Half a dozen sources have told Mission Local that Mayor London Breed’s scathing Tuesday call to halt the public school closure process came after Superintendent Matt Wayne shocked the mayor’s office, members of the mayor’s school stabilization team and the Board of Education by deviating from the understood plan to roll out a list of schools on Oct. 8.
The plan, as the mayor’s office, the team of city officials she designated to work with the troubled school district and the Board of Education all saw it, was for Wayne to release a list of vulnerable schools — and no more. This would precede an “authentic process” of discussions with school communities about those schools’ future budgets and whether mergers with other campuses would better serve students.
But this was not what happened.
The list of potential school mergers and closures, first published on Tuesday, Oct. 8 by Mission Local at 2:51 p.m., not only named 11 schools slated to be shuttered, but also listed destinations where students at the schools up for closure would potentially be transferred.
Officials with both the city and the school district, who thought they knew what was coming, at first believed the list of impacted schools and potential transfer sites must have been erroneous. They purportedly went so far as to begin working to craft a plan to mitigate the damage of bad information circulating prior to the slated 5 p.m. release of the school list.
But they subsequently learned that Mission Local’s article was accurate: The list was not erroneous. Wayne, numerous city and school district sources say, had opted to release a very different sort of list than what they had been led to believe was coming, containing much additional information they had not seen. While this list is preliminary, the inclusion of transfer destinations gave it the feel of a final list, and vastly altered the parameters of any discussions with impacted school communities.
This left the mayor’s office, members of her stabilization team and commissioners on the Board of Education baffled — and upset.
Board of Education member Alida Fisher, speaking at a Tuesday night school closure panel hosted by the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, confirmed that the Oct. 8 list “was not what we expected to see.”
Deep frustration was evident in Breed’s visceral Tuesday statement, which panned both the school closure process and Wayne’s role in it.
“Whatever this current proposed school closure process was meant to accomplish, or could have accomplished, is lost,” reads Breed’s Tuesday statement. “Unfortunately, the only achievement has been to make a precarious time for our public schools even more chaotic. This has become a distraction from the very real work that must be done to balance the budget in the next two months to prevent a state takeover. It is time to immediately stop this school closure process.”
The mayor then set her sights on Wayne: “I have lost confidence in the Superintendent’s ability to manage the current process, and do not believe this current plan will lead to an outcome that will benefit students and the school district in the long-term. I recognize that discussions around school closures and mergers are difficult and painful, but that only speaks to why any effort to engage in this conversation must be done with care, clarity, and competence. That has not happened here, and I don’t have confidence that it can happen right now under the current conditions.”
Mayoral challenger Aaron Peskin forcefully came out against the proposed closures on Oct. 8. Ahsha Safaí also questioned the process, and Daniel Lurie and Mark Farrell signed a letter accusing the San Francisco Unified School District of engaging in “a secret, black box process that is unfair to Asian American students and families.”
The San Francisco Unified School District did not return a Tuesday message querying about Wayne’s actions and the motivation behind them.
While Wayne has clearly alienated the mayor and a supermajority of the Board of Education, it’s unclear if there is any suitable person or persons who can be expediently placed into his job. The Board of Education considered sacking Wayne at a Sept. 22 special meeting, but held off — in large part because there was no candidate perceived as ready to immediately step into the position. Instead, the school board opted to take the extraordinary step of appealing to the Mayor’s Office. She provided a team of city officials to lend oversight to the district, as well as the promise of $8.4 million in unallocated Student Success Funds.
But, regardless of who leads the district or what decision is made in the short term regarding the potential closures, the timing of the closure announcement put affected schools in a precarious position. The delayed Oct. 8 announcement came just days before the district’s Oct. 19 enrollment fair — a well-attended yearly event in which families peruse booths representing the district’s many schools before entering the enrollment lottery.
Even if the closure process is scuttled — and school officials have stressed that the preliminary list is not a “done deal” — it is unclear how schools on the preliminary list will recover from parents, intuitively, avoiding a campus clearly in the district’s crosshairs.
Neither the mayor nor the Board of Supervisors can, officially, dictate the goings-on at the school district. For his part, Wayne did not indicate an obvious inclination to change course in a Tuesday email to school district families.
