Top SF Schools Official Resigns; Board Halts School Closures

Updated at 8:20 p.m. Oct. 18.

San Francisco’s superintendent of schools resigned Friday after a botched school closure rollout, hiring fiasco and worsening budget crisis have spurred mounting questions about his ability to lead.

The Board of Education accepted Matt Wayne’s resignation at an emergency closed-door meeting Friday night. Wayne led San Francisco Unified School District for less than two years, and had two years remaining in his contract.

Board of Education President Matt Alexander announced a new superintendent will be appointed next week, and school closures will be halted. On Tuesday, the board plans to appoint Maria Su, the co-leader of the rescue team Mayor London Breed appointed to aid the district earlier this month. Su has been the director of the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families since 2009, and previously worked in senior management roles at multiple nonprofits, including Vietnamese Youth Development Center in the Tenderloin.

The board plans to direct Su to stop the current school closure process, which Alexander said had gotten too rocky to continue at this time. He said the district’s primary focus will be cutting more than $110 million from the budget before mid-December in order to avoid a state takeover.

“The school merger and closure process has been chaotic,” Alexander said after the meeting. “We’ve heard that from families. We’ve heard that from educators. We’ve even heard that from school district staff. The board believes that we need a reset, and we’re going to ask Superintendent Maria Su to assess the situation and determine appropriate next steps.”

The move comes days after Breed called on the district to halt its school closure plan, saying she had lost confidence in Wayne’s ability to carry it out — joining numerous elected officials and school board members who have questioned his capability to usher the district through the difficult year ahead.

The district has been in turmoil since before the school year began. It’s already under state oversight amid a massive budget shortfall, and it could face a full takeover if it can’t cut $113 million from an already tight spending plan by December. Chronic declining enrollment has left 14,000 empty seats across San Francisco campuses, and the district continues to deal with vacant positions as it recovers from a multi-year payroll fiasco that cost tens of millions of dollars and resulted in wrong and missed paychecks for staff.

But questions about Wayne’s effectiveness began cropping up more frequently about a month ago when he announced the highly anticipated list of schools slated to close or merge after this academic year — part of a “resource alignment initiative” to cut down costs and decrease empty seats — would be delayed.

Within the week, former school board president Lainie Motamedi said that Wayne’s leadership failures were directly correlated with her abrupt decision to resign days after classes started, the board held its closed-door weekend meeting, and Breed sent in a rescue team of city administrators to aid the struggling district.

Since, Wayne has been blamed for failing to budget enough money for 252 special education workers, costing the district tens of millions of dollars. The eventual roll-out of the school closure list has not instilled confidence.

On a Friday earlier this month, Mission Local reported that the list, already pushed back to October, could be delayed yet again — to after the November election. The district didn’t offer much clarity until the following week, when in a video message, Wayne said he would make an announcement naming schools that met the district’s criteria for closure but weren’t necessarily on the chopping block yet.

The list came out the following day, Oct. 8, hours earlier than expected after Mission Local obtained it. It included inaccurate “composite scores” — which SFUSD is using to rate schools on factors including equity, academic performance, school culture and effective use of resources to determine which should close — that had to be updated the same day. Wayne had to apologize after families across the entire district received messages that were supposed to be sent only to an affected school community. The list also included information about where students would transfer and which campuses would merge, leading to questions about whether it might, in fact, be the superintendent’s final recommendation, not just those that met the criteria for potential closure.

In the week since the announcement, parents, politicians and some school board members have spoken out against the district’s mishandlings.

Supervisor Connie Chan and Board President Aaron Peskin called out the list’s disproportionate impact on Asian students. Every leading mayoral candidate, including Peskin, has indicated their opposition to Wayne’s plan, and Tuesday, Breed issued a statement calling for the closures process to be halted amid the confusion, saying it was distracting from the crucial need to balance the budget by year’s end.

School Board President Matt Alexander told KQED on Tuesday that Breed had made “some valid points.”

“The Board of Education … [has] one employee, which is the superintendent, and so we’re monitoring it, holding him accountable and we understand that as a governance team, it’s our responsibility to ensure that we stabilize the situation and that we provide our students and our educators with the schools they deserve,” he said at the time.

It seems they plan to do just that on Friday when the board is expected to vote on whether to accept Wayne’s resignation. He still has two years remaining in his contract.

Presumably, the board will have to name an interim superintendent as the district now adds to its list of priorities the long process of hiring a new leader.

While Wayne appears to be taking the fall for the district’s missteps, Dodson said that he didn’t make all of these decisions alone.

“Several others who were involved during this time who contributed to some of the major problems over the last couple of weeks, including the Board of Education, were very involved in fiddling with the [school closures] plan before it was released,” she told KQED. “They were probably more heavily involved with the plan and the final touches on the plan than maybe a board of education should be.”

KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman contributed to this report.