Matt Wayne will remain the superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, but has gained a special team of city executives who will watch over his shoulder.
On Sunday, Mayor London Breed announced in a press release that the city will step in with a team of experts to help steer the SFUSD through proposed school closures and worsening financial outlook. Financial support will also be deployed: $8.4 million in unallocated Student Success Funds will go to the new team to support “emergency needs and emergent strategies to support the school community.”
Mission Local has learned that this process was several days in the making: Board President Matt Alexander and Vice President Lisa Weissman-Ward reached out to the mayor’s office through Board of Education Commissioner Jenny Lam, Mayor Breed’s former education advisor, to obtain additional support for the city’s troubled school district.
The announcement comes following an emergency Sunday meeting during which the Board of Education opted to not terminate Wayne. Bringing in this city emergency team was viewed by board members as means to feasibly keep Wayne in the position: With no identified successor to immediately grab the reins, firing him on the spot was perceived as too chaotic a move.
This is a stopgap measure until December, when Wayne’s standing will be evaluated by the school board.
In a joint statement released Sunday afternoon, Wayne and Alexander wrote that they are committed to working together. The statement also outlined four priorities for the school district: Balancing SFUSD’s budget, rehabilitating its operations system, expanding the school bond program and right-sizing the district’s school portfolio.
While the first three of those priorities are existential, the fourth — closures — is not. The timeline and extent of the school closures has not been determined. These matters will be discussed in the coming days.
Sunday’s announcements come as parents and students have been left in the dark regarding pending closures after the district blew through its Sept. 18 deadline to reveal which schools would be affected. Alexander put the brakes on the SFUSD’s plan due to questions over its methodological and strategic soundness. His predecessor in the position, Lainie Motamedi, recently resigned, citing the district’s poor leadership and dysfunction.
Wayne, who has served as superintendent for more than two years, has been heavily criticized for his handling of the pending closures.
At 9 a.m. on Sunday, the board held an emergency meeting at SFUSD headquarters at 555 Franklin St. The meeting was closed to the public but some 60 parents, school employees and students attended an hour-long public-comment session beforehand. Many took to the podium to express their concern over the district’s problems that are pulling it apart at the seams.
“Our school district is in a challenging and difficult moment right now,” said Alexander during his opening statement. The board president explained that the last-minute meeting was organized in light of a number of issues, including the delayed announcement of closures and the district’s mishandling of a hiring freeze that led to job offers being rescinded after the recipients had left their prior jobs.
While members of the community agreed on the problems — namely, the closures, but also other woes including a massive budget deficit, bloated administration, staffing issues and the SFUSD’s costly and dysfunctional payroll system — not everyone agreed on the solutions.
Some made it clear they felt that Wayne must go, while others expressed concern that firing the head of the district would cause too much disruption during an already disruptive time.
“Removing Dr. Wayne would further destabilize our whole ecosystem of care, and would increase anxiety and uncertainty at a time when we need it the most,” said Helen Parker Leigh, the principal at Sherman Elementary School.
“If the purpose of this meeting is to fire the superintendent, it will only cause more chaos. What we need in this moment is stability,” said another attendant.
“If you have a leader that is not leading well, I don’t think that keeping him in power is going to help,” said Anna Gracia, a parent at San Francisco Community school. Gracia said that, ultimately, Wayne was responsible for the closures in the first place. “We need to stop it where it starts.”
Others spoke to the chaos but did not weigh in on the superintendent specifically. “I’m not here to defend the superintendent. He must be held accountable through a deliberate process; when and how matters,” said Meredith Dodson, from the SF Parent Coalition. “I’m here to defend our 50,000 students. They need your calm and strategic focus. They deserve a functioning school system, not finger pointing.”
While the planned meeting was posted to the calendar on the SFUSD website — 24 hours in advance, per state open meeting laws — most attendees were caught off guard. Many heard about the meeting through word of mouth following a San Francisco Chronicle report on Saturday.
“I have to say, just the decision to even consider firing the superintendent before the list of school closures has been released and admits the budget crisis — this doesn’t impart a lot of confidence to me,” said Emily, a teacher and future SFUSD parent.
Alexander emphasized that there are no easy answers to the district’s troubles.
“None of us knows the answer, because if we knew the answer, these problems already would have been solved,” Alexander said. “So these really are difficult questions and difficult decisions.”
On the one hand, Wayne has not been particularly great at his job, but on the other hand… how on earth will SFUSD hire anyone better? You’d have to be a complete masochist to walk into a job with state oversight of all hiring, a managing board that will probably face another recall (just given the state of the city), declining enrollment, and revenues constrained, despite being in one of the richest cities in the world, because of Prop 13.
(I’d add “and impossibly contradictory parent expectations” but I suspect that’s standard in just about every school district across the US at this point…)
Campers,
The BOS has a seat at the table because Ammiano put a permanent stipend from the General Fund going to the School District and created a committee of the BOS to meet with some kind of SFUSD representative/s?
Ammiano was in his last year of being BOS President under both City-Wide and District coronations after he gave the City the first Universal Health Care in the Nation (Healthy San Francisco).
