On Tuesday, San Francisco voters will choose among 11 candidates to fill four seats on the city’s seven-person school board. The new board members will take office in a time of turmoil: In just the last few months, both board president Lainie Motamedi and superintendent Matt Wayne resigned. The district put its months-long, botched plan to close schools on hold. And it all took place against the backdrop of a budget crisis.
We’ve analyzed the school board candidates’ answers from several months’ worth of biweekly Q&A and summarized the main takeaways below.
Meet the candidates
The budget crisis has taken center stage in discussions of the future of the district; eight of the candidates named it as their top priority.
The other three candidates highlighted issues specifically involving students and educators in their answers. Cheung, who has unique experience in early education policy and was previously director of advancement at a childcare nonprofit, named addressing chronic absenteeism as her priority. Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10 percent or more of class days; 26 percent of K-8 SFUSD students were chronically absent during the 2022–23 school year.
Krantz, who at age 19 is the youngest candidate and just graduated from an SFUSD high school, named increasing teacher pay and making cosmetic and safety improvements as her priorities.
Finally, Alexander — who has decades of experience as an SFUSD educator, unique among the candidates — named academic achievement as his priority. (Gupta, who was one of the candidates focusing on the budget crisis, wrote in his answer that academic achievement would be his top priority under “regular circumstances.”)
Gupta, Jersin and Chang cited nonprofit or industry leadership background as their standout experience. Jersin, a former LinkedIn executive, wrote that he plans to draw on his experience leading the recruiting platform to improve the SFUSD’s educator recruitment process. And Chang, who is the CEO of healthcare organization Homebridge and whose SFUSD experience entails doing outreach in the district and attending board meetings, wrote: “Managing $1B budgets is not foreign to me.”
People have expressed concerns about the influence of those uninvolved in the public school system on the school board race: Less than 20 percent of San Francisco voters have kids, and many who do send them to private schools.
Of the 11 candidates, less than half — Gupta, Hsu, Huling, Ray and Cheung — are current SFUSD parents.
Hsu cited a character trait instead of prior experiences as what makes her stand out, writing: “I speak the truth, even when it may be controversial or unpopular, and vote my convictions.” Hsu was appointed by Mayor London Breed to fill one of three seats on the board following the 2022 recalls, but lost that seat in the general election four months later after making racist comments about Black and brown families.
Supporting students
Candidates had a range of ideas for helping students achieve academic goals. Lee, Ray, Hsu and Huling named some form of high-intensity tutoring or individualized instruction. High-intensity tutoring, which involves frequent one-on-one or small group engagement with a trained tutor, has been touted as a highly effective intervention for students who are struggling — but it is expensive to implement.
Expanding early education was also a popular idea — endorsed by Ray, Eleftheriou and Jersin in response to that week’s question, and Cheung in response to other questions. The SFUSD currently runs 11 early education schools — which include pre-kindergarten and transitional kindergarten programs — as well as 20 elementary schools that host early education classrooms. Some education research has found early education improves long-term academic achievement, while other work has yielded mixed results.
Several candidates foregrounded more holistic approaches to supporting student learning: Lee and Cheung suggested home visits and care teams, respectively, for maintaining students’ attendance and social well-being beyond the classroom, while Krantz suggested training teachers in engaging with students with disabilities and recognizing signs of trauma.
Supporting educators
When it came to supporting educators, Ray and Alexander named better pay. While Krantz did not answer that week’s question, she named better pay as one of her priorities in response to another question.
Six candidates — Jersin, Lee, Ray, Alexander, Gupta and Huling — named improvements to the recruitment process, including faster hiring, and improvements to human resources. Ray specifically mentioned the need to improve the payroll system. The district has seen its share of recent HR fiascos: Last spring, the district announced it was finally scrapping its multimillion-dollar payroll system, EMPowerSF, that had left educators underpaid and unpaid. And more recently, dozens of educators were offered SFUSD jobs that the district then rescinded due to budget concerns.
Chang, Cheung and Gupta named providing housing support. Gupta, chief program officer at Mercy Housing, underscored the need for more affordable educator housing — alluding to undersupply at Shirley Chisholm Village, the first affordable housing complex for SFUSD employees. In July, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Shirley Chisholm Village had received more than 900 applications for 135 units. Cheung also named improving retirement plans. “Access to stable housing and dignified retirement are basic human rights,” Cheung wrote.
Eleftheriou and Hsu gave more unconventional responses. Eleftheriou wrote that he would introduce training in meditation and mindfulness, reasoning that “thoughts and emotions, particularly negative ones, if left unchecked, will prevent educators from relating to students, parents, and other colleagues.”
Hsu named improving student behavior in the classroom by re-evaluating the Restorative Practice Policy. That policy promotes restorative, not punitive, approaches to correcting student misbehavior.
Balancing the budget
Candidates’ ideas for balancing the budget ranged from reducing spending to finding more funding sources and improving SFUSD to maintain attendance. (Higher attendance translates into more funding.)
Ray, Hsu, Jersin and Lee named reducing wasteful spending — for example, on expensive contractors and consultants — as their main approach to addressing the budget crisis. Hsu pledged to “demand that the superintendent and his staff evaluate every program” that receives district funding and “establish metrics to determine their effectiveness.”
Alexander and Chang named reducing or streamlining administrative costs. In February, the teachers union released a report calling for budget cuts at the central management level rather than at school sites, citing that nearly one in 10 SFUSD employees is a member of the district’s central office staff.
Cheung and Gupta focused on improving SFUSD’s programs to attract and retain families. Cheung emphasized promoting early and special education programs, as well specialized language, STEM and art programs, while Gupta named advanced curricula, technical and language programs as offerings that draw families to the district.
School closures
For months, the school closures were depicted as a money-saving move. But in July, Mission Local reported that the closures were unlikely to save money in the short-term and that their long-term financial impact was unclear. On Oct. 8, then-superintendent Wayne released a preliminary closure list of 13 schools, but following backlash, Wayne resigned and the plan was put on hold.
Most of the candidates criticized the school closure planning process for its lack of transparency and consideration of community input. In response to two questions on the school closure plan, Jersin honed in on finances: panning the district’s financial mismanagement and again pledging to identify and cut wasteful spending.
Hsu called the “equity” criteria ambiguous and, after the release of the preliminary closure list, noted that four schools on the list serve a large population of Chinese students with low-income, monolingual immigrant families. Lee also drew attention to specific schools on the preliminary closure list, gesturing at the plan’s impact on Asian Americans and other communities of color.
Other candidates who expressed concerns about how the plan would impact specific communities include Alexander, who noted that SFUSD’s past school closures disproportionately impacted Black communities.
Cheung and Chang noted the listed schools’ special roles in their communities: Cheung wrote that the schools “have a proven track record of culturally affirming programming that helps address opportunity gaps,” while Chang wrote that they are “smaller schools and specialty schools that are much needed in our communities.”
