The likelihood of a teacher strike, perhaps as soon as early February, is alarmingly high.
It figures to be a rotten time for every public school child and parent. But some of the school district’s hardest-up families are already feeling the stress.
The M.O. of the strapped San Francisco Unified School District is to view personnel as walking dollar signs in need of cutting. The district is, both overtly and covertly, paring back its newcomer programs for recent immigrants as part of an effort to shave more than $100 million from the budget.
There are, according the district, fewer newcomers than in recent years — a decline from 1,856 in 2022-23 to 1,326 in 2025-26. A reduction is plausible: Well before televised mayhem in the Twin Cities, the number of desperate immigrants either able or willing to come to the United States was on the wane.
But it’s hard to say the district is having the necessary budget and staffing discussions with newcomer students and families and the educators who serve them.
Quite the opposite: A number of recent moves affecting newcomers have been rapid and/or unilateral. Among them:
- Mission Local has learned that monolingual Spanish-speaking newcomer parents at Mission Education Center were called by the district in October and told that their children would be moved out of the school within hours. This was not communicated to staff at the school, who noticed newcomer students dropping out of their attendance system before being contacted by alarmed parents.
- Visitacion Valley Middle School is one of three middle schools with newcomer programs. Its preliminary January budget wholly eliminated the newcomer program, which is slotted for up to 120 students — a move undertaken without advance warning to school staff or families. While this cancellation was rescinded, the staffing and newcomer students at Viz Valley for next year will be vastly reduced, Mission Local has learned.
- The district’s dissemination of its newcomer students remains puzzling. At some schools, there are purportedly far more newcomers than resources available to serve them. At other schools, however, there are scores of unfilled newcomer slots.
Immigrant parents and educators at newcomer programs accuse the district of constricting the pipeline that would place students into these programs — and then pointing to low enrollment numbers to justify budget-related cuts.
Newcomers and their families often do not desire the limelight. The goings-on in Minneapolis illustrate one reason why.
Also, busy monolingual recent immigrants don’t necessarily grasp the nuances of a public education system that can drive astrophysicists to despair. And they don’t have supervisors or the mayor on speed dial when things go sideways.
In a somewhat unusual move, immigrant families and educators will stage an event tonight at 5:30 p.m. at San Francisco International High School at 655 De Haro St., protesting what they describe as a dismantling of newcomer education.
Frustration is mounting: Newcomer parent Carlos was prepping for his evening restaurant shift in October when a Spanish-speaking school district employee called him around 7 p.m. and said his son would be moved out of Mission Education Center by the next day.
“Yes, yes, we’re already transferring him,” Carlos remembers the woman telling him on the phone. “And, oh wow, I was surprised because this is not something I expected.” The next day, he went to Mission Education Center to talk to the teachers, “and none of them knew anything. They were surprised.” But his son had already been transferred.
Yeniffer, a fellow Mission Education Center parent, received a similar call. While she hoped to transfer her children to a nearby school in the next school year, she recalls being told no; it would have to be the very next day, because her children were already enrolled there.
When parents asked for an explanation, they were told this was done for their protection in the event of an immigration raid.
“They tried to convince us not to leave the children at MEC because we didn’t know what was going to happen with immigration,” Yeniffer recalls. “That they would be safer in other schools. And I replied, ‘no.’”
There were, even in recent years, well over 100 newcomer students at MEC, a newcomer-centric school. Now, there are a dozen or fewer; three of them are Yeniffer’s kids (including non-newcomers at transitional kindergarten classes, perhaps around 70 total students attend here).
A number of newcomer parents refused to accept their kids’ transfers. Several, however, including Carlos, relented. His son now attends school elsewhere.
It’s not ideal: Neither he nor his wife is able to reliably pick up or drop off his son. His son no longer receives after-school care. And the child is now being instructed in English, in which he is not proficient.
Carlos said he believes the district’s line about immigration fears was a ploy, and he feels duped. “This was something very unfair for the teachers, parents and children,” he said. “Among the parents, we came to the conclusion that it was a pretext they used, and they took advantage of it to intimidate us so we would all leave that school.”
“Maria,” another newcomer parent, wanted to get her children into Mission Education Center. In December, she said, district officials told her to bring in paperwork. But when she filled it out and brought it in only last week “they said it was too late for the documents, and they weren’t accepting any more students at the school.”
MEC, again, has fewer than a dozen newcomer students. “I find it unbelievable, considering that 90 percent of the classrooms are empty,” she said.
Staff at MEC, however, believe it. They say the district has, essentially, stopped sending kids here since December 2024. They accuse the district of making a backdoor attempt to close the school, a move they said it would never pull at a school populated by middle-class and upper-middle-class students.
