The San Francisco Unified School District has spent more than $40 million thus far attempting to right the sinking EMPower ship and fix the misbegotten payroll system that has managed to underpay, mis-pay or flat-out not pay scads of teachers and other workers. After two years, things have gotten better — but they’re still not great.
Now, sources within the district tell me that, while EMPower may eventually be stabilized, it’s clear that it will never truly work. Instead, we are told that this costly white elephant will be scrapped, perhaps as soon as next year. But not before sucking up scores of millions of dollars from a district with real needs. And not before traumatizing the workforce and tarnishing the reputation of the district.
The casualties are legion: Teachers lost to other districts, applicants turning elsewhere and current teachers in crisis.
Take Manuela Wolf. When the veteran Sanchez Elementary School teacher was diagnosed this summer with breast cancer — and a particularly aggressive cancer, at that — she was terrified. But not about what you’d think.
“At the beginning of my cancer journey, I told my colleagues that my greatest fear is that the district will not come through with my payments,” said the 61-year-old, 19-year SFUSD educator. She has been out on extended health leave since August, and draws a 50 percent paycheck.
“I can live on 50 percent, modestly. But my great fear is if I don’t even get that 50 percent.”
And, of course, that’s exactly what happened.
By now, you’ve likely read a story or two about the San Francisco Unified School District’s ongoing payroll debacle. In January 2022, the district debuted a new payroll system called EMPowerSF; it cost some $13.7 million out of the box and failed, immediately and catastrophically by underpaying, mis-paying or just not paying thousands of district employees.
The scores of millions of dollars the district has spent supporting its costly system hasn’t all been wasted: There are presently nearly 2,000 open “tickets” placed by aggrieved employees, down from more than 10,000 a year ago. So, things are improved — but, you know, nearly 2,000 tickets is still a lot of tickets. Wolf could tell you as much.
And the reputational damage incurred is hard to measure. But it’s a lot: The allure of teaching in San Francisco — a district that needs to hire and retain all the quality teachers it can — has been severely curtailed. EMPower did for the SFUSD what Jason Voorhees did for Camp Crystal Lake.
Perhaps the clearest example of how the district has damaged people comes from Wolf. Not only was she subjected to weeks of angst, wondering if the district would fail to pay her at her moment of need — which happened — she prepared for that eventuality ahead of time.
Wolf’s church presciently held a fundraiser for her, in the event she’d be victimized by the district’s payroll glitch. Her longtime friend Elaine Chan-Scherer also — wisely — started up a preemptive GoFundMe.
“I am fighting for my life, here,” Wolf says. “I don’t know how they think people get through this.”
When Wolf, in the midst of what she described as a chemo haze, noticed she hadn’t received a check for November, she contacted the district. She was first told that this occurred because of the recent extension of her sick leave. But this didn’t make sense: The original leave wouldn’t have lapsed until early December, so November’s pay shouldn’t have been affected. Finally, after several days of calls and emails, and the intervention of her school principal, the district said it would provide a check.
That actually hasn’t happened yet, but it’s good that it will (presumably!) come soon. Less good is requiring 61-year-old women in the midst of a chemo fog and struggling with life-or-death issues to spend days arguing with a litany of HR people to simply to receive a basic paycheck. That’s not so good.
And there are many, many fellow teachers with similar stories.
- When A.P. Giannini Middle School special-education teacher Elizabeth Noble was out on medical leave, she was stiffed for two consecutive months. It took her three months of wheedling to get that money back.
- Sanchez Elementary School paraeducator Mirna Cheek had health deductions taken out of her paycheck every month — but they were not applied toward her actual benefits, and she lost her insurance. She discovered this after being billed more than $30,000 for a surgical procedure. While this matter was eventually resolved after much back-and-forth and strife, it continues to haunt Cheek’s credit score, and she was shocked and humiliated to have been taken to collections.
- Fellow Sanchez educator Juan Novella discovered that the $1,700 deducted from his check for 10 months for his retirement plan was never actually deposited into his retirement plan. That’s $17,000 that could’ve been invested during a bull market; he calculates his unrealized investment gains at $5,000. “I spend an hour going over every check,” he says. “I always find something. I am surprised when they’re correct.”
When I reach Lauren Stupek, she’s in the midst of her commute back from the Peninsula, where she now teaches. Along with around 16 other former Burton High School educators by her count — and five of the nine teachers in her English department — Stupek left the district after the last school year. And it was because of EMPower.
“I had to get out,” says Stupek, who taught in San Francisco for 10 years. “What I told my principal was that I always knew the Peninsula paid a lot more. That is not new information. But it became untenable to deal with the stress every month of not just being paid less, but perhaps not being paid at all. I had to become a forensic accountant, when I studied literature. I was sad to leave. I did not want to go. I was crying in my exit interview.”
Stupek, incidentally, is still owed a $5,000 stipend the district failed to pay her over the summer.
I reached Stupek’s former Burton High colleague Liz Kaufman when she, too, was commuting back from the Peninsula. “If I wanted to maintain my career as a teacher,” she said, “I needed to go somewhere where I wouldn’t have to worry about being paid on time and accurately.”
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These are the tangible and intangible ravages of EMPower. The system is befuddled by what should be routine procedures for a school district payroll system, such as change in work status or going out on leave. The devastatingly expensive new program can’t handle things like this, and input has to be done manually. If not, mistakes happen.
In September, district officials publicly brought up the possibility of scrapping the misbegotten system. In November, during a Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Matt Wayne indicated that this effort is already well along. He mentioned an all-encompassing system that, more than just payroll, would handle all budget, HR, accounting and purchasing needs. This, presumably, would supersede EMPower.
