As a father of three children in a San Francisco public school slated for closure, it brings me no pleasure to tell you that much of what has been written about school closures has been facile.
While the city doesn’t need to close schools, the San Francisco Unified School District is in an alarmingly precarious state. Its problems go so much deeper than a voluntary decision to cull schools that was curtailed at the 11th hour in October and led to the ouster of Superintendent Matt Wayne. The monomaniacal pursuit of this clearly misbegotten plan remains baffling.
New Superintendent Maria Su may have the most difficult job in San Francisco right now; it is challenging to describe the state of the public school district’s finances and operational abilities without using language that should get you thrown out of a public-school classroom.
Mission Local has obtained a pair of reports, one of which was previously confidential, that reveal how bum a hand Su (and our kids) have been dealt, and how much work she and her successors will have to do. But perhaps the best place to start is with a very not-confidential report: The Oct. 8 presentation of how closely the district’s estimated revenues and expenditures for 2023-24 adhered to the year’s actual and budgeted revenues and expenditures.
Answer: Not very! The estimated expenditures and actual expenditures diverge by $148.8 million — on a $1.28 billion budget. That is a lot.
The variation between the estimated and actual expenditures went both ways, however: Across several spending categories, the district expended $136.2 million less than it originally estimated, in part due to vacant positions going unfilled. On the one hand, this is good news for a cash-strapped district: It’s spending less than it budgeted. But, on the other hand, this reveals just how deep the district’s problems go.
The true condition of the SFUSD budget is not just that we don’t have enough money; we don’t even know where the money is.
A previously confidential report obtained by Mission Local spells this out. Former longtime city controller Ben Rosenfield produced a 27-page assessment of the district’s finances and inner workings in July “for internal discussion only.”
These must have been the sorts of discussions Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson had in “Marriage Story.” Rosenfield notes that the district is planning “a $120M cut plan and 500 FTE [full-time employee] position cut — almost 8% of the district’s budget and workforce.” This, he adds, “is the most significant reduction plan pursued by any government in San Francisco in 20 years.”
That’s daunting enough. But it’s harder when you don’t even know where the money is. Per Rosenfield’s report:
The district has significant gaps in access to data and reporting needed to manage key parts of its finances and operations. These are long-standing, internally recognized, and largely the result of a patchwork of antiquated and disconnected finance, payroll, and human resources systems. Basic and accurate information on even basic management activities (such as the count and status of hiring processes that are underway or spending versus the adopted budget) require manual data analysis … Basic information that is available with a single “click” in any comparable organization takes hours or days to produce, each time it is needed. (Emphasis ours)
Many of these problems will likely be eased, if not solved, by the pending adoption of an overarching Enterprise Resource Planning management system, a (functional) HAL 9000 to run the district. This would also do wonders for the district’s disastrous payroll situation. Rosenfield acknowledged this. But he also emphasized that “improvements can’t wait for it.”
So, those improvements need to be made without the information “available with a single ‘click’ in any comparable organization” with hours or days required to obtain rudimentary data. That means Maria Su is, in many ways, flying blind. So was Matt Wayne. So was Vincent Matthews, Wayne’s predecessor. That’s a commonality they can all share (along with having first names as last names). This makes it extraordinarily difficult to achieve all the things the district must do, let alone the things it doesn’t necessarily need to do, like cutting schools.
Rosenfield acknowledged this, too — right on Page 1: “Can we really get all this done in one year?” The SFUSD was seriously attempting to adopt its new Enterprise Resource Planning system, pull off its draconian layoffs and budget bloodletting, and consolidate schools in the course of 12 months.
“Completion of any one of these projects would be a major accomplishment,” Rosenfield concluded. “Accomplishing all three projects simultaneously, without significant disruption, seems both unlikely and risky.”
Rosenfield was city controller for 16 years. He acquired the reputation of being highly competent and scrupulously nonpartisan as well as being “the best and most subtle politician in City Hall.” If it was smart to hire him to do an assessment, it would’ve been smarter to listen to him.
Mission Local has also obtained the Oct. 11 audit of how equitable the proposed school closures would be for the district’s most put-upon students. Somewhat inexplicably, this audit came out three days after the district released the list of proposed closures.
