Schools, houses, and food

Good afternoon! We’ve got some (not so good) city news.

San Francisco public school principals turned in their 2023-24 budget proposals last week, in the context of a statewide budget cut for education. Some smaller schools serving low-income, mostly Black and Latinx families may lose around $200,000 each–the equivalent of three teacher positions.

So far, John O’Connell High School, June Jordan High School, and Cleveland Elementary Schoool are “under-enrolled” and so face fewer teachers and larger classes next year. With approximately 440 students coming from low-income families, and a growing number of Deaf, blind, and English language learner students, many O’Connell educators described the lack of resources as “depressing.” June Jordan, a small high school in the Excelsior, is also hurting. “We don’t have a parent liaison. We don’t have a set of Chromebooks. We have one language class. We don’t have AP or honors classes,” an instructor said. “Students notice racial inequities; they notice we have less resources than other schools.” Finalized budgets for SFUSD schools will be sent to the state for review by July.

The “wonky yet bewildering problem of builders’ interminable waits for site permits,” writes Joe Eskenazi, is another longstanding mess in San Francisco. After a review of preliminary drawings and documents, and an accounting of safety and other big-picture factors, builders are supposed to get a site permit– the first step in getting construction approved. Yet just obtaining that site permit takes from four to 18 months— which means permit expediters and influence peddlers proliferate, trying to move things along.

Members of the Board of Supervisors and the mayor are separately crafting legislation to speed up site permits— although almost nobody believes that such “fixes” will do much for housing development. More likely, the proposals are a venue for ramped-up political competition between Mayor London Breed and almost-but-not-officially-announced mayoral candidate Supervisor Ashai Safai. “You cannot legislate a solution to a problem that is fundamentally a management problem,” a longtime government wrangler tells Mission Local. “It requires good management.”

There’s more waiting over on South Van Ness, where hundreds of people line up for food at the Mercadito each week outside St. Mary and St. Martha Church. The lines are likely to get longer in April, when an estimated 100,000 city residents feel the effects of CalFresh food benefits being cut back to as little as $23 a month.

Hoping for better news soon,

Sara