SF Schools Won’t Close Yet, But the City Still Has Questions About Huge Budget Cuts

Updated 10:35 a.m. Wednesday

San Francisco’s new superintendent of schools appeared before the Board of Supervisors for the first time in her new role Tuesday evening at a hearing on the district’s paused school closure plan.

Superintendent Maria Su was appointed by the school board last week, promising to end months of chaos in the San Francisco Unified School District that led to the resignation of her predecessor, Matt Wayne, and an indefinite pause on the district’s school closure plans. The supervisors, who have become increasingly involved with the district’s functions this fall, requested the hearing to learn how staff could still be affected by the closures.

Cassondra Curiel, president of United Educators San Francisco, said educators were left out of the loop on the closure plan, and called on Su to include them in future discussions about possible consolidations — and significant budget cuts expected in December.

“We need our families to know this information from the source,” Curiel said at the hearing. “We’re often the first point of contact around any information, and when we did not have it [about school closures], we couldn’t answer for what was going to happen.”

Since taking the helm, Su has said that her first priority will be closing a $113 million deficit by the end of the year to avoid a state takeover.

Curiel said that the shelved closure plan revealed that the district is likely planning to do that partially through staffing cuts.

“There is no indication from us that the plan to make deep cuts is paused,” Curiel said. “We know that the district’s plans for making cuts to balance its budget have been in the works for months, and we finally got a glimpse into that when they published their [school closure] proposal. And while the proposal wasn’t determined or voted on, how else are they going to make those cuts?”

State-appointed fiscal advisors from the California Department of Education have had veto power over the district’s budget decisions since May after SFUSD’s interim budget received a negative certification in March.

Meredith Dodson, the president of the San Francisco Parent Coalition, said in September that the state has already indicated that there aren’t any “easy cuts left” for the district to make and that any money-saving efforts they carry out will have a considerable impact on schools.

The district’s fiscal stabilization plan, which was released under Wayne’s leadership in June, projected cuts of more than 600 full-time equivalent teacher and staff positions in the next two school years.

Before the school closures were called off, Wayne had been saying in meetings with affected campus communities that the budget cuts the district planned to make would leave the school sites under-resourced if they were not reduced.

Multiple schools might have to share a librarian, or a counselor might have to service multiple campuses and not be onsite every day of the week. It’s unclear if all of the teachers at the school sites that could have merged were going to move with their students to the new school.

Curiel said that the district was vague when asked about how it planned to move entire school communities onto the site of another school and how many classrooms or classes per grade level the merged schools would have.

She said the proposal clarified that the district “was proposing to move schools not to set up an either-or situation. They were proposing to merge schools while in the context of further cuts.”

“We have done extensive research into how much resources [SFUSD] invests into positions that are far from schools, far from students,” Curiel said. “We would like to see the proof that they’ve made as much cuts as they can as far from students as they can without hindering the district’s ability to function.”

Board of Education Commissioner Alida Fisher apologized for the chaos of the past few months, saying that the district was focused on rebuilding community trust and addressing operational issues.

“The way that this process was rolled out without community engagement, without our labor partners…. I do feel the need to apologize for the harm that is done,” she said.

The teachers union has called for reductions to come from central office staff positions and expenses before educators. There are currently more than 50 vacant student-facing positions throughout the district, according to Curiel.

She hopes that the hearing on Tuesday helps to reveal a “cycle” of reacting instead of planning on the part of the district and to get answers to some of the questions about the resource alignment initiative that she said the district has not been clear about.

At the end of last year, the district “said they were going to make cuts to our workforce, and then they found they needed them, and so they brought them back,” Curiel said. “This cycle of wishy-washy-ness provides an environment that is difficult for people to want to remain in…. That’s all, to us, pointing back to a lack of planning and a cycle of reactive behaviors that serve only to harm itself and harm our students.”