The vacant former home of Borderlands Books is getting a new tenant: L’Academy, one in a chain of language-immersion preschools offering Mandarin and Spanish programs, is opening its doors at the end of the year at 866 Valencia St., next to Mission Playground.
But don’t expect an abundance of strollers to descend on Valencia just yet: Enrollment at early childhood education schools has plummeted since the pandemic. L’Academy’s Geary Street location is currently at 25 percent enrollment, and its Hayes Valley location is at 70 percent.
“It’s been the worst three years in the early childhood industry,” said Helena Geng, a co-founder of the chain of early childhood programs.
L’Academy opened its first location, in Hayes Valley, on Feb. 26, 2020, just 19 days before the city’s shelter-in-place order. The Mission location will be the 14th for L’Academy, with four schools in the city, and others across the Bay Area, Sacramento, and North Carolina.
Before the pandemic, Geng said early childcare programs often had one- or two-year waiting lists. Now, L’Academy may struggle to fill the 40 to 48 spots opening up on Valencia Street.
Despite this decreased demand, tuition at L’Academy remains high. At its other San Francisco locations, infant care costs more than $3,000 per month. Preschool tuition is about $2,700 a month. The San Francisco Children’s Council estimates that 75 percent of child care centers cost below $2,459 for children under the age of two, and $1,880 for children between two and five.
Four or five spots at the Mission location will be discounted, or will accept Children’s Council vouchers — a number dependent on overall enrollment.
“If we’re doing well financially, we can offer more,” Geng explained.
The Geary location has also struggled with high teacher and director turnover. L’Academy has been growing its workforce by hiring teachers who aren’t proficient enough in English to obtain early childhood care units through community college, paying for prospective teachers to become accredited online in Spanish or Mandarin instead.
“The main thing we need is teachers that are loving, and teachers that are patient,” Geng said. “Whether they speak English or not is not the most important thing for us.”
The lead teachers do speak English, however, she added.
Despite the generally dismal outlook for the early childhood industry, Zhen Zhen Li, Geng’s co-founder, said that they chose the Mission for the newest location after receiving phone calls from parents asking for a location in the neighborhood.
“Parents would call us saying, ‘There are a lot of young families, why don’t you have one over here?’” Li said. L’Academy had been looking for a place in the Mission for about a year, and chose the Valencia Street location because of the park next door.
When asked about the decision to open this new location despite enrollment challenges, Geng said, “we’re strong believers that San Francisco will eventually recover. And the Mission is one of the most vital neighborhoods, not just because of its cool restaurants, but because lots of people live here.”
Cities are dying, and this is a small part of why. Retail ecosystems need – surprise – retail. A retail district draws shoppers, who go one place, then another. This is what zoning has required, traditionally – retail in retail areas.
The move over the past decade or so has been replacing retail with offices, medical services, and things like this preschool. This just further kills local retail. That spot is not drawing shoppers, It is, presumably, completely closed on weekends, drawing no one.
Yes, Amazon is the main killer of brick-and-mortar retail, but the fact that we don’t enforce retail zoning is a secondary cause. If landlords couldn’t replace retail with urgent care, offices, and preschools, prices might come down, and more adventurous local retail could flourish. As it is, there will be no retail left soon. Just one architect’s office after another (there are two of those on the corner of Valencia and 20th, in retail spaces).
What a welcome addition to our neighborhood! Since borderlands left the vacant storefront has become a graffiti war-zone and toilet. Hope their remodel goes smoothly.