Its content was apparently brushed aside. Stanford professor Francis Pearman ran 345 hypothetical closure scenarios, and he found that the plan the district chose to go with “would rank in the 12th percentile in terms of achieving equity … 88 percent of the simulated scenarios performed better on matters of equity than the current plan.”
Pearman, in the end, held that the closure plan would achieve “a moderate level of equity.” Well, fair enough: Your humble narrator is a long ways removed from high-school math class but, back then, the 12th percentile was bad. The San Francisco Unified School District seriously chose to run with a closure plan that was less equitable than 88 percent of the hypothetical plans generated by its respected Stanford University consultants. Of note, Pearman also found the proposed closures would hit Black students disproportionately hard.
But that is not all. Oh no, that is not all: Pearman further reported that the schools marked for closure had, by and large, “systematically received less investment than other schools in the district over the last twenty years.” What’s more, the schools that displaced students would be transferred to were measured as lower-performing than the schools slated to be closed.
So, that’s a hell of a thing. The mantra of the closure process was that district bigwigs could look affected families in the eye and say that this was in the best educational interests of their kids. Instead, they moved forward with a process that was measurably less equitable than randomly tossing darts at school names taped to the wall.
They moved forward with closures of underinvested schools and pushed to move the displaced students into lower-performing schools. It’s tough to claim that the children involved would be well-served here.
But that is not all: On the composite scores to assess San Francisco schools that the Stanford scholars helped the district to create, enrollment was, by design, a minuscule factor: 6 percent of the scoring total. That’s because, in schools, under-enrollment and inequity are often intertwined. Regardless, the district made under-enrollment a main component in crafting its closure list.
In doing so, it re-indexed a factor of inequity that was designed to be mitigated, and counteracted the entire point of collecting composite scores. The district did this under the guise of striving to craft an equitable plan.
So, this is something to think about for the self-anointed opinion-havers who cheered the school closure process without bothering to analyze what this process really was. This is something to think about for anyone who maintained that the school closures were called off merely because of public pressure and political expediency, and not because the process was rotten to the core and indefensible.
As the district’s enrollment dwindles, the notion of consolidating schools is hardly illogical. But it’s not an existential matter of the sort facing a district that can’t properly track many millions of dollars and is gearing up to enact brutal layoffs and cutbacks, lest it suffer further state intervention. The district was adamant that the school closure process was not dollar-driven, was not tied to the SFUSD budget deficit and that cost savings would be minimal — before claiming $22 million in projected savings, a figure that the state Department of Education did not approve and for which the district has not yet revealed its methodology. The SFUSD, incidentally, hasn’t said peep regarding my Oct. 8 request to show its work: Turn over the cocktail napkin or envelope on which this figure was tabulated, please.
Regardless, as headcounts continue to plummet, the school-closure process may be revived. But we have not yet seen a competent closure process, let alone a defensible one, and the work product from the prior plan was, rightly, relegated to the circular file. Any future closure processes must be started from scratch. And done right.
But this, again, isn’t close to the district’s biggest problem. There is always a next and bigger crisis. They may not teach you that in San Francisco public schools. But San Francisco public schools teach you that.
Disclosure: Joe Eskenazi’s children attend a school designated for closure and since reprieved.
Left tout of your headline…”just”….the school district doesn’t need to JUST close schools.
As you wrote …”As the district’s enrollment dwindles, the notion of consolidating schools is hardly illogical.”
Boy can I relate to this : “. The SFUSD, incidentally, hasn’t said peep regarding my Oct. 8 request to show its work: Turn over the cocktail napkin or envelope on which this figure was tabulated, please. ”
This is a cultural problem within the district. I battled for years and years and years to get the data for the math sequence. The claims central office were making made no sense at all.
Finally in June 2021 I received a response to my CPRA, https://bit.ly/sfusdmathdata , I still maintain if they realized it was the smoking gun it is they would not have sent it out.
There are so many structural issues within the district (fractured databases) but at the core is honesty. For some reason central office’s go to is lie to cover themselves.
The schools are great. My two are K-12 alumni, and now successful STEM college graduates.
The district needs an intervention. “Do not lie”.
