The new school year is looking at a terrible start for SF teachers and school employees who might actually hope to get paid on time, as the district’s new $20 million payroll system is botching and missing paychecks right out of the gate.
For the last three years, most of the stories we heard about the San Francisco Unified School District that weren’t about school board recalls or forcing superintendents to resign were stories about a pricey payroll system called EMPower that routinely failed to actually pay people. The district threw millions of dollars at trying to fix the system which was still leaving educators without their paychecks, at one point paying $2.8 million for a consultant to fix another consultant's error. The district eventually scrapped the EMPower system in March of 2024.
So now we are in a new school year, as SF Unified School District (SFUSD) teachers reported for work today and classes begin this Monday. But the new payroll system called Frontline is still shortchanging paychecks and failing to issue paychecks, according to KQED. That outlet reports that "more than 100 San Francisco public school employees haven’t been properly paid for their summer work," but that number is actually closer to 150 employees. The paycheck glitches include missing or delayed checks, miscalculated hours, or inaccurate deduction of union dues.
The new payroll system has been in effect since July 1. The union United Educators of San Francisco’s (UESF) executive vice president Frank Lara told KQED, “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.”
About 150 botched checks might sound like a relatively minor problem. But consider this happened during the summer, when the district is just effectively on a skeleton crew. An estimated 3,000 teachers and staffers had problems with their checks under the EMPower system, and educators fear we’ll see problems on that scale again as the first full payrolls come through this month.
UESF even filed an unfair-practice labor complaint with the California Public Employment Relations Board over the matter.
“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,” that letter says, per KQED.
The Chronicle spoke with school board president Phil Kim, who defended the new system. “Implementation of any new software will have its challenges, but I’m encouraged to hear that over 97% of the paychecks issued as of today have been accurate,” Kim told the Chronicle. “We owe it to all of our staff to ensure their pay is whole and on time.”
As the Chronicle notes, the new Frontline payroll system is costing $20 million, plus an additional $2 million per year to manage. The previous EMPower ended up costing a total of $34 million, with its original cost plus all of the repairs and consultant fixes it required.
Image: Andrew D via Yelp
