Kelsey Barnes and her husband admit they’re unusual. Since they first started dating, they’ve had a monthly meeting to go over their budget. “We go through our contributions to our little retirement accounts and measure our progress,” says Barnes. “We’re very nerdy people.”
Barnes works for the San Francisco Unified School District as a community schools coordinator — a type of school-site advocate — and because of their nerdy habit, she and her husband spotted a big problem. Last August, Barnes’ pension account stopped accruing funds, even though she’d been contributing with every paycheck. The account is now missing more than $6,000.
Barnes soon told colleagues and one, Jessica Agnos, took on the mantle of union sleuth, pestering the pension fund and helping others scrutinize their accounts. Dozens of district employees have since found the same problem. If their union’s estimate is correct, it could end up affecting hundreds of workers and totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more.
These employees are clerks, custodians, maintenance staff, cafeteria workers, and school coordinators like Agnos and Barnes. Some are among the lowest-paid workers in the district, and many speak English as a second language. Only a few dozen have even figured out how to check for the missing funds. The problem isn’t easy to spot.
It all began last July, when SFUSD, after three years trying to make a disastrous payroll system work, finally switched to a new one. Leaders promised comprehensive fixes.
Other flaws, such as incorrect or missing teachers’ pay, seem to have mostly abated with the new system. But now pension payments aren’t flowing into retirement accounts for members of the district’s Service Employees International Union (SEIU) chapter. SFUSD automatically deducts the funds from their paychecks.
A few dozen employees have documented the glitch, but SEIU chapter president Antonaé Robertson suspects that all of her members — nearly 1,000 — are affected.
Adding to general frustration about SFUSD’s communication skills, Robertson and others say the district didn’t alert anyone, at least not until union members started asking questions.
The district’s first notice to all SEIU members who might be affected came on April 6, and it wasn’t even a direct message. District staff had explained the problem to the school board, and board president Phil Kim forwarded the explanation to Robertson via email.
The explanation Kim forwarded said the problem should be fixed by June, and that the money has been diverted into a different fund but is intact. Two days later, on Apr. 8, the administration sent its first direct notice to employees.
Neither SFUSD nor the pension fund has answered The Frisc’s questions about the number of employees affected or the total dollars that the problem has diverted. District spokespeople referred The Frisc to their Apr. 8 letter to employees.
Kim says that he has brought up the problem “multiple times” to Superintendent Maria Su “and requested that they work meaningfully in partnership with SEIU to [reach a] solution as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile, those employees are still missing the money from their pension accounts, with no record of it accruing elsewhere. They just have to take the district’s word for it.
‘It still looked normal’
When Barnes first noticed the missing funds, she assumed it was a temporary glitch. “I had a lot of faith that it would get resolved,” she says.
She filed a help ticket in September and got what she calls a “cookie cutter” response. In January, she mentioned it at a union meeting. “We had everybody log in and started realizing it was more people than just me,” says Barnes.
To catch the problem, employees have to hunt through convoluted financial documents. Agnos, community school coordinator at Starr King Elementary, discovered she’s missing roughly $9,000. Another coordinator, Michelle Jacques, is missing about $7,500. “Even if I had glanced at my pay stub, which I did from time to time, it still looked normal because the money was still coming out of our checks,” says Jacques, who works at Grattan Elementary.
Doing the math requires logging into the San Francisco Employee Retirement System (SFERS), the city-run pension program, and meticulously double-checking records. The big tip-off for Barnes was a much lower amount of service time than she’d actually accrued. Digging further, the system showed that money deducted from paychecks stopped showing up in their pensions in July 2025.
The community school coordinators, who have a shared WhatsApp group, soon found the problem among other employees. “I’m a senior clerk typist,” says union president Robertson. “None of us work at the same site, none of us work for the same department.”
It’s been hard to get a handle on the problem’s scope. For many SEIU workers, English is a second language. Barnes, one of several SEIU members at Spring Valley Science Elementary School, says “one of our members had to have her daughter help fill out the service tickets because it’s hard for her to translate.”
Agnos, who keeps a detailed spreadsheet, has gotten 37 union members to check their accounts. Several of them allowed The Frisc to review their accounts to verify discrepancies. The totals vary, but all are missing thousands of dollars.
As they wait for a fix, some members want to turn off the payroll deductions. “I would be happy to withhold that money,” says Ashley Ornelas, community schools coordinator at San Francisco International High, “but it’s a mandatory contribution.” Ornelas says she’s missing at least $6,000.
