At the beginning of “Fiddler on the Roof,” when Tevye is introducing the audience to the denizens of Anatevka, a student asks the rabbi if there’s a proper blessing for the czar.
“A blessing for the czar?” asks the bemused rabbi. “May God bless and keep the czar … far away from us!”
It’s a throwaway line. On the other hand, it’s the one I think about the most. Every morning at drop-off, when I watch all the kids run through the gate of their public school, it hits me:
May God bless and keep the San Francisco Unified School District central office … far away from us!
Well, Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht: Man Plans and God Laughs. Like every SFUSD parent, I was recently asked to fill out a survey on the pending closures/mergers of schools. This is not far away from us: On the draft agenda for the July 16 Board of Education meeting, one could find a proposed $1.75 million contract for the massive infrastructure consulting firm AECOM to handle “Resource Alignment logistics management.”
Well, that’s some amazing language there. “Resource alignment logistics” means what you think it means: The district is proposing to bring in an infrastructure specialist to oversee closures and consolidations. It’s all a bit on the nose, isn’t it? The financially strapped school district, which has been instructed, in no uncertain terms, to stop throwing money at high-priced contractors, was proposing that it bring in a high-priced contractor to oversee the liquidation and consolidation of its own assets.
Nobody is laughing now.
This item was summarily yanked off the July 16 agenda. But it, or some version of it, will be back. School closures and mergers are coming whether you like it or not, to borrow a phrase from Gov. Gavin Newsom. These are not good times for the district: It’s hemorrhaging students, it must now amend for years of spending beyond its means, and further fiscal missteps could trigger a state takeover. No one should want this: The state will make cuts with the brutality of a Civil War battlefield medic.
Staving off a state takeover is paramount. It’s not everything, it’s the only thing. There is no other hand.
The district is in a difficult place, and that calls for difficult measures. Everyone gets that. But parents, and everyone else, might be surprised to learn that the district does not expect to save much money via school closures. And, while the district has pressing and immediate financial concerns, and is budgeting accordingly, school closures won’t save money in the short-term.
As that $1.75 million proposed contract indicates, it may cost money in the short-term.
With the possible exception of the military and law enforcement, nobody indulges in the use of acronyms like a public school district. So let’s talk about the DAC meeting regarding RAI.
Or the District Advisory Council discussing the Resource Alignment Initiative — you know, closures and mergers.
During the May 6 meeting of this body, the district’s enrollment director purportedly said that school closures “would not save a lot of money, but are about making the most of the district’s resources.” When asked, minutes later, what the specific cost savings of closing schools would be for the district, the purported answer was “not much.”
We have to use the “purported” here because, while this meeting was recorded, the first 30 to 45 minutes were, inexplicably, not included on that recording. But we have spoken to half a dozen attendees or participants at the meeting who attest that this, indeed, happened.
The San Francisco Unified School District isn’t shouting from the rooftops that school closures won’t save much money, and won’t save money quickly. But, when asked, it admits — eventually — that this is the case.
“The primary goal of closing, merging or co-locating schools is to use the district’s limited resources to create strong and supportive learning environments for every student and educator,” writes a district spokesperson. “The Resource Alignment Initiative allows us to organize our investments better. It’s about making structural changes to the system that allow us to use our resources more wisely so that we alleviate this strain across the system.”
Fine, but my direct questions were “How much money does the district anticipate it will save via school closures/mergers/resource alignment? Will the district save money?”
So I asked the district if it’d be accurate to say the following:
The monetary savings are not projected to be significant, especially in the short-term, and this is not the driving motivation for this move;
There is presently no estimate or goal of how much monetary savings will be derived from closures/mergers/consolidation.
I was told that, yes, these are both accurate.
You’re not going to believe this, but the district is saying that the primary goal of the Resource Alignment Initiative is resource alignment.
This argument is not without merit. The district has lost thousands of students, and many of its schools are underenrolled. At the same time, around a sixth of the school’s classrooms at the beginning of the recently concluded academic year were staffed by substitute teachers or teachers yanked out of special assignment.
The district, in short, doesn’t have enough butter for its bread. The posited solution is to have less bread. Like the SFUSD representative said on May 6, this is about making the most of the district’s resources.
