SF Teachers Are Yet Again Having Payroll Issues, Just After Launch of Costly New System

More than 100 San Francisco public school employees haven’t been properly paid for their summer work, union leaders said as teachers return to their classrooms this week, just over a month after the district rolled out a replacement for its faulty payroll system at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

According to the teachers’ union’s state labor complaint filed Monday against the San Francisco Unified School District, some members’ paychecks were delayed or missing, their hours were miscalculated or their union dues went undeducted in the first six weeks since the new system launched.

“As they processed the first couple of checks for maybe a couple hundred employees who had worked over summer, many of the same excuses started to emerge, which was, ‘We didn’t account for these unique circumstances,’ and all of a sudden, people were not receiving their full pay,” said Frank Lara, the executive vice president of United Educators of San Francisco.

Payroll has been a thorn in the district’s side since 2022, when it implemented the costly EMPower system that left some employees with incorrect paychecks, and others without pay at all.

Over two years, the district tried to resolve issues with the buggy software, spending more than $30 million and ultimately angering thousands of educators.

In total, Lara estimated that at least 3,000 of the union’s members had issues getting paid through EMPower and filed more than 10,000 issue tickets with district staff.

Over the summer, the district rolled out a new system, operated by Frontline and Red Rover, that Superintendent Maria Su assured the school board and district employees would operate more smoothly and reliably. That software cost the cash-strapped district $20 million more.

“After careful deliberation with our teams, I am pleased to announce that we will be able to proceed with the transition to Frontline as scheduled on July 1,” Su told reporters in June. “And we’ve done all the due diligence to make sure we are going to be able to do it and not have the hiccups of last time.”

But since July, Lara said about 150 of the union’s 500 or so members who worked over the summer have had payroll issues.

Some teachers who worked at district-sponsored enrichment programs over the summer didn’t receive pay at all; others never had union dues deducted from their paychecks like they were supposed to.

Other employees were paid at the incorrect rate or had their paychecks delayed for weeks, among other issues.

“We knew that going into the implementation of Frontline, there were going to be challenges. … with the implementation of any software and program, especially built on top of a system that we know struggled and did not work for our school district,” said Phil Kim, the president of San Francisco’s Board of Education. “The question I think that I’ve been posing to staff and making sure that the superintendent prioritizes is: ‘How fast are we able to resolve these issues?’”

So far, the union has been especially disappointed by how the district is handling the problems, Lara said.

“When we raised the alarm, we were shocked at how dismissive the staff was in terms of the very real concerns,” he told KQED.

“When a problem arises, everybody starts blaming each other. When we talk to the executive director of payroll … they go, ‘That’s probably an HR thing or a labor relations thing.’ So then we go over to the executive director of HR, and they’re like, ‘We raised these concerns a year ago and they didn’t include that into the system,’” he said. “Then who’s managing the system?”

Last week, the union sent a cease and desist letter to district leaders, including Su and Kim, detailing the issues employees had been dealing with since July, and informing the district it would file a state labor complaint if the issues were not resolved.

On Monday, UESF sent that complaint to California’s Public Employment Relations Board, writing that after spending a year preparing for the transition to Frontline, “the system cannot actually do the things we need it to do.”

“UESF’s expectation is that SFUSD is paying all of our members exactly what they are owed exactly when it is owed, that our member’s benefits are fully and completely available … without delay,” the unfair-practice charge reads.

In a statement, the district said it is working quickly to resolve any issues that arise and has created a website for employees with information and a way to report payroll concerns.

As teachers return to their classrooms on Tuesday before the first day of school next week, union leaders plan to rally outside the district’s office, urging officials to resolve the issues quickly.

“We’re really concerned now that 6,000 of our members are coming back, especially substitute teachers, that this is going to be a problem,” Lara said.