Nearly 1,800 public school teachers in Baja California went months without pay in 2025, and the state’s new guidelines for fixing the problem may be making it worse. The Instituto de Servicios Educativos y Pedagógicos (ISEP), the agency that manages BC’s public education payroll, published new rules on February 13 for handling what it calls “extraordinary payroll,” the payments owed to temporary staff, substitutes, and teachers returning from medical leave.
The state government agreed to pay 42 million pesos ($2.3 million USD) to 1,782 teachers for work performed between September and December 2025. The payments were scheduled in three installments stretching from mid-February through late March 2026. But teachers and their unions say the new guidelines convert earned salary into a deferred payment that requires administrative “validation” before any money moves, meaning teachers who already taught their classes and showed up to their schools must wait for bureaucratic approval to get paid for work they already did.
Governor Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda blamed the delays on documentation failures by schools, principals, and supervisors who did not submit the right paperwork on time. Teachers and the Brújula News editorial board called that explanation dishonest, arguing that ISEP’s internal processes, not school-level paperwork, are the bottleneck.
Parents and teachers occupied ISEP offices in Tijuana earlier this year to demand payment. Some union chapters maintained work stoppages even after the government announced the payment schedule, keeping students out of classrooms as a pressure tactic. The result: kids miss school while their teachers wait for checks that were earned months ago.
For English-speaking families with children in BC public schools, the disruption is direct. Substitute shortages and rolling work stoppages mean lost classroom days that are difficult to make up. The underlying problem, a state payroll system that routinely falls months behind on payments to its own employees, has no clear fix on the horizon.