SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Matt Wayne declared a payroll state of emergency on Monday.
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The district's employees have been suffering for months over the issues being caused by payroll platform EMPowerSF with their paychecks.
The issues first started cropping up at the beginning of this year when several teachers didn’t receive their paychecks on time. Since then, the buggy system has not only affected paychecks, but it’s also left some employees without healthcare coverage.
Not only that, the complaints submitted by employees often went unanswered in the system.
According to a release issued by the district on Monday, the issues with EMPowerSF "are bigger than originally anticipated," and will be dealt with.
In September, the management consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) was tasked by the district with figuring out why the platform was so buggy. In that investigation, it became clear that the platform had more problems than the district thought.
The progress so far has not been enough for those suffering the effects, leading to more than 100 teachers staging a sickout last week to draw attention to the problem, according to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle.
"It is long overdue for us to escalate this issue and take aggressive action. A&M’s diagnosis has made it clear that our current course of action is insufficient relative to the magnitude of the problems. This is an emergency situation that requires extraordinary measures," Superintendent Matt Wayne said in Monday's release. "Declaring a state of payroll emergency means we will be doing things differently so that we can do right by our educators and staff. We understand the challenges and disruptions these issues have caused. We are focused on ensuring these challenges can be overcome. You have my assurance, and the assurance of SFUSD, that these problems will be rectified."
As part of the emergency, a 60-person Command Center team has been formed to tackle the problem. Progress will be made public on an a dashboard that will soon be made available.
"Our payroll system failures are unconscionable and more complicated than we understood before. Superintendent Wayne and I agree that this is an emergency situation, and that we must act in fundamentally different ways. The Board and I completely support his creating a Command Center to dedicate resources and staff time to focus only on fixing this problem for everyone," said SF Board of Education President Jenny Lam in Monday's statement.
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