The case the district is making is that these consolidations will actually be more equitable and more economic. The real budget killer for SFUSD is under-enrolled classrooms, which require just as many teachers (or substitute teachers) as fully enrolled classrooms. Also, the state of California has stressed a need to consolidate, and if the district doesn’t do it the state will break out the bone saw and start doing amputations. So there’s that.
These are not terrible arguments, but public school families, who suffered through remote learning and are now faced with the grim prospect of having their children’s school experience further traumatized by a closure, can only take so much. For parents confronted with the district’s cloying and esoteric survey about “resource alignment,” it’s jarring to learn that this sacrifice that they are being asked to potentially make for the greater good isn’t a cost-saving move necessitated by the district’s dire finances.
Frankly, it feels like a bait-and-switch.
The surveys, maddeningly, asked parents to imagine that they had 12 coins, and could divide them into buckets marked “equity,” “access” and “excellence.”
God help me, I was reminded of a story my mother used to tell about her student-instructor days at Pershing Junior High in Brooklyn when a teacher began a lesson by saying “Suppose we go to a Persian bazaar to buy a chicken … ”
An oversized student in the back row stood up, slowly ambled to the front of the room and said, in a calm voice, “I ain’t going to no motherfucking bazaar and I ain’t buying no motherfucking chicken.”
You know what? Me, neither. It is maddeningly unclear how this coins-in-buckets crap will be translated into what schools to spare or cut, and why are we pitting excellence, access and equity against each other? In any event, most every parent was left to ponder how to navigate this nonsensical format to impart the simple message of don’t close my kids’ school.
So, the district’s arguments about cutting and merging schools are not baseless. But parents are in no mood to hear them, especially after this muddled messaging. Hastily undertaking this critical process via a method that comes off as both inane and opaque — and doing it during the depths of the summer — comes off as insulting. And, sadly, there are more problems here.
The district is working on a long overdue zone-based enrollment plan to replace the excruciating school roulette system that has plagued the existence of public-school families for all too long. That’s for the best: But does it make sense to make decisions on what schools to cut before the enactment of a system that might totally shake up which schools children are assigned to?
No, it does not. But it does add stress and misery to the lives of public-school families. This may, indeed, be a sacrifice some children and families make to greater serve the needs of the district writ large. But, rest assured, the pushback will be intense. And, following that intense pushback, no one is mandated to take one for the team: As ever, families with options will take them, and families with money will spend it. If conditions worsen, parents with the ability to pull their children from public school will do so, further shrinking the district’s dwindling enrollment, reducing payments from the state and leaving the burden, once more, on the least advantaged families and children.
Well, that’s hardly equitable. And, in San Francisco, the demographics work out how you’d think they’d work out: About 38 percent of city residents are white, but only 13.7 percent of public school children are.
It’s always better to have options. It’s always better to have money. And if you can’t keep the czar far away from from us, you’d better keep us far away from the czar.
This will be difficult. Each school evolves its own unique culture, and people get attached to their site’s traditions, community and norms. Parents, teachers, administrators, and especially young children will be devastated to find themselves displaced.
But don’t sleep on this part: “Around a sixth of the school’s classrooms at the beginning of the recently concluded academic year were staffed by substitute teachers or teachers yanked out of special assignment.” As an educator, I can assure you that the understaffing issue has been a nightmare. Students deserve credentialed teachers in every classroom, not longterm substitutes. There’s an administrator shortage, too: Several schools seem to have been stuck without permanently assigned principals for multiple months.
I agree that “resource alignment” is a weasel term, and I’m tired of such phrases. Just tell it like it is, people: I don’t want to hear about “stakeholders” or “pivoting.” But I’ll be relieved if we emerge from this crisis with fully staffed schools. The recent pay raise should help a little, but SFUSD is still having hiring problems.
Even SFUSD admits that a big driver of its hiring problems is that it can’t guarantee onboarding to occur before candidates have other offers – and that when it does onboard staff, they can’t be certain they’ll be paid. Matt Wayne had the opportunity to drop EmpowerSF in 2021 and chose to light $40 million on fire before admitting it can’t be saved. I think that gives us a sense of how trustworthy he is on fiscal issues and staffing. Why trust him on closures given this background?