Maya,
In my own case I scheduled an appointment to get info on my fight with the District and when I arrived a nice lady came over to where I was standing at the guy’s desk and told me he was out sick.
I said I’d come back “Tomorrow”.
Which I did.
And, he tells me it’s too late to talk because the SFUSD School Board under the leadership of Keith Jackson had made their decision the previous evening (w/out inviting me – the horror ! – )
That could have been an even tougher crowd back then as Jackson (as I’ve mentioned already today) is now crashing in San Quentin for offering to contract murder for hire amongst other things.
Bottom line here for the New Mayor ?
You think this is bad, wait til you get a load of the Housing Authority which began when Jim Jones was in charge there.
lol
Only Don Falk can turn that mess around.
Loved the snow in Buffalo for yesterday’s 1st quarter.
h.
SO many things wrong with SFUSD “management” at 555 Franklin and 135 Van Ness. Anyone who has worked in the district for more than a day (or tried to get a job in the district or filled out a “help” ticket) has gotten caught in the hairball of HR/Benefits/Payroll and can attest to the utter disfunction in these departments. And UESF has reported on how messed up the district’s finances and reporting systems are over years. Thanks for adding some nuanced reports (and humor) to back up educator experiences over D E C A D E S.
THE SYSTEM IS DOWN and has gone to hell in a handbasket post pandemic. Appreciate you beating this dead horse, Joe.
Any normal cash stepped business with multiple locations would close the least popular and most run down buildings requiring heavy investment. This is complicated by equity and it is a good thing they are considering other angles but the district *is* in dire situation, has way too many locations and has delayed doing anything about declining enrollment for as long as I can remember. The closure process had obvious flaws (even basic things like knowing the capacity of the schools and demand) but the core problem that they are spending too much maintaining too many locations is plain and I’m surprised you don’t see that.
SFUSD, not any normal cash strapped business though. One aspect that’s undercutting this kind of consideration: Capital investment money for school maintenance like fixing a leaky roof largely comes from bonds, not the year-over-year operational budget. That said, as detailed in this post, one would think a rigorous Ben Rosenfield style approach to managing District finances was normal MO. Apparently not, which speaks volumes about the competence level of the people we entrusted with the stewardship of the whole program.
Well, “capital investment” is not maintenance — or at least it should not be considered that. Letting things rot and then asking for a loan to pay for maintenance is *not* how a competent enterprise is run, because that loan (bond) increases monthly costs. An “investment” should pay back, or at the very least, reduce ongoing maintenance costs.
In my experience a cash strapped business will run itself into the ground, fail to pay taxes two years in a row, stiff its employees and disappear with six months back rent due. So by that measure… SFUSD is doing about right.
Stephen,
You be funny.
h.
The focus on equity is what got us in this terrible place. Let’s focus on the day to day running of the school district, rather than progressive politics, and the school board might actually survive.
Yes, that might mean closing run down schools that we would prefer not to close. But are we going to close a newly built school and then try to find some money to refurbish a physically run down school? Of course not, that is simply not possible within the current budgetary constraints.
>> Any future closure processes must be started from scratch. And done right.
Where is the money and time for that? “Your humble narrator” is part of a huge problem in San Francisco. Everything has to be done perfectly and so nothing gets done and institutions like SFUSD crumble. Well done Joe.
Joe and his progressive friends like Aaron Peskin are destroyers, not builders, and I wish there were a lot fewer of them in this beautiful city.
It’s disingenuous to call SFUSD a “cash-strapped district”. With a budget of over $23,000 per student SFUSD is just like all of SF government — they have plenty of cash — but we get very little service for it due to incompetence and mismanagement.
If you add up the site budgets of the schools SFUSD wanted to close, you get close to $22 million. I’m pretty sure that’s the source of the claim – obviously it’s hogwash, since closing a school doesn’t mean that every cost associated with it disappears.
How many times have San Franciscans been asked to vote for this candidate or that to “Save SFUSD!” or City College, for that matter, and all we get are down the road can kickers who sit in the fancy seats while these state agencies atrophy, whither and don’t even adhere to their own stated standards when making difficult decisions?
When a diverse raft of board members and commissioners cycle through these operations over a period of decades and the agencies continue to decay, then the problem is probably not one of people but one of governance structure.
