On the first day of school after winter break, San Francisco public school principals were greeted by a baffling email from district Superintendent Maria Su.
In the email, shared with Mission Local, the superintendent shared a preliminary budget that laid out $102 million in cuts to balance the San Francisco Unified School District’s budget and exit state oversight.
School principals and members of the San Francisco Board of Education were confused: The Board of Education had unanimously rejected the same plan just last month.
The budget numbers, sent to principals of more than 100 schools across the district, detailed how many staff members would be retained, and which programs and services would survive into the 2026-2027 school year. Principals and school board commissioners were befuddled — and fearful.
“I don’t know how they could go forward with it,” said a principal and union representative, who did not give her name for fear of repercussions.
Every principal she knows disapproved of the district budget plan, she said. The Board of Education unanimously rejected it. And still, here it was, apparently moving forward.
“It doesn’t seem to matter what we say.”
When asked why Su had re-shared a rejected budget, a spokesperson for the school district said that the Board of Education has the authority to reject Su’s budget, but not to make decisions on staffing, and so the budget sent by Su is still in play as a “starting point.”
Su, during December’s school board meeting, described the projected cuts in her budget proposal — which call for major layoffs of school staff, including teachers and assistant principals, with the greatest cuts happening at smaller schools with lower enrollment — as a “worst-case scenario.”
The next step, she added, will be meeting with school principals one-on-one to listen to feedback on how the plan would affect their schools.
At smaller schools with lower enrollment, the number of layoffs would be significantly higher, even though smaller schools often educate larger numbers of low-income and immigrant students.
Those who voted down Su’s budget argued that the size of a school doesn’t necessarily correlate to how many employees it needs.
Schools with large populations of low-income or immigrant students, for example, typically need more staff to help students who may not be getting help with their homework after school, or have access to outside tutoring, or even a quiet space to study.
Visitacion Valley Middle School, for example, hosts just over 300 students, and nearly 90 percent of them are low-income and receive a free or reduced lunch. Under Su’s budget, Visitacion Valley would lose about half its teachers — going from from 22 to 14 — as well as its assistant principal.
This weekend, schools will host meetings with families, and SFUSD staff will go over Su’s budget proposal. The district has until March to present any budget revisions.
Su, who was appointed in October 2024 to replace former Superintendent Matt Wayne, and took on a permanent role last November, has faced criticism in recent months for what some staff see as a lack of transparency in the district’s financial decision-making.
But Board of Education sources said Su’s staffing cuts were the “main reason” it voted against the district’s overall fiscal plan in December.
At the time, criticism of the plan was harsh. “This appears to be a one-size-fits-all” policy, said Board Vice President Jaime Huling during last month’s meeting. “We have diverse schools with diverse needs.”
Reading from messages he received from school principals concerned over the staffing plan, School Board Commissioner Matt Alexander said in December, “‘It’s just not possible to run a school at this staffing level …. It honestly feels like [this proposal] was made by people who have never actually worked in a school.’”
“You just can’t run a middle school without an assistant principal,” said Maya Baker, the principal at Visitacion Valley Middle School. Between disciplining students, managing daily school operations and new curriculum, the burden placed on school principals will be “impossible,” she said.
“I thought they would go back to the drawing board,” said another school principal, who wished to remain anonymous. When she opened her email to discover that the same plan had been proposed again, she was shocked.
The model, which is based on a ratio recommended by the state, may work for suburban schools, she said. But at a smaller, urban school like hers, students have “deep, unique needs.”
The district has some hard choices they’ve ignored for years/decades. 126 schools may have made sense back when we had ~90K students. Now that there are ~50K students, we probably need to cut the number of schools to ~75. 75 well staffed schools would be much better than 126 poorly staffed ones. Hard choices, but choices that need to be made.
Regarding the Visitacion example, going from 14 students per teacher to 21 is still below the California average of 22
I think we should make cuts to the military, for some reason they have money for the military.
San Francisco doesn’t have a military.
For those interested in the numbers, this post shows enrollment around the ’60s peak:
https://www.sfusd.edu/facing-our-past-changing-our-future-part-ii-five-decades-desegregation-sfusd-1971-today
They noted a 37% drop (not 50%) in teachers, not students.
Greg, you should re-read. That is not a student to teacher ratio. That is just the number of teachers.
Wouldn’t it be better to just close a few schools rather than under-staff all of them?
Sounds like the cuts themselves are non-negotiable, so we are just quibbling about who and what gets the chop.
The harsh reality is that SFUSD has consistently failed to pay their staff the correct amount and on-time. For a group of professionals who are commonly underpaid and living paycheck to paycheck, many have left the district with no intention to return with more lucrative opportunities in private education and more functional school districts like San Mateo nearby. SFUSD continued to fail a the simple threshold of meeting their obligation as an employer and it is a tragedy which will have a domino effect on us all.
Yes, the SFUSD screwed up its payroll system, but the teachers are, in fact, quite well paid (particularly when you consider what a poor job they do of educating their students; for example only about 22% of 12th graders are able to do math at or above the level of proficiency expected of 12th graders).