SFUSD is still having hiring problems.
My older child went the entire year without a teacher for American Literature. The principal had identified two potential hires and they both went after other jobs because 555 wouldn’t onboard. When I confronted Matt Wayne and Marin Trujillo at one of the BOE community meetings, I was given a gamut of lies, from ridiculous excuses such as “finger printing takes anywhere from 3 to 90 days” to “we needed to start this process last April” Incredible. My younger child had an educator hired for their Language Arts class, but waited through October to be onboarded for NO apparent reason. The educator came to back to school night and said as much. Matt Wayne lies. We are looking right now at corruption as bad as it was under Rojas. Many good people have fled from 555 this past spring. Where are the whistleblowers!? Please come forward!
“The state will make cuts with the brutality of a Civil War battlefield medic. ”
From this article, that seems like it would be a good thing, no? SFUSD has to get its financial ducks in a row, yet it simply refuses to do so, wasting money and failing to consolidate and properly staff the classrooms. The state can cut the very ample administrative fat, like the ridiculous consultant contract, and focus on the classrooms. There’s going to be some disruption regardless, and if SFUSD has no rational plan, then having someone else manage the process seems like a net positive.
FWIW, “the state will make cuts” is already happening—we were informed last week that my son’s school will go without an assistant principal next year because the current one left and the state’s budget control folks deemed a new one non-essential.
On the one hand, this seems like an utterly ridiculous way to run a school system, but of course the current system (spend yourself into a massive hole) isn’t great either…
I think if we look at any of the state takeovers over which FCMAT has presided we have reason to doubt that they will do any of these things. One of our state advisors spent two years insisting that the district office did not have too many top administrators (despite being larger than it ever has been in spite of lower enrollment) – only to be silent when the technical audit found that the Superintendent’s enormous cabinet is an impediment to good functioning. FCMAT non-technical advisors tend to have a set playbook that does not leave districts better than it found them.
We have fewer students. So we need fewer schools.
SF Standard had a ridiculous headline that perfectly showed how irrational parents are about this: “Parents terrified by school closures.”
It’s OK, parents. It’s safe to come out. We’re just closing some schools we don’t need. And we taxpayers are NOT sorry we’re not keeping your personal favorite school open for your convenience.
The SF Standard headline was truly ridiculous, but not for the reasons you imply. The Standard chose to sensationalize the (very real) emotional impact of the looming cuts while overlooking significant data that school closures will not save money, and will traumatize children. It is irresponsible to cast parents as hysterical and reactionary when the facts tell a different story. I’m thankful to Mission Local for this article and hope it sets the record straight.
We have fewer students. Yes Katherine. Matt Wayne’s cabinet is huge and overstaffed. Management meanwhile has driven some of the most talented educators out of SFUSD.
Why does Educational Placement Center overstaffed to the 25 people ? It’s literally unheard of that any district would have that many people working in placing students.
Seems like you might not know or understand much beyond believing the manufactured consent the district is pushing for Katherine.
Which schools, specifically, don’t we need? Please name the schools, as their irrational families are eager to know.
Did you catch the part of the article where the closures won’t actually save much money?
It’s polite to read the article before commenting. A bare minimum would be to read the entire headline.
Matt Wayne wrote this 👆👆
SFUSD alum here and still a volunteer for school activities. The article and commentary have covered the main issues so I will draw attention to a tiny item. I wonder if Mission Local would be interested in sharing how much SFUSD’s consultant has charged SFPUC so far for services related to the sewer expansion and who has been on that team.
Did you say SFPUC and sewers? Wasn’t Susan Leal SFPUC chief once you a time and didn’t she go onto work for AECOM?
Once on a transcontinental flight, Leal was seated in the same row as me back in steerage, the opposite window seat.
Where in this discussion is the actual record of spending for the SFUSD? We need to see where the money goes and then we might actually be able to have an informed opinion of what to do about a shortfall…I suspect (and would like the figures) that like my experience in the health department, way way too much money goes to mid level management and contracting out of essential services (like the payroll debacle)…I’m sure we can find millions to save and use for actual teachers and schools. How about a demand for transparency and see the actual financial statements.