“We want a system that works,” he told the school board. “Since our last meeting, we’ve met with companies who provide … programs to schools. We’re in the final stages of that decision.”
Behind closed doors, we’re told that the discussion about dropping EMPower is even more overt. It’s acknowledged that the system doesn’t work, and all the district’s costly efforts to make things right won’t get it to work better than it does now.
A number of higher-functioning school districts have an integrated system of the sort Wayne spoke of that handles more than just payroll. SFUSD could obtain one of those — or subcontract with a district that already has one. Either would be an improvement.
Expecting to be paid accurately and on time is not a huge ask. This is a basic obligation for any employer. The SFUSD hasn’t been meeting it for the last two years. And this is a shame on so many levels. The kids at affluent and functional Peninsula school districts, where an increasing number of ex-SFUSD educators are flocking — how to put this nicely — they’re going to be fine.
But the kids at the SFUSD need the high-quality teachers who’ve either been driven from this district, or won’t come here now. It’s not entirely clear what “the pitch” is to get new talent at the district, or retain employees who have options. Making this an even more maddening situation, the SFUSD’s notoriously sclerotic onboarding process continues to lose applicants who wanted to come but received offers from elsewhere while being made to wait by the phone.
All of which is deeply painful for Manuela Wolf, who hasn’t just taught 19 years for the SFUSD, but has always worked in the hardest-up schools in the least-served neighborhoods. She cares deeply about the well-being of this city’s children. But it shouldn’t come at the cost of her own well-being. And it is.
“I want to survive this. I want to live. I don’t want to deal with this anxiety of, will I be able to pay my rent?” she says. “Will this happen again next month? I have a double mastectomy ahead of me. There are other issues I need to focus on.”
$40 million!!?? Imagine what that could have funded or paid for. This does sound like egregious financial mismanagement.
That, and a failure to heed the teachings of the sunk cost fallacy.
Maybe the IRS should do an investigation into the book keeping of SFUSD? This issue seems more criminal than an inconvenience for the employees.
Given how many of your readers are software people, I wonder if one of us could find some hours to help you dig in to why this went so far off the rails. Enterprise/government software projects of this sort are notoriously bad (there’s research on their ghastly failure rate I can find if you’re interested) but this still seems particularly brutal in a reasonably well-understood space like payroll.
For example, was the problem here that SFUSD has bad software procurement processes? Bad oversight? Did they truly have bad luck in their choice of partner? (I hope it was just incompetence, but given all the DBI reporting here I also have to wonder if there was corruption.)
I found an article elsewhere that details the problems with the contract in more depth: https://sfstandard.com/2022/03/30/flawed-contract-offers-clues-to-rough-rollout-of-sfusd-payroll/ Infosys was not responsible for migrating data or any actual trouble shooting of the system after delivery. Shocking, really.
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…)
Why isn’t the District suing EMPower? If I was ripped off for $40 million, I would be suing to get the money back with damages!
They signed those rights away on the contract.
Are the EmPower people eating any of the cost overruns or contributing to the kitty to develop a new system? Were there any non-performance clauses in the original contract or is SFUSD eating the entire $40 million?
No. It’s all on the district.
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 ?
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 $2,000 A DAY to “fix” it. When that 6 figure salary was over, I watched in person as the consultant gave their final report to the current BOE, which amounted to reporting that the payroll department “needed more staff”.
It is a complete outrage the current superintendent still has his 6 figure job.
I’m wondering who thought it was a good idea anyway. I worked in the district for 30 years and the old system worked fine.
Thanks for following and writing about this issue for the past two years. Next up: talk with some folks who are qualified and have been trying to get hired by SFUSD and cannot due to bureaucratic nonsense.
They are purposely stalling everyone and NOT onboarding. Please write about that. Qualified hires are not making it into classrooms.
Finally! Long overdue! EmPower has been a failed system since day one when they converted our leave balances incorrectly from the old system, shorting us days of work that count towards retirement– effectively robbing us of money that we already earned. Soooo many outstanding issues that even when SFUSD agrees they do it or did it wrong are not getting fixed, still. Arbitrations that have been won by educators with support of our Union UESF, legal solutions with independent mediators which go past deadlines for fixing, and when they are “fixed” are still incorrectly implemented because current SFUSD staff are both incompetent and/or overworked and/or have no historical knowledge of the mess that is SFUSD administration. Most admins and many workers in payroll, HR, Labor Relations, Curriculum and Instruction and more -all the way to the tippy top- left the district over the past two years largely due to the Empower cluster *&%$, 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….
Indian IT vendors in general are quite adept at getting as much money as possible with as little accountability as possible
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
The are also not beholden to the city government sunshine laws. They can cut deals and operate basically in secret.
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!
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.
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.
Matt Wayne wants a system that works. Now. Almost 2 years into EmpowerSF’s Reign of Terror on SFUSD teachers and support staff he wants a system that works. Now. He must’ve finally been burnt by the criminal enterprise called EmpowerSF.
Matt Wayne wasn’t the superintendent when EmpowerSF was implemented. We can look to the leadership in power prior to Matt Wayne.
It doesn’t matter. He continues to make decisions that feed this outrageous money pit. Very very expensive ones.
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.
Ah yes, blame labor for … management messing up a payroll system. Makes perfect sense. 💯
Blaming the union and organized labor for this? Are you kidding? They had nothing to do with the purchase or implementation of this system.
‘Management’ didn’t miraculously fall out of the sky…they came from somewhere… where could that have been?
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.
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 wasn’t *teachers* who screwed this up. Teachers were the victims here. A little common sense, please.
The teachers didn’t fail a contractor. The contractor was a criminal enterprise aided and abetted by the school district.
Eliminate the San Francisco School Board.
Dick Allen
San Francisco