All we get from these boards are constant fire fighting with few cycles left over to address the compounding structural problems.
Perhaps the supervisors and board members can divide the labor by creating and empowering a separate pair of boards of directors responsible for transitioning SFUSD and CCSF to a more stable place by long term structural reform, while relegating the sitting commissioners to fight fires due to these myriad structural deficiencies.
Marcos,
I say we turn management over to the Robots as quickly as possible.
h.
SFUSD has been mismanaged since Bob Alioto was the superintendent. The person in charge of facilities and maintenance would buy materials to fix and upgrade his summer home up north and use SFUSD employees to do it, leaving restrooms with no doors in the schools, windows fixed once a year, boarded up the other 11 months, lights not working, etc. it was still happening just ten years ago when a district employee would park his 661 van a block away and send fours hours at home until it was time to drive back to Shelby to clock out. Nothing has changed but the board getting loonier like the cartoons.
Seems like folks wanted to keep jobs going by keeping the antiquate patchwork going along. Sorta of like still using COBOL instead of upgrading to Azure.
another reason my kids went to private school. What a mess.
great work don t forget prop 13 and the failure t reform on the part of state reps and governor
Worth noting the district is reporting at the Board meeting a week from Tuesday that they anticipate rising enrollment at ES and HS that will necessitate new construction, kind of like that 525 student school they’re opening next year. I think someone needs to take a look at why and how the district shares such contradictory information that always seems to support the course of action they’ve already chosen.
Long gone are the days of Equity being the sole criterion for decision-making
The inside scoop:
The biggest expenditure is salaries. The biggest salaries are the senior teachers. Cutting senior teachers is the easiest “fix”, because a beginner is $56k.
but you can’t just “fire” teachers. So, what CAN you do?
Option 1: Close a school, you can then fire all the teachers, even if the students are simply moved. Since they still need a min number of teachers, you’d think they’d transfer the teachers, right? Nope. They “offered them the option to apply” for the new jobs at the other school, losing all tenure. It had nothing to do about student population. Not a thing. The actual closings would have been a very small savings otherwise.
Option 2: Offer senior teachers early retirement.
Currently, we’re at option 2.
As far as I know, there have been no attempts to cut other costs. No attempts to cut back on administration. No attempts to find other boondoggle billing systems. Basically, they look at *teachers* and see an easy target.
Take it for what you will. The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is to pay for the schools now and find other ways to generate revenue/cut costs. (SFUSD actually owns some property that could be rented, etc… )
Thank you Joe, you are absolutely correct in your overview. I believe school closures are necessary due to population decline but should be the final part of the process needed not the first.
I also very firmly believe SFUSD should be required to sell real estate to help improve school facilities. In fact, I don’t think it would be a bad idea for SFUSD to be required to sell any school site they close. This would raise 100s of $millions.
No way. Rent. Only rent. Governments should never give up real estate.
if schools need to be closed (which may not even be necessary):
1. close schools in the wealthy neighborhoods where most of the kids go to private school anyway;
2. build affordable family housing on the newly-available lots;
3. watch enrolment headcount rise as the exodus of lower- and middle-income familes reverses;
4. bonus fun: watch the heads of the wealthy explode.
Fun ideas, but the kids aren’t coming back.
Mark R Allen
You in the Real Estate business ?
Last time they sold property the deal went to Feinstein’s husband and his Coldwell-Banker spin-off.
Joe’s looking at numbers to crunch but deciding factor could be the View from the Market Rate condos that will end up there.
A better idea would be to convert them into Shelters for Homeless Students and their families.
h.
Wait!
We are bound under law to expand our population to a million+ people with mandated 80K+ in new housing units.
Next up in 10 years – “SFSUD faces class overcrowding dilemma due to a shortage of schools”.
This town is ruled by un-intended and un-thoughtout consequences.
Well … except for retirement pension and benefits maximization by our ruling overlords – that’s the one (and only?) area a great deal of expertise and fore-planning is dedicated to.
It is an interesting question. Of the 82K units, 46K are supposed to be “affordable.” Don’t be fooled by what the means. It certainly doesn’t mean working-class families will be staying in or moving to the city. A year or so ago, the district was gushing over the possibility of 5,000 new students from all that new housing construction.