Thank you for reporting on this. Well written. Watching it all unfold from the horrible payroll system (still malfunctioning btw) to the millions and millions literally thrown away by Matt Wayne on contracts with outside consultants, he’s been here the whole time to gut San Francisco’s public schools. While we are on the brink of a possible Trump takeover, please do not take lightly that crushing public education is a likewise agenda in Project 2025.
We’ve spent over 11 million dollars on closure consultants and we’re spending 100 million on a new school in a part of town children don’t live in. And this won’t save the district money?
555 Franklin is a clownshow. We need less central office staff, we need a DOJ investigation not a state takeover. Something isn’t adding up. The state auditor warned our board of ed and superintendent of the potential for jail time. We need to open the books in SFUSD, Matt Wayne is refusing to staff any positions that would financial oversight. The administration, as it exists today is operating like a criminal enterprise and the “stakeholders” deserve a real audit before we start closing schools and destroying community.
the state has passed bill after bill to increase san francisco’s population and is telling us to entitle 82K new homes, 46K of them affordable to working families. if we are to take this seriously then we will absolutely need these facilities. not today but maybe tomorrow.
instead what we have are a superintendent and board of education that are systematically unwinding and looting the district as they make it unpalatable for anyone without money. these people are all failures and are dragging the rest of the district down to their level.
The most optimistic number of new students the District is projecting from all those new homes is 5,000.
Yes, that’s right. The District expects no more than approximately one new student for every 17 new homes. That should not make anyone committed to equity particularly happy.
Most new housing units in San Francisco are studios and one bedrooms. Some buildings include two-bedroom units. Very few except for certain affordable family housing developments include three bedroom units. “Experts” tell us that this reflects changing demographics including age and relationship status. Small one to two person units are all we really need because so many current and projected residents in San Francisco are single, either young or elderly, and do not or will not have kids.
Except that that is not exactly true.
Many working-class immigrant and refugee families live in the city, and every year there are more new arrivals. And by families I mean one or two parents, two to five kids and possibly extended family members. While some of the older housing has multiple bedrooms (if not bathrooms), most of those larger units are unaffordable to the working class, and very little more recent construction was designed with these families in mind. So many of those families live in studio and one-bedroom apartments and ultimately as their kids get older some of them move out of San Francisco even if they continue to work in the city.
I believe SFUSD could expect substantially more than 5,000 new public school students to live in those 82,000 yet-to-be-built or even planned new housing units. Getting that many more students, however, would require a huge change in public policy, city planning and funding for affordable housing. That would require serious commitments from city, state, and federal governments.
An example of public policy changing demographics. The long history of redevelopment in San Francisco has had a hugely disproportionate affect on African-American communities: freeway construction in Hayes Valley (and years later its removal), the Western Addition A1 and A2 (slum clearance) projects, closing military bases and the deindustrialization of the workforce resulted in a drop from 13.4% (1970 census) to 5.1% (2020 census)
That on-going displacement has always been a matter of public policy, city planning and housing development. In other words, it was no accident. Likewise, SFUSD’s “optimistic” view that there might be one new student in the district for each 17 new housing units is also the result of deliberate inclusion and exclusion.
Nice call.
Next up in the news:
“Teachers complain of class overcrowding”.
Can we be more explicit in saying that “Superintendent” Matt Wayne (title in quotes because he was unqualified from the jump) has literally further destroyed SFUSD? As former central office staff, I was absolutely appalled at the salary of some of the most incompetent members of district leadership while some of the most intentional, passionate, QUALIFIED and genuine staff were forced to leave due to his decision to “restructure” staff for so-called budgetary reasons. The school closures do not have to happen UNLESS there is a plan in place to smoothly and respectfully transition students and support students, staff AND families to minimize disruption as much as possible. SFUSD is awful and the children suffer the most. Get Matt Wayne out of there and create a budget that supports the entire SFUSD community and not just fill the pockets of people doing a half-assed job.
SFUSD currently has a greater concentration of elementary schools in neighborhoods with relatively fewer kids and too few elementary schools close to where kids actually live.