After being blindsided when the district called parents and moved students out of MEC, in October staff wrote a sharply worded letter to the SFUSD.
“The decision to move students without notice or collaboration … inflicted real harm and didn’t allow staff to prepare transition plans,” it reads.
“While we understand the intent may have been to address safety concerns, the execution of this plan was unacceptable and reckless. … We want to also acknowledge that there was significant hesitation in composing this letter out of concern for retaliation and potential staff investigations.
“Remaining silent would only perpetuate the mistreatment our families experienced and allow such actions to continue unchecked here and potentially occur in other schools.”
Staff said they received no response.
Mission Local sent a list of specific questions to the district regarding newcomer programs. The district replied with a general statement that did not address our questions.
So, we don’t presently know if the person or persons who proposed nixing Visitacion Valley Middle School’s newcomer program and shunting those kids to Everett or Francisco has ever taken public transit from Viz Valley to the Mission or the Marina and timed it with a stopwatch.
Even the partial restoration of this program in next year’s budget reveals what experts in the field described as questionable understanding of newcomer education programs.
The plan, at present, calls for reducing newcomer teachers at Viz Valley from five to two. But students are taught in multiple subjects: Social studies, science, English, math. How’s that going to work with just two teachers?
Ominously, as of Jan. 29, the district has funded zero newcomer teachers at Visitacion Valley.
Meanwhile, Mission Local spoke to multiple district employees who independently confirmed that a staffer at Galileo High bemoaned to a roomful of peers that there were more newcomers assigned to that school than resources to educate them — with some being placed in general education.
Meanwhile, at newcomer-centric San Francisco International High, there are legions of open slots specifically for newcomers; the school has a listed enrollment of 280, down from 499 in 2021-22. It’s slated to shrink again to a projected 220 with cuts in next year’s budget.
Why are newcomer-centric schools with unused resources being passed over in favor of more traditional schools with limited resources?
That question, at least officially, remains unanswered. But the runaround given to “Maria” — who was told to bring in paperwork to get her kids into a newcomer school and then told that a school with fewer than 12 newcomer students wasn’t taking any more — is instructive, educators working with newcomers said.
There are, it turns out, many newcomers across the district who are not in newcomer programs. It is not clear how diligently the district is informing newcomer parents about their options. So if they don’t hear about newcomer programs from their friends, and if the district isn’t adequately publicizing that option, they’re just not going to know.
Newcomer education requires lower student-to-teacher ratios and specialized educators. These are costly requirements, and the district is in cost-cutting mode.
Carlos, whose son was abruptly moved out of a newcomer program, wishes his child was still benefitting from that specialized environment.
In addition to emotional and logistical hardships, his boy, a limited English speaker, was actually moved up a grade at his new school.
“It was,” Carlos said of the abrupt school transfer, “just a complete mess.”
Additional reporting and translation by Oscar Palma.
International High School and newcomer programs are a huge resource for our city. San Francisco should be proud of the work that’s being done there and boast about their amazing students, teachers, and staff. These programs are truly remarkable and create thinking, engaged leaders to guide us into the future.
AMEN! Just posted something similar, but leave it to SFUSD to screw up such a great program.
If schools are closed during the strike will students be considered absent? I’ve email SFUSD and have not received a reply.
Common sense would… oh wait, right, it’s SFUSD you’re dealing with. My guess, they probably think you’re trolling them. IIRC, didn’t absentee rate factor into state funding now? If that’s the case, they have every incentive to get this right.
At any rate, consider getting legal counsel on retainer /s.
Good luck with trying to hire any lawyer, to take on SFUSD.The best bet is to bypass them and go directly to the State of Calif., or contact your local supervisor or Senator Scot Weiner.
So here’s a question: We keep being told that housing is in critically short supply and way too expensive in SF. So why would there be so many low-income immigrant students? Something doesn’t compute. Thanks for any serious, non-hateful, responses.
This shouldn’t surprise to anyone. SFUSD has been failing newcomers for decades. Our family friend had a horrendous experience at Mission High School. We still laugh and cry at all the “services” she was allegedly getting.
The New Comer Program,which many school districts,across the nation, have for newly arrived immigrant families, has been undermined for decades, by the Chinese and Spanish immersion schools,which were created in order to please White middle class parents, and to distance themselves away from American American students, whom the district sees, as discipline problems. Notice only 2 languages are focused on, while every day, there are students from:Cambodian, Laos,Russian,and the Pacific Islands, that need new comer services, in order to be acclimated into not just school, but their new country.