Yes, the district is excited by the possibility of getting one new student for every 17 new housing units constructed. Planning the city around studios and one bedroom apartments “affordable at all income levels” (thanks Bilal Mahmood for the silly phrase), guarantees that families won’t be able to live in the city. Thus, fewer or no kids to go to public schools. But the private schools will still have kids who come from the entire Bay Area and are driven to and from by whoever has the time to do that. It’s good for the air, good for traffic, good for those kids building (local) community ties. Oh, no it isn’t.
A testimonial,
I taught for them for a couple of years til I crossed swords with the Union and the Administration and the President of the School Board.
Trifecta ! (kinda like RCV)
I created a Student Security Force with 7 monitors wearing orange vests and carrying clip boards in the halls all day citing cutters and channeling them to my programs Student Court and Detention Hall in my room which was converted Manual Shop.
That was 30 years ago and the District was incompetent at every level even then.
They had a closed hearing to which I was not invited and canceled my work.
Last I looked the Board Prez was in Prison for arranging contract killings amongst other things (Keith Jackson – Nuru associate).
When I went for proof of employment required for ballot designation they told me that my records were destroyed in a mysterious fire.
Oh yeah, great outfit.
lol
Go Niners !!
h.
Another reason why we should support Lauren Boebert’s “Buy More Lottery Tickets” bill. The legislation would require all citizens to replace their existing 401 K’s with a mixed portfolio of high-risk/low-yield scratch tickets combined with the more conservative California Weekly Lotto. This, in turn, according to Boebert, would send needed money to education.
“in terms of achieving equity … 88 percent of the simulated scenarios performed better on matters of equity than the current plan.”
Isn’t it at least possible that a big part of SFUSD’s problems are attributable to worshipping at the altar of so-called “equity”?
After all it was not so long ago when several SFUSD representatives were recalled for fiddling with matters of equity (school renaming) whilst Rome was burning (not reopening after Covid)?
Have the parents actually been polled about how high a priority “equity” is? Or put more bluntly, do the voters support de facto busing in 2024? Because at least this parent wants quality and not equity.
I agree with Joe that SFUSD is probably the most broke part of the city, along with City College. But I suspect that there is a demographic imperative to close some schools, and for SFUSD to become less ideological and more pragmatic.
This article starts from a flawed premise. I couldn’t read past the part where the parent of a school slated to be closed announces that the city doesn’t need to close ANY schools.
Clearly, this writer 1) has not been following the SF USD, which has declining enrollment 2) has not been following San Francisco city, which is way over budget, and 3) does not understand that the city doesn’t have an unlimited pot of gold anymore to indulge the individual demands of selfish people.
I would like to see Mission Local hire writers who are more informed on local issues.
Cynthia,
Joe and Lydia have the best staff in Town, some with advanced degrees from the top schools in America.
Their Research is the best in the City and Joe does the most thorough research.
Which makes you the opposite end of a horse.
h.
you clearly haven’t been reading the years long coverage of sfusd here. look in the archives, joe is well informed.
uhhh, errr… from one cynthia to another… google “Joe Eskenazi”
Yeah, I know he has a job at Mission Local. Doesn’t invalidate anything I wrote. He clearly doesn’t understand the very concept of a budget, and just doesn’t want his kids’ school to close.
And furthermore, Cynthia !
Pardon us for forming a quick defensive circle around this last remaining bastion of honest Journalism in San Francisco and its Cleanup Hitter.
We’re all Refugees here from a terrible space peopled with many thousands of people who present with about your band width.
Go Niners !!
(to the hospital mostly)
h.
Cynthia —
Thanks for your input. We’ll get right on it.
JE
“As a father of three children in a San Francisco public school slated for closure . . .”. That’s called a disclaimer. Your phrasing sounds as though Joe hadn’t disclosed that.
People need to remember that public schools are a State agency with only nominal oversight from the City. My kids got very good educations here and are thriving. Parents need to get their kids into the right schools and stay on course (easier said than done – but doable!). Parents make schools great while the Board often quibbles over silly matters (remember the school name issues). The Board has 1 employee – The Superintendent.
Calm on down, the price is right.