“Last week, my team announced which schools meet the criteria for closure or merger, ensuring that our efforts to improve literacy and math instruction remain on track while we continue to address our structural deficit and resolve operational issues,” he wrote.
“With severe budget cuts imminent, continuing with the status quo in SFUSD is unacceptable and not sustainable. … Since I joined SFUSD, my team has consulted experts, implemented best practices, and deeply examined the mounting challenges within SFUSD that have been the result of more than a decade of status quo decisions.”
The district is now stating that school closures could save it $22 million. Mission Local has learned that there is no California Department of Education-approved fiscal analysis of San Francisco school closures. The district has not responded to an email requesting it reveal its methodology.
As both the mayor and Wayne intimated in their statements, difficult times are coming. The district must shave a deficit of some $400 million over the next three years and adopt a harsh, job-cutting budget by December, or face the specter of state takeover. It must rally to pass a school improvement and safety bond on the November ballot. And it must begin taking steps to install a new Enterprise Resource Planning system — an overarching software management network coming on the heels of the catastrophic EmPowerSF payroll system that cost scores of millions of dollars but disastrously underpaid and mispaid employees and drove teachers out of the district.
Those are all existential issues, and the mayor and members of the Board of Education are now overtly questioning the district’s fixation on school closures.
“There are so many other things to work on,” said school board member Fisher at the Tuesday night panel discussion. “There are so many other savings to look into. There is only so much gum-chewing and walking you can do.”
Joe Eskenazi’s children attend a school on the Oct. 8 preliminary closure list. He moderated the Tuesday night Harvey Milk Club panel discussion.
I worked at central office some years ago but maintained relationships with former colleagues. Since Wayne has been at the helm, he and his incompetence have led to a complete restructure of central office leadership, including dissolving key positions held by individuals with the institutional knowledge, insight, and relationships with City Hall that would have not led to where the district is now. It’s always easy to find a scapegoat but the BoE is also to blame because they approve any decisions the superintendent makes and they have the power to hire or fire him. Wayne is the sacrificial lamb for all those running for re-election. Then again, he should have been replaced a LONG time ago.
As an SFUSD parent whose child’s school is not on the list, I receive the absurdly lengthy almost daily emails/texts sent from Wayne. The district is being far more reactive than strategic (and helpful), further speaking to the chaos happening before our eyes. Our children, families and staff community deserve better.
“Wayne is the sacrificial lamb for all those running for re-election.” Uhmm do you even know who is running for re-election? Only one out of FOUR commissioners is. And as hard to follow as your comments are, at least you got that part right—that Matt Alexander is really doubling down on the hot-dog guy meme ‘I wanna know who did this!’
You sound like you have a personal beef with Dr Wayne because your friends’ jobs got cut. Like all the other naysayers, you seem to be very long on criticism and curiously short on solutions. Maybe that’s because the administration and board you worked for happily stuck their fingers in their ears and ‘la la la’-d their way through years of declining enrollment and kicking the structural-deficit can down the road. It’s your former administration that paid their very special friends to implement the disastrous Empower system rather than using proven large-corporation enterprise software packages. It’s your former administration that let Allison Collins conduct sideshow after sideshow, alienating parents and city childcare partners and the freaking Department of Public Health.
Thanks for reminding all of us just how deep and far back this district’s dysfunction goes.
Exactly! He was brought in to deal with the cuts because prior group bankrupted the district. Now everyone wants to act like their not broke. Hey breed..pony up the cash to save the schools or just get out of the way.
He shold have started with central office layoffs before listibg schools for closure.
And lets not forget this sites role in this.
Wayne may be a really bad guy but……the way I read it….he released MORE information than planned and told more about the possible result and Breed is mad.
Sounds like City Hall is mad because they didn’t get a chance to bury the truth with endless meetings.
Yup breed is playing hero ball and wants some savior glory without any buy in.
So the state will be taking over SFUSD, that’s what I’m hearing.
Best news in years!