According to US Census data maps there are approximately 6350 kids living in the Inner Richmond, Lone Mountain and Presidio Heights neighborhoods (Group One) and four SFUSD elementary schools (Peabody, McCoppin, Lilienthal, Sutro). By comparison, there are approximately 7300 kids living in the Tenderloin, South of Market, and Financial District/South Beach neighborhoods (Group Two) and two public elementary schools (Carmichael and Tenderloin Community School). Each of those collective areas is about the same size. The Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood is somewhat larger than the other two areas, but has approximately 9000 kids (Group Three) for its four schools.
Obviously, neighborhoods are relatively porous and I am sure some kids from the Inner Richmond are likely to go to a school in the Outer Richmond (for example Alamo or Argonne), just as some kids from the Tenderloin go to schools in Nob Hill, the Western Addition and Chinatown. And kids in Bayview Hunters Point probably go to schools in Portola, Potrero Hill, and Bernal Heights. And, of course, kids from those “nearby” areas are also likely to go to schools within Groups One, Two and Three.
In terms of the perpetually delayed enrollment changes for SFUSD elementary schools, there needs to be some pretty clear connection between the number of kids within a zone and the number of schools. In my three examples, it looks like group one needs to lose one or even two schools, while the other groups should gain one each. The District’s plan, however, is to create much larger zones than my examples. They anticipate that each zone will have ten to twelve schools.
The District is also looking at “Diversity Categories” and an “Equity Tiebreaker.” In other words, they say they are committed to creating enrollment zones that do a much better job at integration than the current system has done. In short, they are promising not to Gerrymander the zones and recreate segregation. They need to be held to that promise.
The District believes “Zones are a way to help strengthen connections between schools and families living nearby.” (You can find information about the changes to the assignment policy on the SFUSD website.) An undefined term here is “nearby.” I am not convinced there can be only 5 or 6 zones (based on the 72 elementary and K-8 schools in the District’s current “portfolio”) and have “families living nearby.”
Part of the initial reasoning behind the enrollment process recognized that “many students living in the same neighborhood are not going to school with each other, and not forming the social connections that bring communities together.” If there are only five or six zones, they will have to be roughly three miles square. That means “nearby” families at opposite corners of this hypothetical square could be living more than four miles away from each other. Four miles away is not nearby in a city that is only seven by seven miles – and certainly not in a city where virtually no elementary school kids have the freedom to go outside and visit friends on their own.
The District’s initiative in progress to realign its resources promises that schools will be closed, merged, and co-located. If the District still intends to pursue changes to the elementary school assignment process by creating zones with ten to twelve schools in them, those zones will have to get bigger resulting in an increased distance between “nearby” families. They could increase the number of zones with fewer schools in each to reduce that distance, but that would be likely to fail to achieve the plan’s promise of equity. I wonder how many “Group One” families will be pleased with the idea of losing a couple of neighborhood schools so that Groups Two and Three can gain one or two schools – or at least the funding for the number of students who live “nearby”? I cannot yet say much about the machinations of the consultants hired by the District, but I have absolutely no confidence that the current School Board will make the equitable decision to close, merge, and co-locate more schools on the west side of the city than in eastern neighborhoods – and to shift the funding accordingly.
School closures and mergers are incredibly upsetting and stressful (and I’m very worried about my kids’ school getting closed), but at the end of the day, a school system has to grow and shrink along with its population of students. It defies logic that closing schools won’t save *some* money. For example, each school closed represents one less principal to pay. Moreover, the argument that having fewer classrooms means more classrooms (ideally, all!) will have a qualified teacher on day 1 is incredibly compelling to me.
Mr. Eskenazi, I’d love to hear your solutions to the district’s budget woes. (And don’t just say the state needs to provide more revenue. Of course we’d all love that, but it isn’t going to happen quickly enough to save the district.) I’d take this snarky column a lot more seriously if it provided some solutions.
There’s robust evidence from school closures nationwide that savings are minimal. Even if SFUSD closes schools and jettisons principals (which won’t happen if they consolidate schools), those savings are small. Moreover, closing schools tends to lead to enrollment drops as some students do not enroll at other schools in the district. Since most of the money comes from average daily attendance, losing students causes less revenue.
