Persistent payroll issues within the Syracuse City School District have prompted it to create more than a dozen new positions to deal with the problems.

Hundreds of employees have been underpaid or weren’t paid at all after the district transitioned from PeopleSoft to an Oracle Cloud platform earlier this year. A similar situation is playing out in the Rochester City School District.

The SCSD Board of Education voted this week to approve the creation of the 13 new positions. BOE documents show the salaries add up to around $912,000 a year before benefits.

The documents list the positions and what the salary for each will be:

Account clerk II (1) — $46,913 annually
Accountant II (1) — $81,781 annually
Maintenance worker I (1) — $24.30 annually
Payroll clerks (2) — $58,560 annually
Personnel analyst (1) — $68,958-$95,481 annually
Personnel specialists (3) — $66,288 annually
Programmer II (1) — $78,990 annually
Senior data analysts (2) — $84,872 annually
Senior systems administrator (1) — $99,373 annually

Syracuse Teachers Association President Nicole Capsello says the Oracle-related payroll issues began in July. Some of the problems have been fixed but not all of them have been resolved.

Staff members, many living paycheck to paycheck, report their pay has been late, short or missing altogether since a payroll system upgrade was implemented. Some employees say they’ve had to pay late fees because they couldn’t cover their bills on time. 

In a statement, Nicole Capsello, Syracuse Teachers Association president, said that they appreciate the move to add the additional positions.

“I certainly appreciate the move to hire more staff in order to get payroll issues fixed. The domino effect of the failed implementation includes HR and payroll staff working excessive hours solely to correct payroll issues caused by the implementation of Oracle. This has led to other HR and payroll related tasks not being completed in a timely manner or even at all. We do share the concern over the amount of money that will need to be utilized, but we also need appropriate staffing in those departments to ensure everyone’s pay is correct and all other functions of HR and payroll are getting done in a timely manner.”