In the history of the world, has any parent said, “cool,” when their child’s school has been closed? No. It’s always the end of the world. It makes sense. Their child knows the place, the family knows the teachers, perhaps the administrators. There’s a family element to it. So it is absolutely no-win to announce a closure. EVERYONE is pissed off. Which explains why every mayoral candidate HAS to say, “well, this is just terrible.” Sometimes hard decisions have to be made. Someone’s ox will be gored. It’s weird that politicians proceed as if they can keep everyone happy. It looks like schools will be closed. There’s no way to do it perfectly, and people always immediately go to procedural complaints: “It’s not that you broke up with me, it’s *how* you did it.”
I feel like my head is going to explode at the very idea of Spring Valley Elementary School closing. Not only is it a lovely old school, not only was it recently remodeled, restored, refurbished, not only is it the oldest school in San Francisco, it is the OLDEST SCHOOL IN CALIFORNIA! Since 1852! There must be some other ways to save money beyond closing all those schools. Please, let’s not do things we later regret which cannot be undone.
I taught at Horace Mann, Mac & Bal in the 90’s and 00’s. In my experience, the SFUSD Central Office was completely dysfunctional, staffed by arrogant and pompous functionaries whose job security was their “institutional knowledge” of how to coax the District’s outdated and broken accounting/payroll/HR/etc/etc systems to operate (barely) at the most minimal level. The managers, analysts and upper leadership—whether they be careerists and principled educators—were so overwhelmed playing whack-a-mole to contain the incipient chaos that any attempt to implement a strategy for reform was easily swallowed up by the bureaucratic beast. 135 Van Ness and 555 Franklin were—and based on the news, still are—the rotten heart of the District’s abysmal outcomes.
Status quo doesn’t work and the Board of Education can’t run away from their lack of oversight. I know nothing of Mr. Wayne but after reading the analysis done by the SF Chronicle on school closure, no amount of “well timed” political machinations are going to change the fact that some schools have to either close or merge with other schools. As a taxpayer my outrage is directed at the School Board. The buck stops with them! As for Mr. Wayne’s “premature” disclosure of schools on the chopping block, now that it’s out there challenge it with facts, figures and solutions not outrage. In SF maybe State oversight would be a good thing.
$22 million is approximately the site budgets this year for all of the sites to be closed. While I’m sure the district will claim some actual analysis happened, the best studies find savings well south of a million per site, and that’s only after short term costs are paid out.
Conservatively, each teacher is about $100k a year.
K-5 with 2 sections per grade level is 12 teachers—> 1.2 million.
Principal salary: $120k
Secretary, health worker, janitor: $200k
Not factoring in other facilities costs, $1.5 mil per site saved per k-5. More for the 2 high schools.
Getting close to $20 mil per year savings, assuming the teachers get consolidated into open positions.
How do you read it differently?
You’ve just made an estimate of the entire site budget for these schools, including all their teachers. As E. Rat said, those entire budgets add up to about the claimed “savings”.
But in reality, we’ll still need most of those teachers. The kids are staying in the system — unless this chaos manages to kick off a real death spiral, anyway — just moving to different schools. They’ll still need teachers, so most of those teachers will move too.
Greg,
I see your point, but the key is that the positions at the closed schools will no longer exist, resulting in fewer total positions overall.
While the teachers will indeed move to fill open positions in other schools, their original positions at the closed sites will be eliminated. This consolidation means that the district won’t need to hire additional staff to fill those vacancies, which leads to savings.
I got a sneaky suspicion that someone has ideas of selling district property to the private sector, otherwise what is going to be done to the empty buildings?
When was the last time a San Francisco Superintendent did a decent job? You might recall a decade plus ago when Administrators out of the Student Support Services department funneled money to personal bank accounts via non-profit vender payment schemes.
Unless they plan on selling off the parcels of land the schools sit on AND laying off the teachers and support staff at these 11 schools, $22 million in “savings” doesn’t seem like a realistic number.
Wayne is doing his job and trying to bring the schools within budget.
This is so rare in San Francisco that Eskenazi doesn’t even recognize it. There must be an ulterior motive! How dare he do his job! People are unhappy and unhappy people in San Francisco must be right about everything!
Kent —
I used to watch Kent Tekulve pitch when I was a kid and I remember him being *a lot* harder to hit than this.
