Every day, it seems, a Bay Area brewery or winery or venerable tavern goes gently into that good night. The booze business is cratering, and it’s a sad and deplorable development.
But, it seems, the San Francisco Unified School District is doing its damndest to buck this trend — by driving its employees to despair.
Being a school principal in San Francisco was already a job with a stress level akin to defusing unexploded ordinance or directing air traffic. Or perhaps doing both simultaneously.
The district’s administrators have already reached an impasse in long-running labor negotiations. Mediation failed. Next comes a “fact-finding” panel. If that, too, fails, the next step is a potential strike vote.
If it comes to that, it won’t be a mystery why. Death by 1,000 cuts is a real thing, especially when you have to procure multiple bidders for the cutting device.
That’s no joke. This school year, principals learned they were required to seek three separate bidders for every contract, even for long-running projects handled by long-running contractors — and no matter how paltry that contract is or how specialized the service the contractor provides.
Mission Local spoke with eight SFUSD principals or former principals who recounted spending hours searching for second and third bids for taiko drumming, chess instruction, ecological education, dance classes, after-school playground sports, bird-watching, storytelling and more.
If the time invested was significant, the dollars often were not: These are contracts in the low thousands or, sometimes, hundreds of dollars.
This added aggravation and time to an already aggravating and time-consuming process. This is the end of the third week of the school year, and a number of principals report that a contracting morass has kept some of their programs from starting on time.
On Late Friday afternoon, the SFUSD sent out a communique “clarifying and simplifying” the contracting process.
The threshold for requiring multiple bids to be submitted appears to now be $25,000. That’s amazing because, as recently as Thursday, principals say they were still being told by their supervising assistant superintendents that it was mandated to triple-source any contract, no matter how minuscule.
Mission Local has obtained multiple communications between the district and school sites in which a contract in the low thousand dollars was rejected. Rationales offered included “Denied … Please attach three quotes” and “Denied … 3 quotes.”
Coincidentally or not, the district’s late-Friday-afternoon “clarification” came some 24 hours after Mission Local inquired about SFUSD contracting policy.
“While I appreciate the recent change in our contract process, I wish it would’ve happened when we first flagged the issue last spring,” said Independence High principal Anna Klafter, the president of the principals’ union. “It would’ve saved our school leaders a lot of stress and frustration.”
It’s never a good situation when real school principals feel like they’re re-enacting a situation that would play well in a school mockumentary like “Abbot Elementary.”
But, lo, there was Catherine Walter from Grattan Elementary School, in recent months pondering how to find second and third bids for a program offering a 12-week drama residency for neurodivergent students.
Walter has also been forced to scrutinize the storyteller market because, up until today at 3:38 p.m., it was deemed no longer good enough to simply ink a contract for several thousand dollars of PTA money with a beloved retired nurse who’s been telling stories to Grattan’s students for a decade and change.
“I don’t want another storyteller. I don’t need one,” says Walter. “She is one of the most cherished people we have here. The kids love her.”
This gets to the heart of the efficacy — or lack thereof — of the district’s erstwhile policy of seeking at least three bids on even the puniest contract. This was required even when the present contractor had been doing a fine job for an agreeable price — and for a long time.
Allen Lee has been the principal at John Yehall Chin Elementary School for 25 years. And for 15 of those years he’s been working with the same consultant to teach puberty education. This, he says, is a contract on the order of $2,000 a year.
As recently as Wednesday, he was spending time seeking out two other providers of puberty education and soliciting a quote from them. Even though he had no interest in shifting the contract.
“Getting these two quotes becomes a hoop we now have to jump through, to be perfectly frank,” he says. “I have to contact these people. I feel bad for them because I am wasting their time.”
It was lost on none of the district’s many principals that while the mayor of their city was touting the end of “dumb rules” and an era of streamlining onerous processes, their jobs were becoming even more encumbered by rules that did not come off, shall we say, smart.
“The school district can still say, ‘Allen, you are proposing a contract of an amount that seems to be unreasonable,’” says Lee. “They can still do that level of fact-finding without us having to go through these three quotes.”
In its Friday communique, the district noted that, “As stewards of public funds, we have a fiduciary duty to ensure that spending is both appropriate and practical.”
It is unclear how the prior requirements were either appropriate or practical. A former principal chalked them up as “A CYA for the legal department and the district that does not solve the problem and creates all these problems for the people doing the work.”
And there’s more where that came from. If principals already had a perfectly acceptable contractor doing perfectly acceptable work for a perfectly acceptable rate, it stands to reason that the outfits listed for the second and third bids may not be … perfect.
Principals had been perversely incentivized to find less-than-viable bidders to fill out the requisite forms.
