At the UFT’s prodding, the city and the Department of Education have finally moved to upgrade the troubled Special Education Student Information System (SESIS) to stem both the ongoing loss of more than $300 million a year in Medicaid reimbursement for services for students with disabilities and to address the thousands of UFT member complaints that have poured in since the system was launched five years ago during the Bloomberg administration.

Teachers have reported marked improvement in SESIS following work conducted over the summer at the DOE’s behest, according to union representatives.

Speech teacher Blake Rose of PS 321 in Park Slope said she has her fingers crossed. She reports “no breakdowns since September” and hopes the “nightmare” days of SESIS are over.

Last spring, a SESIS working group was assembled with representation from the UFT, the city’s Office of Management and Budget, the city’s Office of Labor Relations and the DOE.

In June, the UFT arranged for the working group to meet two times with SESIS users. Michael Cappiello, a social worker at JM Rapport HS for Career Development, was one of more than a dozen SESIS users who shared and demonstrated their experiences and “pain points.” He said the inclusion of those who must use the system on a regular basis “is the way things should work.”

Cappiello said it had become easier to access SESIS and the system was easier to navigate.

“The working group took our recommendations from the June meetings, worked on them over the summer and reported to us in September about what could be fixed and what couldn’t be fixed,” he explained.

SESIS was created to consolidate information about students with disabilities in an online data system to better track Medicaid reimbursement and enable better coordination among service providers. But from the beginning, the system was plagued by slowness because it couldn’t handle the amount of traffic, breakdowns and redundancy.

According to UFT Secretary Howard Schoor, the changes made to SESIS so far have addressed some of the logistical and technological challenges facing educators who must input data daily in the system. He said the city is working on a long-term system upgrade aimed at addressing the proper filing for Medicaid payments and expects to complete its work by spring.

The UFT’s five-year battle with the city over SESIS has already cost the DOE more than $42 million, following an arbitrator’s 2013 order to compensate more than 34,000 UFT members for the hundreds of hours beyond the normal workday they spent logging data.

“The UFT gets credit for trying to improve the system,” said Cappiello.