JE
Matt Wayne might resign tomorrow over this school closure mess. The Mayor’s trying to score political points by saying she’s lost faith in him. Look, I don’t say this lightly, but for the first time, I’m seriously worried about my kid’s education in our public schools. This could open the door for CDE to swoop in and take over. If that happens, we’re all screwed. Parents, teachers, admin, staff, board – none of us will have a say anymore.
Remember what went down when CDE took over Inglewood back in 2012? It was a disaster:
Immediate Impacts:
– Enrollment dropped by approximately 60%: From around 18,000 students to fewer than 7,000 by 2023, significantly impacting district resources and sustainability
– Test scores suffered across the district: The state takeover did not improve student performance, and academic outcomes dropped throughout the district
– IUSD closed more schools than initially proposed: State control led to a consolidation of schools, further reducing the district’s capacity and exacerbating its struggles
Loss of Local Control:
– CDE held control for 10 years, only beginning to return authority to local officials in 2022
– Community resistance was completely ineffective:
• Despite massive protests, clashes with authorities, and teacher strikes, the community had no real influence
• These intense efforts did absolutely nothing to change CDE’s decisions or approach
– CDE made unilateral decisions, ignoring all local input and public outcry
– The community essentially lost all say in their children’s education for a decade
– If CDE takes full control, all PACs, LCAP, DELAC, and any other advisory boards will have no voice
• This means a complete loss of structured community input mechanisms
• Diverse community needs and perspectives will be ignored
Long-Term Consequences:
– IUSD has struggled to recover fully: Even after local control began to be restored, the district has not returned to its pre-takeover levels
– The district still lacks full autonomy: Although some control has been handed back, the district continues to operate under significant state oversight
– Top-performing schools still underperform: Inglewood’s top high school now only ranks in the middle among California schools, reflecting the lasting damage of the takeover
I’ve always said if we had 100% funding, I’d split it 50% elementary, 30% middle, 20% high school, even though my kid’s heading to middle school. But if CDE takes over? I’ll keep working here to help, but honestly, I might have to think about getting my kid out of SF to protect their education. It’s one thing to stay and fix a ship, it’s another to know it’s sinking and there’s no hope of saving it.
I’m telling you all this because you need to know how serious this is. We can’t let what happened in Inglewood happen here. What are you going to do to make sure we keep control of our schools?
SF hires a well qualified person who makes the tough decisions needed to avoid takeover. Politicians and Unions freak and force him out. Nothing gets done. SFUSD staff get back to playing the fiddle while the state takes over.
“While this list is preliminary, the inclusion of transfer destinations gave it the feel of a final list”
Question:
If the list had not been leaked, perhaps the district would have managed process closer to the expectations of the Mayors Office?
The leaks make it seem like lots of remaining upper management have it out for Dr Wayne, for one reason or another.
Wayne obviously messed this up big time and probably should be removed. But he is doing what he was brought into do by Breed and her school board allies. Wasn’t it last month where she appointed one of Wayne’s closure lackies to the School board for a rubber-stamped approval? The cynicism from the mayoral candidates amazingly makes him look like the good guy. Literally weeks ago all of these candidates were on a closure kick.
I certainly would be fighting this if my school was on the chopping block…but what’s next? I thought avoiding the state takeover was all that matters. Now it seems like that’s how this could all play out as it will be a great way to pass off responsibility.
Exactly. Wayne is a cut out for what Breed and her charter school allies want. And when Wayne does what he does, London Breed gets to clutch the pearls bought by the donors who own her and pretend to be upset. This is the political game they play, because it’s not about actually improving the school or the financial structure of the school. It’s about doing what her political backers and donors want done, and figuring out a way to hoodwink the citizens and conceal what the real machinations are all about.
Wayne lost me with the “high school task force” (aka we need to appease the anti-lowell crowd) but let’s be honest: none of his critics offer any solutions.
It gets worse: Wayne is lying about capacities with an abstract construct called PROGRAM CAPACITY that basically terraforms the school system based on an abstract ideal not connected to budgets and problems. Like: hiding middle school under enrollment and taking it off the table.