By Bilal Mahmood : sfchronicle – excerpt
If our bureaucracy makes it difficult to accomplish something as seemingly simple as paying a teacher on time, how can we solve the rest of the challenges we face as a city?
Charles Sylvester has been a special-education teacher for over 20 years in San Francisco Unified School District. He’s seen plenty of ups and downs during that time, but in 2023 he encountered a career first.
The district misreported his taxes. Thousands of dollars of payments were effectively missing…
He isn’t alone. Over the past year, over 5,000 school district staff members have reported missing payroll, taxes misreported or delayed 403(b) payments…
In 2022, the school district transitioned from a 17-year-old payroll system to a new system dubbed EMPowerSF. Almost immediately, hundreds of employees reported payroll issues.
Over a year later, those issues still persist, despite the district spending over $30 million on the new system. That’s almost $10,000 per teacher…
To add insult to injury, the same software underlying the EMPowerSF system had been used once before in a California school district. In 2007, Los Angeles Unified School District also launched a payroll system powered by the same software, and it also failed to pay teachers on time…
“SFUSD’s job is education, not writing code,” said Autumn Looijen, a software engineer and co-founder of the public school advocacy group SF Guardians, which investigated the district payroll debacle on behalf of her organization. “The problem is, the school board approved a contract that relied on Infosys to build a software system but left SFUSD on the hook for fixing software bugs.”
A $15.8 million mistake
So, what caused a critical service like a payroll system to fail so spectacularly?
Talking to current and former district officials involved with the software implementation, one persistent issue kept emerging — a lack of testing…
Bilal Mahmood is a civil servant and entrepreneur, and a board member at SF YIMBY…(more)