SFUSD reports progress and risks in Frontline/Red Rover payroll and HR rollout; board presses for contingency data

District staff told the School Board on Tuesday evening they are continuing intensive work to complete the Frontline enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Red Rover human capital management (HCM) implementations before the district's targeted July 1 go-live date, but cautioned that critical configuration, testing and training tasks remain.

Marin Trujillo, chief of staff, said district teams are "focused on getting this right, not fast," and described the next two weeks as "extremely critical." She and operations and budget leader Meli Lau Smith walked the board through a series of status gauges showing some modules moving from red/orange to green but called out outstanding items including a retirement system interface and remaining HR approvals.

The presentation said central-office training is complete, roughly 400 HR action requests (HRAs) remain pending review, and the district is running pay compares across the workforce to reconcile differences between Empower (the legacy payroll/data system) and Frontline. Trujillo, Smith and Associate Superintendent of Human Resources Amy Baer said pay compares will continue until the district reaches its internal tolerance thresholds and that the team has established a triage and case-management approach for payroll errors.

Why it matters: the ERP/HCM replacement affects payroll, retirement contributions, hiring, site budgets and other daily operations across SFUSD's roughly 9,000 employees. Errors or missing integrations could delay pay or benefits processing, disrupt school-site operations and require short-term extensions of legacy systems.

Key details from the update and board discussion

- Systems and integration status: Presenters said Frontline is the new ERP and Red Rover is the HCM; the CFERS retirement interface completed testing to about 75% and remains in configuration. Some workarounds have been used in the interim.

- Payroll pay-compare work: The district ran a small initial sample (about 1,800 employees) and then expanded to run pay compares for all employees (presenters said a goal was to run the full set of "9,000 pay compares"). Trujillo said there are three reasons a check might differ: (1) Frontline calculates payroll more accurately than Empower ("different but not wrong"), (2) data have not moved from Empower into Frontline, or (3) Frontline configuration errors that must be fixed.

- Accuracy tolerance: Staff said they use different variance tolerances by element (for example, a $1 variance threshold in some comparisons) rather than a single 95% number across all checks; they said they will publish the criteria and thresholds to the board.

- Training and staffing: Central-office training is complete; the district expects to run additional refresher trainings and some redo sessions. Accounts-payable clerks and some other user groups had not yet completed training; sites and AP staff will have additional sessions before go-live.

- Contingency planning: Staff described a triage team and embedded case-management teams in HR and payroll that can take walk-ins, tickets and calls; they said the district can produce accurate replacement checks within a day in many cases. Staff also said contracts for legacy systems could require a multi-month overlap and that an extension could cost on the order of $2 million beyond current ERP implementation projections if continued licensing is needed.

- Timeline: The district reiterated plans to present the FY25-26 budget first reading on June 17 and said June 6 will be a critical "go/no-go" decision point for the July 1 target. Presenters said they remained "cautiously optimistic" but acknowledged momentum must be maintained.

Board questions and concerns

Commissioners pressed for more public and board-facing detail. Topics raised included: whether root causes found in pay compares were being fixed (Trujillo said yes, with examples), how retirees and SERP participants would be affected by retirement-interface issues (staff said manual workarounds exist and they are addressing configuration to avoid human error), whether staffing transitions and layoffs would reduce implementation capacity (staff said temporary onboarding and case-management hires are planned to mitigate that risk), and requests to publish pay-compare summary numbers when available.

Commissioners also asked for clearer labeling of early-warning indicators on status slides (some slides mixed milestones and actuals), publicized post-go-live office hours and triage contact points so community members know where to report payroll issues, and the timetable for completing all pay-compare runs.

Public comments and context

Members of the public who spoke during the meeting's public-comment period highlighted related concerns: layoffs of central-office technical staff, potential impacts on school-based tech support and school secretarial staffing, and anxieties about hiring and after-school programs. Speakers asked the board to rescind layoff notices affecting IFPTE Local 21 ProTech unit members and to ensure student- and site-level supports are not lost during the transition.

What staff will deliver next

Presenters committed to: (1) publishing the pay-compare criteria and variance tolerances to the board, (2) delivering aggregated pay-compare results after the full run, (3) providing a clear, public contingency plan and triage contact points for payroll and HR issues, and (4) making a formal go/no-go recommendation around June 6 if momentum does not hold.

Ending note

District leaders said the implementation team has worked through holiday weekends and evening hours and asked the board for support while they complete remaining configurations, tests and training. They emphasized their objective of stabilizing payroll and HR processes for the new school year while minimizing harm to employees and students.