Superintendent Dr. Vincent Matthews. Board of Education President Gabriela Lopez. Board of Education member Mark Sanchez.
SFUSD Superintendent Vincent Matthews, right, on March 12, 2020, announcing a 'three-week closure' of San Francisco public schools. At his right are then-Board of Education President Mark Sanchez, and then-Vice President Gabriella López,

At 9:05 a.m. on Monday, April 5, San Francisco’s beleaguered public school parents received an email from Dr. Vincent Matthews. 

The district superintendent’s note did not begin “Some personal news … ” as so many communiques do these days. But some personal news did follow: While Matthews had, in March, abruptly announced his retirement and escape by golden parachute from the distressed craft that is the San Francisco Unified School District, he was now hopping back into the district’s cockpit. 

“Given current events — including the large and complex task of returning some students to in-person learning starting April 12, and all of our students by fall 2021 — the Board [of Education] has asked me to delay my retirement for a year,” Matthews wrote. “I strive to maintain the humility and wisdom to change direction with new information and have agreed to remain with SFUSD for another year, until June 30, 2022.”

And there was much rejoicing. 

For, among district employees who think Matthews is a great leader and those who dislike him viscerally — and those in between — there is agreement here: Nobody wants an overwhelmed Board of Education in the midst of suing itself to add a national search for a new superintendent to its overflowing to-do list. Reopening schools and, basically, just keeping the lights on is burdensome enough.

Not only would searching for Matthews’ successor suck up crucial time and bandwidth, it’s also difficult to predict success in this endeavor. If the recent pool for MTA director was shallow because of Mayor London Breed’s brusque treatment of erstwhile Muni boss Ed Reiskin, Board of Education members’ treatment of Matthews makes a child’s experiment of that. So it’s hard to conceive of just who would be raring to come and work for this school board at this point in time. 

In a year, with schools open and the city and school district out of crisis mode, things may be different. And the board intuited this, which was one of the reasons it reached out to Matthews. 

So the superintendent ended up doing the Board of Education that had driven him to the brink of early retirement a favor. The board, so much maligned for its inactivity, was active here. This was a much-needed win: Albeit, in reality, more not-a-loss.

And maybe Matthews can come out a winner, too. 

The superintendent did not return our messages as of press time, but multiple sources have confirmed that he did not merely return out of altruism or because he was asked. That’s not to say that Matthews doesn’t care about children and want the best for the district. But he had conditions. 

Just what those specific conditions were is not presently a public matter, but school board president Gabriela López confirmed on the record what multiple sources confirmed on background: Contractual language has not yet been finalized. 

Yes: “contractual language.” 

Bryant Elementary School playground.

If Matthews’ contract is being altered — and the Board of Education is set to vote on it — this is not insignificant. 

Could it be a material ask? López and others assured us it is not: Demanding money would seem to be out-of-character for Matthews. And it would be a bad look for an administrator already earning north of $300,000 yearly — and especially after board member Alison Collins sued the district and five of her colleagues, at this of all times, for $87 million. 

Rather, we’re told, the change in the contract is regarding “the school board and district staying focused on re-opening” and “Dr. Matthews having both the space and the ability to work collaboratively with this board” — and “the board continuing to adhere to its own rules and procedures.” 

López said that “my understanding is, with [Matthews’] asks, it really is, ‘let’s make sure our only work and focus is to fully return to schools.’” She anticipated voting on the new contractual language “in a couple of weeks.” 

These seem like intuitive things for Matthews to insist upon — and for everyone to want. And, while the school board has been a fractious place, López said it would be no problem for all members to keep focused here. 

And that would be for the best. For all parties. Because with contractual language comes contractual obligations.

Flynn Elementary School. Photo by Lola M. Chavez.

So, Matthews stayed. And there was much rejoicing.  

But a tempered rejoicing; even district employees who felt Matthews is the best superintendent they’ve worked under were more grateful for the stability of his ongoing presence than for any particular leadership quality he brings. And the rejoicing was brief, because there’s so much to do.

In-person school commences today, and teachers have been vaccinated — but 584 staff members are “requesting an accommodation.” Of those, 290 “meet the criteria for approval.”

Several school principals confirmed that, yes, some of the students heading into school in the coming days and weeks will be taught by a teacher-of-record on a screen and watched over in-person by a substitute.

“Yes, that is definitely happening at some schools,” said one principal. “Even worse than that, there will be classrooms where the teacher of record isn’t doing anything at all. It’ll just be kids taught by substitutes — or, at this point, we’re so short on subs, there won’t be a sub. I’m not sure how that will be handled.” 