Ironing out kinks
The district’s accounting system has bedeviled employees for years. Problems started when SFUSD upgraded in Jan. 2022 to a bespoke system, EMPower, instead of one that a majority of California districts use. At EMPower’s worst, hundreds of educators received inaccurate pay, some missing entire checks, leading then-Superintendent Matt Wayne to declare a state of emergency in Nov. 2022.
After spending millions of futile dollars to fix EMPower, the board finally voted to scrap it in 2024 and turned to the well-known system Frontline. It connects directly to SFERS, which manages retirement accounts for the nearly 1,000 members of SEIU’s district chapter. (The teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, has a different arrangement. The state manages pensions for its some 6,000 members.)
SFUSD spent $20 million upfront on Frontline, according to the Chronicle. When the system went fully online nine months ago, the district acknowledged it had to iron out some kinks. Superintendent Su and staff gave almost daily updates after the switch but stopped in September.
At that point, the district knew something was amiss with the SEIU pensions. “EMPower was already a disaster on the back end. And then you’re trying to do a transfer of information,” says Agnos. “How are you going to pull this off? Turns out they didn’t.”
A mysterious trust fund
One month before Frontline went live last summer, SFUSD and SFERS signed an agreement acknowledging that SFUSD was “facing challenges” submitting data to SFERS. It spelled out SFUSD’s responsibilities in sending data to SFERS in the proper format, among other things.
In August, a month after Frontline came online, district staff presented a progress report to the school board. “We continue to work on the SFERS and Frontline interface,” Marin Trujillo, SFUSD’s head of staff, told the board. “These [connections] are critical. We never thought we were going to get them ready for the go-live. We almost did. We’re not there yet. We’re actively working on them.”
In February, Agnos heard from SFERS that her missing money was going into something called the “SFERS Trust Fund,” and that she should direct further questions to the district.
When The Frisc began asking SFUSD about the problem in early April, spokespeople declined to comment.
Then school board president Kim emailed SEIU on Apr. 6, forwarding the explanation that district staff had sent to the board. They said they learned about the “data integration issue” in January, following the departure of then-head of payroll La’Trice Harris-Hill.
“Evidently, the program that communicated between SFUSD and SFERS broke down during Frontline implementation last year and had not been replaced or repaired but completed manually with a work-around,” according to the language Kim shared with SEIU. “There had been no plan put in place to repair or replace the system.”
Reached via LinkedIn, Harris-Hill told The Frisc said that she “did not return after winter break for a number of issues.” She added that there were problems “long before her arrival,” but refused to give further comment.
The district then sent an email on Apr. 8 to employees who use SFERS, its first direct communication since the problem began. The email said the issue had “largely been resolved” and “employee contributions are in the process of being reviewed and processed.”
The email said both employee and employer contributions — SFUSD matches the amounts — are in the SFERS Trust Fund, the same explanation Agnos had heard in February.
SEIU members say they know nothing about this trust fund. They have no way to view it. They don’t know if SFUSD’s matching dollars are actually going through, or if they are earning the correct amount of interest.
Last week’s SFUSD email encouraged those having problems to submit help tickets through the online portal.
‘Disingenuous’
An unnamed SFERS spokesperson, responding via email to The Frisc’s queries, said that the district and city are working together to resolve technical issues. “SFUSD members will receive the benefits they are due,” the spokesperson wrote.
But employees say it’s hard to have faith when they weren’t warned about the problem in the first place. It’s the latest grievance around transparency between the district and its workforce. “It was disingenuous on their behalf not to tell us, considering we meet with them about payroll issues every month,” says Robertson.
She worries her SEIU chapter received the silent treatment because it’s less powerful than the teachers union, the United Educators of San Francisco. But UESF has also dropped hints about problems. President Cassondra Curiel spoke at a Mar. 10 board meeting about pension “discrepancies,” and Agnos says she’s heard from multiple teachers about gaps in their pension dollars. UESF officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
While the pension dollars are only a small fraction of each employee’s salary, the missing money is especially important to workers who have recently retired, are thinking about retirement, or are perhaps afraid to, given the uncertainty.
Agnos knows at least one cafeteria worker who’s been with the district 35 years is waiting for a resolution before retiring. Opening her laptop at a local cafe recently, she pointed to her growing spreadsheet of colleagues who are missing funds.
Now that the union has signed its new contract — talks went on longer than the teachers’ union, and finally resolved in late March — Agnos hopes more members have time to check their accounts, and that more local politicians take notice: “We’re waiting to hear back about what can be done, and we’re trying to alert everyone.”
