The Bay Area is still abuzz from hosting six World Cup matches. But for many locals, soccer fervor is a daily staple, not a once-every-four-years treat.
For San Francisco’s Guadalupe Elementary School, soccer is also a crucial means to get kids back into class.
Guadalupe is a small school on the city’s southern edge, just steps away from Daly City. Five years ago, the school was reeling from the pandemic, like most others, and its chronic absenteeism rate was an alarming 50 percent: a measure of how many students had been absent at least 10 percent of the 2021-22 school year. The district-wide rate was about 30 percent.
Principal Raj Sharma arrived in the summer of 2023. The absenteeism rate had dropped to 40 percent, still quite bad; Sharma soon had a goal to reduce it further.
“I walked onto campus, and the first thing I saw was soccer,” Sharma tells The Frisc. “Kids are really into it. We just had to formalize this thing.”
Kids were playing pickup soccer on the blacktop yard in the mornings; Sharma saw a chance to make the sport a carrot to get kids back into class. Guadalupe’s student body is nearly 80 percent Latino.
“Soccer is part of our culture,” says parent and PTA leader Roberto Guzman Rivera. “For many of our families, soccer is in our blood.”
But Sharma’s idea — a new turf field for the schoolyard and a team to compete against other schools every spring — needed $50,000. “You go to other schools and they raise millions,” says Guzman Rivera. “For us, it was a massive deal.”
And chronic absenteeism makes fiscal matters worse. In California, the fewer kids attending class, the fewer dollars go to school districts, something SFUSD has struggled with in recent years.
Getting students to “Be Here!”
SFUSD has been juggling multiple crises for years, including a budget deficit made worse by falling enrollment. Losing students, along with declining attendance, means less money from the state. The district says that in 2024-25 alone student absences cost it more than $60 million.
Of course, attendance woes aren’t just a fiscal problem. The district is struggling to boost academic performance, and kids can’t learn if they’re not in class. Those who rely on schools for meals also risk going hungry. Everyone in the district knows absenteeism is a problem that needs fixing.
“I don’t see how we meet any of our student outcome goals without addressing chronic absenteeism,” said school board member Supryia Ray at the June 23 meeting. In 2025-26, SFUSD spent $6,000 on a social media awareness campaign — “Be Here!” — to address the problem.
Some schools have gone further, assigning staff members to chase down students or, as Guadalupe has done, have staff make phone calls to families. But it’s unclear if the district, which has cut central office staff the past couple years, is making a more coordinated effort. Board members became frustrated at the most recent meeting trying to get concrete answers from Superintendent Maria Su.
Su told the board that when school resumes in August, SFUSD will have a new staff position — essentially an attendance czar — and will upgrade its attendance tracking system, which currently is logged daily in spreadsheets.
Last September, SFUSD set itself a goal to lower chronic absenteeism from 24 percent to 20 percent by the end of this school year. It has not yet released those numbers.
Soccer field, not birthday party
Back at Guadalupe, parent Guzman Rivera is also frustrated. “I do not understand why SFUSD treats solving chronic absenteeism as if it were rocket science,” he says. “The answer seems straightforward: when schools offer programs that students genuinely enjoy and feel connected to, students want to come to school.”
It’s what educators call a “sense of belonging,” and studies show it’s often a prerequisite for good grades: kids can’t learn if they feel like outsiders. At Guadalupe, students’ sense of belonging has climbed since the soccer program began.
The team — the Mustangs — just finished their third season. The turf field and entire program might not have happened without a team effort. In 2024, the school got a $10,000 seed grant from the San Francisco Education Fund but had to come up with another $40,000 — no small feat. Eighty percent of its 273 students are from low-income households; their PTA network doesn’t come with deep pockets.
They went door to door in the neighborhood with flyers, says Guzman Rivera. In lieu of a birthday party, one student even asked for donations to the field. Milton Ronaldo Lainez (whose second name has deep soccer meaning) knew he wouldn’t enjoy the fruits of the money raised for too long, since he was already in fifth grade at the time, says his mom Mayra Herrera. But his younger sister would, and “my house is a huge fan of soccer,” says Herrera.
Raising the money wasn’t the end of the hard work. To join the soccer program, students must get good grades and have clean disciplinary records. Milton Ronaldo, now 12, was behind in classes and struggled at math, but joining the team motivated him to “complete all the assignments,” Herrera says. He’s now earning straight A’s in middle school “because of this good foundation.”
It’s not just Milton Ronaldo. The school’s math scores are improving, and according to Sharma, the kids on the soccer team are driving the improvement.
Sharma acknowledges the soccer program isn’t a cure-all for chronic absenteeism or better grades. All kinds of factors are at play. For example, Guadalupe’s students and families could be more susceptible than other schools to fears of federal immigration enforcement.
After two years of steady decline in absenteeism, down to 25 percent, the school’s rate ticked back up to 31 percent in 2024-25, according to state data. The setback mirrors district-wide numbers, but Guadalupe’s rate of improvement remains above district averages.
Sharma says it’s important to continue the momentum with family outreach, interventions for struggling kids, and more activities that kids love. But the sight of Milton Ronaldo grinning ear to ear and adding tournament medals to his World Cup sticker collection makes it clear: soccer helped kickstart Guadalupe’s post-pandemic comeback.
