SFUSD officials say they’ll again delay school closure announcement — until after election

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In small meetings this week with members of the San Francisco Unified School District’s advisory committee, multiple sources tell Mission Local that district officials have stated that they plan to once again delay publicly announcing which schools will be closed. 

District Advisory Committee members were told the district would officially announce this on Monday. 

The announcement of which schools would be closed and/or merged, a decision some nine months in the making, was originally scheduled for Sept. 18. Only days before that deadline, it was then delayed to sometime this month. The date meeting attendees were this week told is slated for the release of the initial list is Nov. 12, according to multiple sources. This is, conspicuously, after the coming election — in which, among many other races, 12 candidates are vying for four seats on the SFUSD school board and voters are weighing a school bond.

District officials this week have said they will go through a process of “deep engagement” with “particular communities” heading up to the Nov. 12 Board of Education meeting. While meeting attendees were not given specifics beyond this language, this may be a euphemism for the district working proactively with the communities of the impacted schools — and doing so in advance of Nov. 12.

District sources have told Mission Local that a preliminary school closure list does exist, and contains 10 to 14 names. The details of that list are not completely known, and whatever list is eventually publicized could vary in both size and content. 

This is the latest twist in a tortured process that has unrolled while the district is battling a deep deficit and the looming possibility of state takeover. The Board of Education made it clear to district officials last month that there were enough questions regarding both the methodology of the district’s closure plan and the strategy to push it forward that a majority of its members would not vote to advance it.

At an emergency Sept. 22 meeting, the school board opted not to fire superintendent Matt Wayne; among other factors, there was not a consensus in-house candidate to step in and immediately take over. Instead, the school board took the extraordinary step of reaching out to the mayor and greenlighting a team of San Francisco officials coming in to advise the superintendent and watch over his shoulder.

Not publicizing the initial closure list until mid-November calls into question how, logistically, the present Board of Education would vote on the closures by mid-December, and how the schools in question could be closed by August 2025. 

School tours for prospective SFUSD families are already taking place, and the district’s annual enrollment fair is slated for Oct. 19. Schools that are potentially on the chopping block have, counter-intuitively, been listed as potential sites for 2025-26 transitional kindergarten expansions, confusing nervous parents and indicating a siloed process at the district. 

Because of the alteration in travel patterns of thousands of students and families, school closures will also merit an Environmental Impact Report under the California Environmental Quality Act. These reports require months, at minimum, to complete, which does not seem wholly compatible for the district’s closure timeline, especially considering the many other pressing concerns the district has. 

Questions to the district resulted in the message: “We will provide an update in October, as we said. …. We have not shared any definitive updates on our timeline for an announcement. … We do not have updates to share today.”