California teachers aren’t underpaid. New teachers start ar a lower pay scale, like most professions.
AJ, in case you missed it the point is that SFUSD has a financial crisis. So by definition the problem is not too little spending but too much!
There are too many schools, closing some of them and streamlining would allow paying wages competitive with other districts.
Apologies, Jim. I failed to make myself clear. You are correct that SFUSD has a financial crisis. What I was alluding to is not that the problem is too little spending, but that that SFUSD has been unable to meet its simple obligation of handling payroll. If the school district cannot handle the bare minimum of paying it employees on-time and the correct amount – how can we expect them to handle a budget?
Jim, that is an inaccurate diagnosis — SFUSD has mutliple overlapping crises and a few connected to deep long-running issues in this city …
AMEN! When I retired from SFUS Dysfunctional, I subbed down in San Mateo, and the schools down there work just fine. The problem with our school district as well as Oakland, It’s too top heavy with people, not in the class room, making decisions for the classrooms, and most of them even they make the big$$$ don’t live in the city.
I’d love to see Mission Local go deeper on where the disconnect is here. What was the board expecting from the superintendent instead of this?
Did they expect Su to propose a plan with fewer job cuts in the same total budget? If so, where would the savings come from instead?
Or did they expect a plan with a bigger budget? If so, why does the board think the district has more money to spend than Su thinks it has?
The same folks didn’t make any calibrations over the years.
I’d like to better understand the ratio point. I’m under the impression that most of the funding comes from the state. I would assume that funding supports a certain number of adults/student. If we think the state ratios are inappropriate for our schools, well, great, but unless the city is willing to pitch in, we will not magically find more money for better ratios. What am I missing?
Maybe the smaller schools should be closed to allow for more efficient operations?
SFUSD seems like a big part of its operations are to be real estate managers and operators.
Are they using their dollars wisely to efficiently run schools? Are they investing in maintenance and selling off property that doesn’t currently have demands?
These are the kind of questions the board has to be asking, but I have never seen them do that.
Closing ten schools should be relatively easy, and some sites might be perfect for new housing. A more complicated but beneficial scenario might be turning a semi-centralized school site for new teacher housing. Such a use could provide dozens or hundreds of new teacher-preference housing.
If they are in $$$ trouble, where did they get the funds to open that brand spanking school, which will open next fall, in Mission Bay near, UCSF.
There was a 2016 bond – Prop A
I am quite befuddled by the District’s spokesperson comment saying “the Board of Education has the authority to reject Su’s budget, but not to make decisions on staffing.'”
Maybe I’m missing something but aren’t most budget matters of any organization around staff and how they are to be allocated? If these two intertwined oversight roles are as separate and off-limits for the BOE to weigh in on as SFUSD is asserting it is no wonder this district has such perpetual dysfunction.
Why do we even have an elected Board? To focus on curriculum that dissuades critical thinking and punishes achievement?
SFUSD is holding onto a fat rainy day fund and insists on stashing away more money right now… We are already operating on skeleton crews at the sites. The money is there. SFUSD refuses to spend it.
The District Administration seems to be terrified by a handful of parents who protest any suggestion of closing of THEIR school. School is FREE for them. Deal with a consolidation or a move. The students will. People also depend on the jobs they have at SFUSD. Life is becoming hell for the remaining employees who are still trying to keep the district functional after a serious wave of layoffs, defections, and early bonus-driven retirements last year. Everyone is doing more with less. Now we are told there are more serious cuts on the horizon. Some union members are working on long-expired contracts and the office of Labor Relations is offering almost nothing for the next 3 years. These members are critical to positive outcomes for students and the function of the organization as a whole. I wonder if any of the Directors of this, that, and the other are even still invested in student success. The rank and file workers ARE.
Matt Alexander points out something that matters deeply:
“It’s just not possible to run a school at this staffing level …. It honestly feels like [this proposal] was made by people who have never actually worked in a school.”
Though it violates state law (California Education Code), Su was appointed and then made permanent despite lacking a teaching credential.
Visiting a school site for half an hour to read a book to a classroom is not enough to make one qualified to be superintendent of SFUSD or any district.
Sorry to say my girl-London Breed appointed her to appease the Chinese community.Like both Elon Musk and Trump,Su lacks the qualifications for that job. In addition to having a Calif. Teaching Credential, she should have an Admin. one as well.
Two of my children attend SFUSD schools with higher populations of high need students which means that under this new budget proposal, their schools will suffer disproportionately. This is not acceptable. The school district needs to cut from other parts of the budget and prioritize student instruction and services. Students should not be punished for budget mismanagement from years past.
All budgeting should be publicly available. Students at some schools are funded at like 9,000 per pupil and over 50,000 per pupil at others. Smaller schools are much more expensive per student. All schools are suffering because we need to close a few schools to right size. Why are we paying people well over a quarter of a million dollars annually to continue to kick the can down the road.
Time to punish all those public school students and low income families!
How dare they try and setup lives in the good ol Frisco!
They probably also voted for the ‘wrong’ mayor and supervisors, right??