Nearly a hundred parents, teachers and students crowded into the San Francisco school district’s headquarters Tuesday night, alarmed that planned staffing cuts to K-8 schools across the city could signal an end to the school model.
“There’s more and more cuts each year,” said Maia Piccagli, a parent at San Francisco Community School, a K-8 in the Excelsior, and president of the school’s parent group. The school has some 280 students served by 30 to 40 staff, according to Piccagli, who’s worried that proposed cuts of its only middle-school physical education teacher and a security guard this year might portend future closures.
“The district is talking about consolidating schools in the next couple of years. We feel like what they’re doing this year is cutting the K-8 budgets so much that we won’t be able to function well,” she said. “Next year, they’ll say, ‘You’re not functioning well,’ and then they’ll cut you or close you.”
It’s unclear if these fears are founded in fact. While Buena Vista Horace Man K-8 Community School will lose seven teachers, most of the proposed cuts in the district’s K-8 schools would affect one or two staff members. The proposed cuts at Buena Vista Horce Mann are high, and parents fear that the language-immersion program will be gutted.
Speakers lambasted the school district’s plan to cut positions at several schools across the district, including K-8s. It is unclear how many positions would be lost at each of the district’s eight K-8 schools, but they ranged from one to seven.
Compared to previous school years, the district is giving schools “less money and less control over who to hire” in the 2024-25 school year, said Nick Chandler, a social worker at Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School in the Mission. That is going to be especially dire for the K-8 school model, which mainly serves students new to the United States, English learners and unhoused families, Chandler and others said.
Nearly 50 percent of San Francisco’s public school students are economically disadvantaged and 25 percent are English language learners, according to the San Francisco Unified School District.
Earlier this month, parents and staff members at K-8 schools across the city were told their campuses would have less control over their budgets, meaning some schools would lose positions.
If the schools choose to submit to the new arrangement from the district, they will have to “start over and design a whole new school with a whole new budget in two months, which is not doable,” said Chandler. He and others are asking the school district to maintain their funding for at least another year, giving them more time to adjust.
The school district did not directly respond to the speakers’ concerns. Superintendent Matt Wayne said he appreciated hearing comments “so we can make sure that we’re following up and addressing them.”
School budgets are due on March 22. Last Monday, more than a hundred parents, students and teachers gathered at a school district advisory meeting to voice their concerns about the planned cuts. On Tuesday, many of the same parents and teachers presented their demands in front of the entire school board, though the issue was not on the meeting’s agenda.
They took over the meeting room with signs that read “Hands off K-8s!” and “Chop from the top.” The crowd was so large that the school district had to improvise a new overflow area for those who could not fit inside the meeting hall.
Parents and teachers who spoke at the meeting said the district had not sought advice from K-8 school communities before laying out the proposed staffing cuts, seemingly violating a school district guideline on “meaningful consultation with parents/guardians, students and staff.”
The uncertainty that the K-8 community feels, said Chandler, “is dangerous for families that need it, that depend on it.”
SoMa’s Bessie Carmichael School PreK-8 Filipino Education Center would lose one of its two social workers, which many parents and teachers said would be inadequate to serve its two campuses. The school has a large number of students experiencing homelessness, food insecurity and other trauma, who benefit from the social worker positions.
“Students from PreK-8 experience a myriad of mental health concerns, such as depression and suicidal ideation,” said Kate Calimquim, one of Bessie Carmichael’s two social workers, adding that the school has “a long wait list of students waiting for mental health services.” Data from the 2021-2022 school year showed some 5 percent of the school district’s 50,566 students at the time were homeless.
“We worked hard in order to become a PreK-8 school; please do not set us up to fail,” said Teresa Dulalas, a former parent at Bessie Carmichael.
The Buena Vista community also handed the school board commissioners a stack of handwritten letters of support from the students. In the coming year, the school would increase class sizes from 22 to 33 for grades four through eight.
“Dear Board of Education, I don’t want classes to increase size,” said Carla, a 5th grader. “I don’t think there are any pros, only cons.”
SFUSD had no problems shoveling more and more money into that criminal enterprise of a payroll company, EmpowerSF, somehow paying EmpowerSF for EmpowerSF’s own mistakes. Where ever that pile of money was, go back to it and fund schools instead. And if you want to make cuts, get rid of the disrict’s legal team. How did they let the district paying for EmpowerSF’s mistakes get by them?
Parents always think the budget is unlimited. It isn’t. We have fewer students, so we get less federal money, so we have to get rid of something from the budget. It’s simple.
Actually, I would love to see California fund school differently, catching up to the rest of the country. We fund based on average daily attendance (ADA), where as in almost every other state, they fund based on enrollment.
We have been funding by ADA for over 100 years. Time to change, right? Most states do not have these fluctuating problems of lay offs and hiring sprees. I have been around the district as a student, teacher, and parent for 30 years. The ebb and flow is quick and poorly managed.
https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/student-count-options-school-funding
We need to focus on the top, which is way over bloated. Not sure if you realize, but we have so many very well paid employees downtown, “specialists” of some sort or another, that are completely useless in schools or in the classroom. Not to mention the complete waste of time and resources on things like Empower.
I think the biggest problem we have, honestly, is when people who know little to nothing about SFUSD, who have no direct experience with it at all, are given the power to elect board members and make choices based on a complete lack of information and the belief in a robust system of mythology about our public schools.
True, but it isn’t going to be from schools with more privileged clientele… I don’t see Clarendon or Rooftop getting hosed anytime soon.
I am a parent, and I do not like budget for my kids’ education, paid with taxes to be redirected to useless homeless junkies, druggies, and mentally ill people. Don’t get me wrong, I am good with poor families with children.
The SFUSD budget and the City’s budget are totally separate and separately controlled. Whatever you think of services for adult homelessness, addiction and mental illness, that money isn’t coming from SFUSD’s budget.
With enrollment declining from lmost 60000 to less than 50000 in past years, it only makes sense that fewer schools can be supported. That is reality. And some of the positions that are targeted for elimination are not teaching jobs.
I work in the district as a paraprofessional and I have a daughter in 11th grade in the district. The problem is they pay staff ridiculous amount of no money so they’re losing staff which means they’re losing enrollments. People are going into private school because San Francisco parents have a lot of money. It’s a trickling down effect. At the end of the day I feel like it’s not going to be any type of public school education if it keeps going this way
I have been a parent, ever since, 1983. As a single parent is very hard to find, the support, amongs us, Latin, people always, is benn , the number one, to have your children, put in Especiall clas. Why? Because, they always underestimate. The knowledge upon are children. Is been classified. Please fight for are children education. Ok. Now, myself, fighting Cancer. But, I fight back on my days. Indeed. Thank you.