SF Schools Brace for Hundreds of Layoffs, Including Teachers and Counselors

Updated 12:30 p.m. Thursday

San Francisco’s school board on Tuesday night approved a plan to send layoff notices to hundreds of educators and other employees amid a major budget shortfall, raising concerns from school workers and families about diminishing student services.

The final number of layoffs at the end of the year will almost certainly be lower, the district said, but its workforce is still going to shrink. Tuesday’s unanimous vote allows the San Francisco Unified School District to issue preliminary notices to 559 employees, but it hopes to find not-yet-guaranteed restricted funding to rescind notices for some of the 280 included support staff. Classroom educators are also included, with 115 credentialed teaching positions that won’t be budgeted for next year.

The layoffs are the board’s first major budget decision of the year as SFUSD rushes to patch a $113 million deficit and regain local control over its spending. Without major changes, the district has reported, it could run out of cash by the middle of next year.

“The district has experienced a significant decline in overall enrollment consistent with statewide trends, and yet we’ve kept staffing levels largely the same,” said Board President Phil Kim. “It simply is not sustainable.”

While it’s unclear whether the cuts will come mostly from pink slips, voluntary departures or SFUSD’s early retirement buyout plan — which Superintendent Maria Su confirmed Tuesday received more than the minimum 314 applications to go forward — there will be fewer staff positions in the district next year.

This could force schools to have more combined-grade classes or fewer full-time support staff, such as English language arts specialists and social workers.

Art teacher Laura Simon said Visitacion Valley Middle School is at risk of losing a full-time counselor and nurse.

“My school nurse helped me get vaccinated so that I could come to school, she helped my family find a clinic so that we could go see a doctor — so many of our newcomer students wrote that same thing,” Simon said during the board meeting, reading notes from students. “‘The nurse is always there for me; she talked to me about substance abuse and my feelings; she makes my school feel safe.’”

Tara Ramos, who has been the librarian at Sanchez Middle School for a decade, said the most notable effect on students would be a lack of enrichment opportunities. Librarian roles, which weren’t included in the preliminary layoff notices approved Tuesday, could be redistributed based on the district’s new staffing model.

“My only role would probably end up being to just release teachers,” Ramos told KQED. Four days a week, she hosts a whole grade level in the library for almost two hours while their teachers have a planning meeting. But she said this isn’t the part of her job that inspires her — or the students.

“I wouldn’t be able to do any book clubs, I wouldn’t be able to do any special projects. I’ll have no opportunities for collaboration with teachers, to make connections between what I’m doing in library class and what the kids are doing in classrooms,” she continued. “It’s just going to be very basic, and it kind of feels like I’m more of like a substitute than a librarian.”

In the school budgets sent to schools last week, Sanchez is budgeted to have a librarian three days a week, according to Ramos. If she takes that role, she would work at another school the other two days.

Under that schedule, Ramos said she probably wouldn’t work with the second and third-grade classes like she has this year — taking them on curriculum-relevant field trips like Mondays to the African American Art and Culture Complex in the Fillmore during second grade’s history of San Francisco unit.

She also wouldn’t host book clubs, which have helped coax some of her more hesitant readers into becoming bookworms but require individualized attention as she gets to know what excites students about reading.

Assistant principals, who focus on issues like chronic absenteeism and managing individualized education programs for students with disabilities, are also not included in the district’s preliminary staffing model. Earlier this month, the school board approved 149 administrator layoffs — all positions considered supplemental by the state and that SFUSD can’t afford to pay for with general funds under its bare-bones staffing plan, according to Su.

That fund — which comes from local property taxes and the state — would guarantee the staffing of classroom teachers, a principal, a clerk and janitorial staff at each school site, which are the requirements for “keeping the lights on.”

Other roles would be filled only if the district can find restricted money to allocate to them. Ramos’ position will likely be covered by the Public Education Enrichment Fund, which comes from the city and a portion of which must be used for sports, libraries, arts and music.

Parents, teachers and board members have repeatedly implored district staff to cut contracts and positions in the central office first so that SFUSD doesn’t have to issue and later rescind as many layoff notices — which hurts morale and is likely to lead educators to look for jobs elsewhere.

Receiving a pink slip — and not knowing whether it will be rescinded — “often causes a lot of anxiety and, of course, a real reaction of folks to seek employment elsewhere,” said teachers union president Cassondra Curiel before the vote. “For these layoffs to be coming in at almost 400 when we know that annually in a regular school year, 400 of our educators churn out of education in San Francisco Unified … we really find this to be an unnecessarily high number.”

Su said her team would turn to reductions in the central office next but had to look at teacher staffing first because the state requires districts to send out preliminary notices for those positions by March 15.

The total number of educators that will be cut — and how many will be through layoffs — won’t be clear until May, when Gov. Gavin Newsom releases his state budget revision and the district has a better understanding of its attrition and retirement rates. A final vote on layoff notices has to happen before May 15.

“We need to see the central office reductions. We need to see the contract reductions,” board member Matt Alexander told Su and the budget team, adding that he felt uncomfortable supporting the layoffs while these cuts remained up in the air. “If we get to May 15, I’m not going to vote for this same number of layoffs unless the data shows that that’s what needs to happen — but there needs to be a lot more evidence.”

Feb. 27: This story was updated to clarify that school librarian cuts were not included in the layoff notices approved Tuesday night. Instead, campuses could have reduced and redistributed librarian roles under the district’s overall staffing model for next year.