Support our Teachers & Fix EmPowerSF Now!

SFUSD School Board & Superintendent

Grattan Elementary School

As many of you may have heard, SFUSD has created many problems with the implementation of the EmPowerSF payroll and benefits system, affecting the pay and benefits of many SFUSD teachers and staff. This is simply unacceptable.  

Teachers and staff at Grattan should not have to spend tens of hours trying to correct mistakes in their own Empower paychecks and recover lost money, submitting help tickets that lead nowhere. Our teachers have lost precious time tracking down money they should have received automatically, and other teachers have had their retirement accounts disappeared. These problems have not been solved despite many assurances.

We understand the Board has hired an outside consultant to try to fix the problems, but it is not clear what we can expect in terms of the timeline and when things will be fixed.  We need answers to these questions now. Our teachers and staff deserve better!
Petition by
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Sarah Grossman-Swenson
San Francisco, California

To: SFUSD School Board & Superintendent
From: [Your Name]

We are writing to you as Grattan parents, San Francisco voters, and community members who want to see our public schools succeed.

We are concerned the poor implementation of the EMPowerSF payroll system is eroding the morale of our educators and taking valuable time away from their teaching - not to mention the havoc caused to their personal lives. Our Grattan staff members are spending many hours per week trying to work through missing paychecks, healthcare benefit challenges, and other issues. We have informally heard of a Grattan teacher with multiple months of missing paychecks, and another Grattan teacher who had their health care insurance lapse. These issues are unacceptable, but the worst part is that that there does not seem to be a clear timeline about when we can expect things to be resolved. We understand that help tickets are not being answered and prior response timelines have been abandoned.

Rather than vent, we want to turn our anger into a constructive outcome. We are sure you want to resolve this issue as much as we do. We understand the School Board approved a $2.8M contract for Alvarez & Marsal to remove the backlog of payroll errors, stabilize EMPowerSF, and help the district better use the system. We have the following questions about how this will be implemented:

1. When will the backlog of past errors be eliminated?
2. When will new errors stop being made? Specifically: what is the success metric that you/Alvarez & Marsal are measuring to "stabilize EMPowerSF" and when will that be delivered?
3. When can our educators expect help with payroll issues? Specifically: what will be the response and resolution time for tickets/calls going forward? When will these response and resolution times be implemented?
4. How frequently will you be reporting on the backlog, error rate, and resolution time for help tickets?

We hope you agree that it is essential that you answer these critical questions right away. Our SFUSD teachers and staff deserve better!