SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Some employees with San Francisco Unified School District were in for a nasty surprise this month when their health care was canceled out of the blue.
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Forty-eight summer school employees fell victim to the district's notoriously buggy Empower payroll system, as first reported by SFGATE.
Earlier this spring, the $14 million payroll system just launched in January had another major glitch, causing paychecks for several teachers to be seriously delayed, according to the outlet.
The district was made aware of the problem last Wednesday, according to a statement spokesperson Laura Dudnik provided to KCBS Radio on Tuesday. While SFUSD has said the problem is being dealt with and that reimbursements will be issued to any employees that were forced to cover health expenses out of pocket, this is little comfort to those affected.
While SFUSD has said the problem is being dealt with and that reimbursements will be issued to any employees that were forced to cover health expenses out of pocket, this is little comfort to those affected.
"We immediately began working with the City to correct the errors so that benefits can be reinstated with no break in service," Dudnik said. "We are following up with all impacted employees and we have implemented new measures so that no additional employees will be impacted by this issue."
It's unclear when the reimbursements will be delivered or when the error will be resolved, leaving those 48 employees in the lurch.
"We need people to be processing tickets quicker, and we need on-boarding for trained professionals to actually deal with these cases," said Frank Lara, vice president of United Educators of San Francisco, which represents the 6,500 employees with the district on Twitter on Tuesday.
The reason the error occurred for these 48 employees is that their assignment may have changed or their position may have changed, resulting in the system cutting of their benefits, according to Lara in an interview with KCBS Radio on Tuesday.
Along with that, another 150 employees have been having issues with their 403B accounts with the district, pre-tax funds that get deposited into pension or retirement funds.
The union is planning on meeting with Superintendent Matt Wayne on Tuesday to work on resolving these ongoing issues. "We feel that a long-term solution involves staffing the payroll these benefits, sort of the bread and butter of the district, because we can't keep having these problems and having members wait a week to pay rent," said Lara.
The union is putting pressure on the district to address each individual case within 24 hours, but still some employees have been waiting up to a week for the situation to be resolved.
This is the first time the new payroll system has had to process summer school staff, according to Dudnik.
"As we work through all of our cyclical/annual processes for the first time, we anticipate that we may continue to experience issues but we are better positioned now as we continue to identify, respond to and resolve them," said the statement. "Like many sectors we are experiencing limited staffing and sustainability challenges, and we are working hard to hire additional payroll and HR staff and invest more resources in these operations."
It's also unclear if the district will be able to prevent more issues like this from occurring in the future.
"While we know it doesn't feel fast enough, we are making progress. The team continues to work furiously to address technical and process issues, resolve individual employee cases, and put in place systems and processes to minimize issues and provide greater clarity and information to our employees to help rebuild trust and confidence in us and the district so that we can move into a stronger new school year in the fall," Dudnik's statement concluded.
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