Signing a new contract was supposed to bring an end to the tension between the Mars School District and its support staff. But now the union has filed new grievances after some staff members received less in bonuses than they expected and in some cases were told they actually owed money to the school district.

In a letter to the staffers, Wes Shipley, Mars superintendent, told support staff that they may be receiving less than they expected due to shifts in the way the district pays employees according to the new contract, which was signed in September.

“The change in the method by which our Support Staff is paid — from salary to hourly wages — has caused some confusion,” Shipley wrote. “However, this is a math and accounting issue.”

In the contract employees were to receive a $1,000 bonus for the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, totaling $2,000. Those who had been with the district for less than two years would receive prorated bonuses.

Many employees expected to receive the two $1,000 bonuses in a check, and some did. But others received substantially less and some received notifications that they in fact owed the school money.

“We are filing a grievance,” said Brooke Witt, Mars Area Education Support Personnel Association representative. “It’s unfortunate they’ve taken this course of action.”

Tom Breth, the district’s chief negotiator, said that while he has not yet had time to review the grievances in depth, he is confident that the school is abiding by the contract.

The school claims that in the switch from salary to hourly pay schedules some employees were overpaid, and that the money was subsequently taken out of their bonuses.

“We believe we paid them twice for hours worked in September,” said Shipley. “We tried to do a reconciliation to bring everyone into hourly.”

When employees are paid by salary, they receive that money in real time, Shipley said, meaning they don’t have to build up hours as they do while working a job that pays them an hourly rate. When an employee works an hourly job, they do not receive paychecks in the first weeks, though they are paid in the weeks after they leave.

Salary employees do not have this delay, and the district believes this may be the source of some disappointment. Instead of withholding the employees’ checks when this shift from hourly to salary took place, the district paid them and later took it out of their bonuses, said Shipley.

“It mostly fell on the 12-month employees who work around the clock,” said Shipley.

Witt, however, believes the school is incorrect in its accounting and that the district added paychecks from months not included in the fiscal year.

In addition to the concerns about the bonuses, the union is also filing a grievance with the school due to their removal of health care benefits from people who the union claims are still eligible to receive them.

As of Tuesday afternoon Breth had yet to discuss the grievances with Shipley.

Shipley later clarified that he sent the letter as a way to begin the process of mending the relationship between the school and the union.

“The purpose of the letter was to reach out to the staff and thank them for their hard work and dedication during difficult times,” Shipley said in an email. “Additionally, I intended to express my hope that we can move forward and build a stronger working relationship while acknowledging that they have a sense of dissatisfaction and deflated expectation concerning the process of reconciliation of their wages.”

The district and its representatives are looking into the grievances, he added, and hope to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

“If mistakes were made, we will correct them immediately,” he said.