Indeed, the Board of Education documents laying out the high number of school district staffers requesting to not work in-person and the shortage of substitutes is followed up by a slide reading, “Become an SFUSD substitute!” 

Well, that’s uplifting. But also a bit ominous. 

“If you know it’s an information overload, you really shouldn’t be doing this to principals right now, because we are holding this shit show together.” 

In happier times, you’d disperse kids into other classrooms when there were no subs to be had. But that’s tricky when there’s a hard cap on how many students can be in a classroom (Principals also note that they’ve been told there will be no in-person graduation ceremonies — “I’m sure parents will be super upset,” one principal says).

The first wave of children hit classrooms in a matter of hours, including at a handful of Mission schools, and there remain many hatches to be battened down. Principals told me they are still grappling with the choreography of pandemic lunch periods, when, they say, meals will be delivered in eight-minute intervals during late morning and early afternoon. 

Principals are poring through lengthy guidebooks — which differ from last week’s lengthy guidebooks — about the protocol regarding the close contacts of a close contact (“I had to call three different supervisors, and every one of them gave me different information.”). They are, in short, dealing with a morass of information; principals observed that we’ve had a long time to plan for this, but these plans are coming together rather quickly. 

“I’ve sat in meetings where they start out by saying this is an information overload. And you sit there and you realize, shit, this is an information overload,” says one veteran principal. “If you know it’s an information overload, you really shouldn’t be doing this to principals right now, because we are holding this shit show together.” 

And, on top of all this, principals were taken aback by four hours of dialogues being held this week regarding Collins’ racially divisive tweets. Matthews is ostensibly so committed to re-opening that he’s moved to have this enshrined in a contract — but he and his deputy, Enikia Ford-Morthel, were the facilitators of these two panel sessions. 

Administrators I spoke with — of all races — felt that, regardless of the necessity of frank dialogues and hard discussions, holding them 72 hours before students return and while school nurses are frantically phoning principals to figure out how health screenings are supposed to work is not the right time. 

And yet, none of the school principals I spoke with was pessimistic. Just nervous. 

“We are optimistic people. That’s why we do this work,” said one. “We see the bright sight of everything.” 

Let’s hope, in the coming weeks and months, they don’t have to look too hard. 

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Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.

“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.

He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.

The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.

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9 Comments

  1. Vincent Matthews is 100% responsible for our kids not being in school. As much as we don’t like the people on the BOE or the UESF president, it wasn’t their job to get schools open. It was the superintendent’s job and now he is capitalizing on his own failures to turn SFUSD into his own fiefdom where he makes ridiculous money for the rest of his life and doesn’t answer to anyone.This is a very dangerous precedence he is setting.

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  2. LA USD is opening their entire system during the month of April, including middle and high school on April 26. SF won’t even have elementary schools entirely open by that time.

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  3. No in person graduation for middle and high schoolers yet again? I hope that is not the case, but if so, what about using the district owned radio station (KALW) as a viable alternative?

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  4. Why the focus on “a national search” for a new Superintendent? What a waste of money and resources. Pure egotism on the side of the District (and constituents). There are plenty of folks locally who are capable, if none of them want the job then that should be the big canary in the coal mine. Besides, the Superintendents of recent pass don’t really sell the benefits of the time and costs of the ‘National Search”.

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    1. “I strive to maintain the humility and wisdom to change direction with new information”

      I would love to see that comment or attitude from the SFUSD board

      ‘the change in the contract is regarding …“the board continuing to adhere to its own rules and procedures.” ‘

      The old “I’ll work for you if you follow the rules” stipulation!

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  5. Thank you for detailing the unprecedented logistics that site leaders and staff are facing to reopen. So happy kids are headed back! Wish it was all of k-12.

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    1. Site leaders all over the world have opened up successfully for months and in some places more than a year. I’m not going to congratulate SFUSD site “leaders” for simply opening up schools. Especially since most haven’t even opened. SFUSD leadership made our city into an international joke and nobody should be boohooing for anyone in SFUSD besides the kids who were robbed of an education. SFUSD Superintendent Vincent Matthews should be charged with dereliction of duty.

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  6. SFUSD was asking parent volunteers to count windows last week, so I’m glad they’re really on top of this reopening thing.

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    1. As much as I don’t like most of the people on the BOE , we do need to remember that there were operational people such as Facilities Manager Dawn Kamalanathan and HR COVID Manager Daniel Menezes who didn’t do their jobs during this whole clustermuck. The board should have been holding the operational people accountable, but just cause we have an insane board doesn’t excuse the operational people from doing their job. The superintendent has gone from district to district avoiding responsibility for the messes he makes and he’s doing it here too.

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