SF School District Should Focus on Budget Before Deciding on Campus Closures, Breed Says

San Francisco school officials should focus on resolving the district’s budget before making final decisions about possible school closures, Mayor London Breed suggested during an interview with KQED’s Forum on Wednesday.

Her comments come as the San Francisco Unified School District faces multiple colliding issues, including a budget crisis that puts it at risk of a state takeover and other operational dysfunction. On Sunday, Breed announced she would send a team of five experts led by top city administrators to help the district “stabilize.”

“This year, when we balance this budget without school closures at this time, it’s going to give us an understanding of what the school district has to do long term,” Breed told KQED on Wednesday. “Because the fact is, no one can say, ‘We’re going to keep all the schools open’ or ‘We’re going to close the school.’ No one can say that because we don’t have the facts.”

The district’s budget deficit is projected to reach $148.5 million this school year, and intervention by the California Department of Education has already begun. While the district is required to pass a balanced budget by December, it has also been moving forward with plans for its first campus closures in 20 years — which district officials have said are meant to make up for steadily declining enrollment, not to cut costs.

Breed did not confirm any timeline for the next steps for school closures, which the district ultimately will decide. District officials on Tuesday said they still intend to share out a short list of schools that could face closure by October; that target was pushed back from last week after Superintendent Matt Wayne said officials needed more time to “carefully review everything.”

“Our goal is to set a timeline, which we don’t have at this point, but we hope to have it sometime in October to put parents at ease,” Breed said. “People need to have clarity, they need to have a timeline, and our goal is to get there.”

According to the district’s initial timeline, the list of campuses recommended for closure would go up for a school board vote in December, with the affected campuses shutting down at the end of the academic year. While he has not set a new date for releasing the list of schools that will close or merge, Wayne said on Tuesday that he still expects a board vote before the end of the year.

“December will be [a] critical month because this is when we present our updated fiscal stabilization plan, which shows how we’re going to balance the budget and ensure that we maintain local control, and then it’s also when we’re going to present to the board and ask for their action on our school closure plan,” Wayne said.

Staving off school closure plans until after the district balances its budget would align with a resolution that Supervisor Connie Chan introduced on Tuesday, although Breed did not say she is backing the proposal.

“SFUSD should be focused on shoring up their existing budgetary concerns,” Chan said in a statement. “We need to work with the California Department of Education, school district families, and community stakeholders on solutions to balance the district’s budget deficit in the best interest of San Francisco students and families.”

The District 1 supervisor said rushing school closures could also hurt the likelihood of the district passing its $790 million bond on the ballot this November. The measure, Proposition A, would provide critical funding for schools and district infrastructure, including the beleaguered hiring and payroll system.

Breed, who is facing a tight reelection this November, announced that she would deploy the so-called School Stabilization Team shortly after an emergency school board meeting on Sunday at which officials said Wayne would stay on as superintendent. During a joint press conference with Wayne on Tuesday, SFUSD Board President Matt Alexander said he called the meeting and requested support from Breed because he felt a sense of urgency to address fiscal and operational problems in the district “immediately.”

Alexander and Wayne met Tuesday morning with the leaders of Breed’s emergency team — Maria Su, the executive director of the Department of Children Youth and Their Families, and Phil Ginsburg, the general manager of the Recreation and Parks Department — and started to work out “specific ideas” for how they could help.

“It has been very clear from the mayor, from Maria Su, from Phil Ginsburg, that this is a partnership,” Alexander said. “It is not the city telling us what to do. It is the city offering resources, supporting us, working in partnership with the school district to address the issues the Superintendent outlined.”

On Forum, Breed asked SFUSD parents to “please be patient with us.”

“For sure, this year, the first plan is to balance the budget for December,” Breed said. “We need to look at the data to understand and determine what will happen, and until we do that, I can’t say anything will happen this school year.”