 16,000 invoices didn’t get paid for over three months.

During that same period, the district spent $2.1 million on overtime pay for school police officers, who patrol properties and help resolve conflict. A group of 32 officers received over 80% of that pay, the audit finds. And sometimes the hours weren’t given prior approval.

CEO Sonja Santelises told WYPR that the timeline offers important context to these challenges.

“We had a pandemic, in the midst of that one of the largest influxes of federal aid, and we had a financial and human capital system that we are in the process of implementing,” she said. “It's been 20 years since the district had a new system.”

The district started updating that software, called an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, in 2023. Santelises said that will make a big difference in addressing some of the audit’s findings.

The ERP system allows HR, technology and finance departments to communicate and document activity more effectively.

“It wasn't necessarily that things weren't always happening, but it was absolutely a matter of the fact that we didn't have robust systems to document it,” she said.

Santelises says that “outdated and archaic” software explains the audit’s finding that some new employees didn’t go through criminal history screenings.

“And it's not like the ERP is going to solve everything, but there was a lot of modernization around it that we needed to do that really left gaps in things like screenings,” she said. “Because a manila folder holding that in somebody's file cabinet is very different than in 2025, being able to sit at a computer and pull that kind of information in real time.”

Santelises said the district is “moving in the right direction,” with fewer areas of vulnerability identified by the audit this year than the last routine search five years ago.

“What we're trying to do now is really dig into the findings, to see what we have already addressed, what's in process,” she said. “So we're still unpacking the specifics.”

But Santelises said she hopes the next audit will reflect the perks of an updated digital system.