One needn’t be a contracting expert to begin spotting flaws in the district’s former dictum. But Ed Harrington is a contracting expert, and he spotted them.
“If you’re spending a few hundred or a few thousand dollars with a known vendor — why are you doing this?” asked the former longtime city controller. “This shows you don’t trust anybody and have no faith in them. It’s San Francisco, so maybe we should be less trusting — but if it’s a small dollar amount, let it go.
“There’s no reason to have three bids on paperclips.”
At 3:38 p.m. on Friday, the district apparently saw the wisdom in that.
That’s a belated relief for Independence High’s Anna Klafter. She has been laboring to complete a $3,000 contract with an ecology nonprofit that has worked at her school since 2012 or 2013. “We pay them peanuts,” she said.
Prior to today’s district memo, she had been frantically searching for two additional contractors who’d accept walnuts or cashews, lest the contract be denied.
“These were the barriers produced by our own system to keep us from completing the work that needs to be done to support students and families,” Klafter says. “This was but one thing in a sea of other things.”
Pointless stress and anxiety isn’t a result or side effect of what the school board is doing. Pointless stress and anxiety is SFUSD School Board’s mission statement.
Owen —
You’ll be amazed to learn that the school board does not oversee district contracting.
Yours,
JE
Plz put that fact in a follow up article.
I assumed the SF School Board approved this chaos.
Sir or madam —
People seem assume that the School Board controls celestial bodies, but its role even in running the school district is circumscribed.
Best,
JE
Their current and former payroll processing companies had no bid contracts.
Gotta love the hypocrisy.
It’s just a symptom of the larger problem of school underfunding. They have to hire all these contractors to do what could have and probably should have been done by full-time paid staff receiving benefits. And teachers are still stuck buying basic supplies for their classrooms.
I see both sides here.
We live in a corrupt city. As Mission Local (among others) has reported, people with power to award contracts in this city have awarded them to their friends, and some of our civic money has been spent on treats for the grant awardees.
These may be small grants but who can trust San Francisco public officials with no-bid contracts?
Sir or madam —
Rest assured, the contracting process even for small-dollar sums is still rigorous (if you like it) or cumbersome (if you don’t) even without having to triple-source a contract for $1,000.
Best,
JE
“taiko drumming, chess instruction, ecological education, dance classes, after-school playground sports, bird-watching, storytelling and more”
You can’t find volunteer groups for each of these? Why are SFUSD funds going towards any of this when the core needs of students are not being met?
Why are we trying to continue to require unpaid labor?! We should just tax the hundreds of billionaires that live in our city to pay for necessary education for our future generations.
But they donate the political campaign cash, so the “leadership” is basically captured by them. Fait accompli.
Unless SF were to put limits on corporate PAC dark money from Billionaire parasites, the situation will continue.
Where did you get the idea that site-budget dollars are going towards any of these things?
Have you ever heard of things like ‘grants’ and ‘PTAs?’
Hi can you please follow up with additional background information?. When did this change happen? Was the state advisor involved in this new policy? And so on?
Meanwhile, Mayor Laurie, has his child(ren)?, enrolled in his inherited, old Levi home, Friends school , private school. Take that dollar you took and invest in my beautiful school district. Because it a mess. And fire instead of shuffling people who are inept of caring our children who are enrolled in sfusd. I can literally tell u friends school, is not a friend of black children or brown, if they aren’t like yall because they aren’t staffed from a common who looks like them. Ugh. This hurts all of us. When don’t take care of all the children. Children.
And the Friends school only costs about $50 K per year.
Rashida,
I’m a retired teacher of Middle Schoolers and live next door to the Friends wonderful school in the old Levis factory and my dog and I pick up trash year round and in the Summer there are lots and lots of Black and Brown students at the school.
They spread wealth from the regular school year into their Summer Programs.
go Niners tomorrow 1pm !!
h.
Hey Joe- thanks for the constant excellent coverage on SFUSD- one thing I hope you cover one of these days are the debilitating lawsuits that SFUSD deals with. I have a sneaky suspicion some vendor sued SFUSD and thus this mandate that these principals had to deal with this year. I think the general public has no idea how often the district is sued for the smallest of things and is often the origination of bad policy.
Effing unbelievable.
The subtle humor in the beginning of this article is a clear indicator that AI will never take over from good writers
Stupid BS like this is why SFUSD leadership has bailed and is jumping ship in droves. Admins (principals) and certificated (teachers) know, there’s sooooo much Kafka-esque bureaucracy to contend with at every turn that distracts us from our jobs: to teach and run schools. Have we looked at the number of folks who have left the District in the past 3 years and why? It would be fascinating to do exit interviews, though any teacher will tell you educators are at a breaking point. SFUSD systems are a huge hairball of a mess.