This pattern of closure-caused enrollment loss is seen all over the place, notably in Chicago and Oakland. But it happened here, too – Commissioner Sanchez noted there’s some evidence that the 2007 closures caused some Black families to leave SF and SFUSD.
Again, the reason SFUSD is willing to state that closing schools isn’t going to save money is that it won’t – and it may cause more problems.
The mismanagement of Covid and single-minded dedication to keeping housing prices high both play a huge role in where we are at in this city. Please vote accordingly in November.
It would be nice if Matt Wayne didn’t talk exactly like a private equity ghoul at all times however. Would be great to see a change in leadership with a new school board.
In the days of my youth, the ethics of journalism required that articles like this be labeled “Editorial” (or “Op-Ed” in The NY Times) . Running this “concerned parent” fret-piece without such a label has lowered my opinion and trust of your site’s output.
I too have children in SFUSD. They are both in New Traditions on Hayes, near Stanyan. I believe this facility will be seriously considered for closure due to it’s aged building and grounds. The school is two blocks from our home. Moving our children to any other facility will make our lives more difficult.
SFUSD has supported our children through the whole Covid Public Crisis. Huge amounts of PUBLIC money were poured into their efforts, including free lunch for all students since the return to in-person schooling.
Personally, I am ready to support SFUSD in any attempts to reduce their current operating costs. If they don’t do it, outside forces will. People hate paying for government services. If SFUSD doesn’t reduce their costs, they will be targeted by “the people”.
And for your record, our nuclear family is 25% “White”, 25% “Asian”, and 50% “Mixed”.
We are a public school family because
1) I was raised to believe in the “melting pot” concept of public education.
2) And I never recieved my PIN code to withdraw money from that WhitePeople fund that so many people think Whites share.
Seth —
Thanks for the lecture on journalistic ethics. I don’t know how old you are, but you aren’t older than Mike Royko, and he, too, wrote a reported column. I didn’t invent the concept and the notion that readers are hypnotized rubes who can’t discern a reported column from straight news from an ad for tomato paste and will run out and agitate is silly. Readers get it and this is concern-trolling.
As my column made resplendently clear, the district’s budget problems are separate from the school closure issues. If you only read the headline you’d know that the cost savings will not be much and will not help in the short-term … which is when the district needs the money. The entire point of this article you’ve seen fit to comment on is that school closures are not pegged to save much money and won’t do it quickly.
I’m glad you’re ready to support the district in its attempts to cut costs. Because that’s gonna happen, to you and me both, whether you like it or not.
Best,
JE
New Traditions is one of the whitest schools in the district, sir. Your white person card is active and in use, don’t fret. Your kid will likely end up at SOTA, too. Dime a dozen story.
SFUSD hired a superintendent from Hayward immediately following the closure of five schools. They are now following his playbook. And all after three student focused school board members were recalled.
Dark times are ahead
Matt Wayne is doing exactly what Project 2025 (Heritage Foundation) has in mind for public education: kill them!
This is a national strategy for a powerful right-wing organization, so the question to Wayne is: why are you following their agenda if you’re not actually on their side?
At this point, I’m ready to ask anyone running for any office, “are you now or have you ever been a member of the San Francisco school board?” If the answer is yes, I’m voting for someone else.
“why are we pitting excellence, access and equity against each other?” Thank you Joe: Exactly.
Sincere wishes for a successful Persian chicken dinner provided by SFUSD. “Soon” would be good; just not a very good bet.
Disappointing article. I wish you would’ve delved more into why closing schools won’t save money, especially into the medium and long term, rather than indulging in obscure and trite references to musicals. It seems like you had too much fun writing this article and forgot that the purpose was to inform the public, not flex your writing skill.
Hi Alex —
Three things:
1. There is no other publication that published the rather relevant fact that school closures won’t save much if any money and none in the short-term. Only us. And, as the district concedes, this is not a conjecture but a fact. Seems important. I’m confused why you would have me break down personnel and building maintenance costs here.
2. You think it was “fun” for a father of public school children to write about pending closures? Or would the framing in terms of “trite references” be more apropos in getting the vast majority of San Franciscans without public school children to read a story about something that doesn’t personally affect them?
3. “Fiddler on the Roof” is not obscure.
Best,
JE