As a Pacifist he volunteered to teach in Viet Nam after first beating Briggs to allow Gay Teachers to teach in the State.
He was in a small village when the Tet Offensive went down and when the North Vietnamese Regular Army searched the village the villagers risked their lives hiding him in a kitchen cabinet for god’s sake and putting a hundred people around him.
Tom represented D-9 when District Elections which was also one of his baby’s and he was so popular that when the Tech billionaires led by Gary Tan put together a plan to take control of the City they went to Jim Sutton who took on Trevor Chandler as a client and transformed him from a career AIPAC operative to a ‘Public School Teacher’ inside of a month where he paid one month’s union dues so that he could write ‘union member’ on his campaign material and doesn’t have 2 months total part-time service as a Substitute 3rd grade teacher and he’s supposed to replace Tom ?
To Paraphrase, I know Tom Ammiano and Trevor Chandler is no Tom Ammiano no matter what Jim Sutton says.
Last week a City funded ‘Early Care Educators of San Francisco’ held a Forum where they promoted Chandler as a legitimate teacher and the Examiner ran a coverage that failed to note that he was a substitute and a brand new one at that.
They failed to invite myself (a Bachelors and Masters in Special Education and 59 years since 1965 experience) and Jaime Gutierrez, a Cal product and native District 9 resident along with Julian Bermudez because we had not raised their minimum of $150,000 for our campaigns.
I know Trevor Chandler and he’s a nice guy with a great husband and friendly dog and I worked a Community meeting over the Hill Bomb with him and ran into and rapped with him outside the Womens Building and at Dolores Park.
He’s a nice guy but he’s being used by the billionaires who are presenting him as the new Ammiano which is fraudulent and an insult to serious career educators like Tom and myself.
Jackie Fielder for D-9 Supervisor !!
No on the Wiener Acolyte !!
Peskin for Mayor or Crime will get worse I guarantee !!
h.
District 9 residents, Trevor Chandler is far and away the best candidate for Supervisor. Which by the way is not at all the subject of this article.
H. Brown, thanks for that rambling, off topic reminder that you should not be running for office.
I kinda like h.brown. I mean I’d never vote for him but he is entertaining. Like that Marcos guy who posts here and ran against Daly in D6, only to finish something like 6th. You want him in the race but nowhere near the seat of power.
Neither should Trevor Chandler.
From what’s on Breed’s press release this afternoon, there are no Latinos on the city’s “support” team.
Given how quickly the mayor was able to cobble together a team, it’s pretty hard to believe that this morning’s emergency meeting performance review for Matt Wayne was ever actually what the meeting was going to be about. That should be abundantly obvious since he didn’t even bother to show up. During the meeting at least one board member sent a private text saying she had no idea why Wayne wasn’t there.
The support team is picked for their skills, not their race!
This is not the time to play identity politics with our kids’ education.
That is not at all what I was doing. Neglecting to include Latinos is consistently considered okay, whereas the absence of Asian and (sometimes) African-American representation is rightly considered a disaster or racist or insensitive or inappropriate – in short wrong and unacceptable. White people are way over-represented in many city initiatives, but it’s always time to play identity politics when white people want a piece of the pie that they really don’t derserve.
Unlike you, I am certain there are Latinos who are qualified to be on this committee. Racial optics are a thing, and they are often exploited. Breed certainly does that when she says white people can’t disagree with her policy positions.
And I don’t for a minute believe this whole school closure, superintendent incompetence and all the private school parents who are “concerned” about public education aren’t playing horrible politics with our kids’ education (I’m thinking Meredith Dodson, William Obendorf, Autumn Looijen among others).
The student body at the schools served by San Francisco Unified School District is 13.8% White, 6.2% Black, 37.7% Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander, 29.6% Hispanic/Latino, 0.2% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.8% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.
I still get the sense that you are overstating the race angle. And that is ironic given all the trouble that the SFUSD got into during Covid with their school renaming fiasco.
If dwelling too much on race is part of what got SFUSD into this mess, as many believe, then similar card playing sure as heck won’t get it out of the mess.
How can the school district be in deficit when property tax revenues are rising and enrollment is declining? Is this just another example of poor City management and corruption? Remember that a couple of years ago the district wasted millions of dollars studying changing names of schools and painting over murals.
The board is the problem. When you have a director of nutritional service making sure ketchup is a vegetable and transportation director who gets rid of a contract with union workers but you assess additional fees after property tax, no one will support you.
Why is this team getting access to $8.4 million in unallocated Student Success Funds school funds?
Board pres Matt Alexander and VP Lisa Weissman-Ward are 100% trustworthy elected leaders. They have proven they represent the interests of public school students, families and educators and are not using the B of Ed as a political steppingstone. Smart of them both for putting the brakes on the train before the wreck. Matt Wayne is just the conductor and while less than perfect, it would be worse to replace him at this point… We need stability, not more chaos in SFUSD. The Board, families, UESF and all invested parties need to keep up the pressure for a transparent and democratic process.
Thank you for great reporting, Mission Local