Indian IT vendors in general are quite adept at getting as much money as possible with as little accountability as possible

In reply to Ben Rosengart.

Blaming the union and organized labor for this? Are you kidding? They had nothing to do with the purchase or implementation of this system.

In reply to SFUSD Teacher.

They are purposely stalling everyone and NOT onboarding. Please write about that. Qualified hires are not making it into classrooms.

In reply to LNK.

It doesn’t matter. He continues to make decisions that feed this outrageous money pit. Very very expensive ones.

In reply to Rudderless.

The are also not beholden to the city government sunshine laws. They can cut deals and operate basically in secret.

In reply to Adrian.

The current board of education sustains it . The superintendent hired MANY private consultants to “fix” it. One consultant was hired to by the CURRENT sup and BOE to the tune of $2,000 A DAY to “fix” it. When that 6 figure salary was over, I watched in person as the consultant gave their final report to the current BOE, which amounted to reporting that the payroll department “needed more staff”.

It is a complete outrage the current superintendent still has his 6 figure job.

All eyes on the management. Thank you for this coverage. My own accumulated sick days were stolen from me when this InfoSys was adopted. (Empower is the districts name) At that time, I desperately reached out to the city attorney’s office as I was well away of the blatant and shocking wage theft of other colleagues. I was informed that the city attorney “doesn’t deal with the district”

Millions have gone missing from the SFUSD. It is corrupt. Period. The city should be stepping in, the SFUSD payroll should be switched IMMEDIATELY to the SF City Gov system.

Some on our BOS care more about 8th grade algebra? This is a disaster that everyone needs to be helping with.

The superintendent casually mentioned a few days before the publication of this very article that he was planning on pulling $30 MILLION of the Public Education Enrichment Fund (PEEF) in order to help him cover costs.

It is outrageous.

Of course educators have fled. I’m not sure that wasn’t the plan to begin with. The largest donations for the multimillion 2021 school board recall came from CHARTER SCHOOL interests.

Does San Francisco care about its public schools? A criminal investigation should be well under way at this point.

SF goverment is corrupt.Someone did very well for closing this company.You absolutely can not deny this.The morons running this city all need to be in jail.How could they pay $40 million.Some human CPA s could do a better job.They can think.The government people only think about what they can get out of it.The FBI should investigate all this.

The money the district throws around is crazy. They do this with carefree abandon because they didn’t have to earn it. They spend on software and contractors not to mention consultants and upper management. If I ever had to hire a consultant to help with your job I don’t need you. Take care of the people who do work for you

In reply to paulh.

Right, but is that because USD is incompetent at software procurement? Is that standard across many school districts? Does the city or state have procurement/negotiation resources they should have called on but didn’t? And/or did someone get a nice revolving door job or Nuru-style trips to Santiago? T

(Here we’re wandering more afield from tech reporting to government procurement reporting, which is if anything even more boring, but I can’t be the only IP transaction lawyer and SFUSD parent reading this. Or, uh, maybe I can…)

In reply to 1Charles1.

If you think Labor is management, I’d laugh.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but having headlines pointing out the lengthy bargaining and near strike against said management should make it obvious that Labor isn’t management.

In reply to Ben Rosengart.

‘Management’ didn’t miraculously fall out of the sky…they came from somewhere… where could that have been?

In reply to zrants.

It wasn’t *teachers* who screwed this up. Teachers were the victims here. A little common sense, please.

In reply to 1Charles1.

Ah yes, blame labor for … management messing up a payroll system. Makes perfect sense. 💯

The people who did diligence and sign off on this new system need to be named and fired. There is no excuse. I believe the recalled school board members are some of the culprits. Who else ?

In reply to Owen Baker-Flynn.

Matt Wayne wasn’t the superintendent when EmpowerSF was implemented. We can look to the leadership in power prior to Matt Wayne.

Primary and secondary education (with college quick on their heels) as an ‘industry’ is manifestly corrupt, largely from initially well intentioned but now grossly narcissistic motives by organized labor leaders. Not just in SF. There’s a reason charter schools, homeschooling and alternative schools are things now. It’s just that big cities have reached their saturation point and failure is fait accompli. Hard to say what primary and secondary education will look like in SF in 20 years, but I’ll bet it will either be completely transformed and functional or non existent. Can’t go on like this for much longer.

Can teachers file a class action lawsuit for collective damages? Yes they did not sign the contract that probably has some non-performance clause, but they were the party that was harmed.
Union? Can the union do this? If there is a will, there is a way. There must be a will by now!

Finally! Long overdue! EmPower has been a failed system since day one when they converted our leave balances incorrectly from the old system, shorting us days of work that count towards retirement– effectively robbing us of money that we already earned. Soooo many outstanding issues that even when SFUSD agrees they do it or did it wrong are not getting fixed, still. Arbitrations that have been won by educators with support of our Union UESF, legal solutions with independent mediators which go past deadlines for fixing, and when they are “fixed” are still incorrectly implemented because current SFUSD staff are both incompetent and/or overworked and/or have no historical knowledge of the mess that is SFUSD administration. Most admins and many workers in payroll, HR, Labor Relations, Curriculum and Instruction and more -all the way to the tippy top- left the district over the past two years largely due to the Empower cluster *&%$, leaving little capable workforce to remedy all the problems that still exist and that continually affect workers. Such a mess for all of us, so ready for this to be done and for my leave balance along with ALL partime workers to be returned to us. So many hours of our labor wasted on this when we should have been teaching or taking care of our own families and lives. Grrrr….

I think some of these commenters are correct in that there is something criminal afoot. Literally no one who took any kind of leave in the last 2 years has had a correct paycheck. Even folks who just took a sick day had incorrect fees deducted that still haven’t been paid back to anyone. This EmPower mess has permanently damaged SFUSD in so many ways that we can’t even image and will see the effects of for decades. It feels like this was a systematic attempt to damage public education. And Matt and the Board continue to hide ways in which they are furthering harm to SFUSD by outsourcing union jobs so they cannot be trusted either. Thank you Joe for continuing to write about this. Your work has certainly increased the public pressure for SFUSD to finally talk about abandoning EmPower, something many staff in SFUSD schools have been calling for since the first horrible paycheck fiasco in January 2022.

And this is why when the school district asks for more money or a bond, people don’t want to fund them.

In reply to zrants.

The teachers didn’t fail a contractor. The contractor was a criminal enterprise aided and abetted by the school district.

In reply to snelson123.

No. It’s all on the district.

Eliminate the San Francisco School Board.
Dick Allen
San Francisco

Terminate the San Francisco School Board.
Dick Allen
San Francisco

I did a google search for “best payroll system for schools” and I can tell you that Empower and Insys do not appear in any list. Who decided that Empower was the right system to buy? I’ve worked for government entities at various levels, and my observation is that they never buy the best equipment or software. I don’t know if it’s a bidding system problem, or a crony capitalism problem, or lack of experience in contracting, but it’s evident at all levels of government including the postal service and the courts systems. I’m not a journalist, but somebody might be able to report on this and get us some answers.

WOW! Teachers finally learned a lesson! How to fail a contractor. Too bad it took so long to figure it out. Now, how will they fix it? Suggest they look at how the other counties handle their payroll for teachers.

It was and remains a cronyism infested district. They do not care if they kill people: they care that they are in the news and getting sued for it.

In reply to Mike.

That, and a failure to heed the teachings of the sunk cost fallacy.

In reply to rick girling.

They signed those rights away on the contract.

Thanks for following and writing about this issue for the past two years. Next up: talk with some folks who are qualified and have been trying to get hired by SFUSD and cannot due to bureaucratic nonsense.