Like all California school districts, San Francisco’s public schools must serve all students who apply. But the San Francisco Unified School District, which has struggled with chronic teacher shortages, isn’t able to provide services to a small number of its special education students.
The solution — busing dozens of kids out of town to private schools, sometimes three or four hours of travel a day — is disruptive for the students and families. It’s also expensive for SFUSD.
A better solution is now at hand, at least for a fraction of these kids. SFUSD is opening its first dedicated special education school at a site that’s sat empty for two years: the Edwin and Anita Lee Newcomer School in Chinatown.
This October, 16 students will move into two of the school’s classrooms. Another 16 will do the same for the 2027-28 school year.
It’s a small step, representing only 20 percent of the 160 kids being shuttled around, and the busing program will continue for the rest of them. Starting in October is also less than ideal, forcing kids to begin the school year out of town before moving to the Lee Newcomer School.
There are still details to work out, not least of which is deciding which kids make the cut.
For the first 16 kids, SFUSD will need 11 staff members. (Special-ed staff-to-student ratios by law are much lower than in regular classes.) “We believe that we have the staff identified and ready to go,” SFUSD head of special education services Jennifer Jimenez-Payne said at last week’s school board meeting. She added that not all were officially hired yet.
Still, “this is a big jump,” says Melanie Valino Bauzon, chair of SFUSD’s Special Education Community Advisory Committee (SPED CAC). “Parents don’t want to wake up at five in the morning” to send their kids to school in “God knows where.”
The move also provides fiscal relief for SFUSD, which continues to work out of a deep budget hole. In 2025, the district estimated it would spend $42 million on the special-ed accommodations, which also include extra private tutors and therapists in San Francisco.
District staff told the school board last week that moving just the first 16 kids to Lee Newcomer would save $3 million. That’s a drop in the bucket of SFUSD’s $1.3 billion budget. But as state watchdogs and the teachers union have pointed out, the less the district spends on pricey outside help, the more it can use for its students.
Glimmers of hope
The move comes as SFUSD is getting its fiscal house in order. It’s not done yet, but as its finance team notes, the district has made strides cleaning up its once-miserable position control — keeping accurate records of its personnel and which positions are empty.
In 2024, the district misplaced $30 million in special education funding. It was restored, but the news didn’t help what was already a difficult climate for staffing, particularly for special education. (It’s not just SFUSD; special-ed staffing is a statewide problem.)
But last week, Jimenez-Payne said the special-ed staff vacancy rate is down to 7 percent — around 35 teachers and 96 paraeducators. Last spring there were 262 vacancies, according to the SPED CAC.
Even with an empty school to fill and recruitment looking up, SFUSD is moving slowly. The new program is open only to kids with complex needs like autism or intellectual disabilities who wouldn’t normally attend a mainstream school. Jimenez-Payne estimates that around 80 students qualify, about half of those who are currently shuttled out of town.
The inaugural group will make up two classes, one grades 5 to 8 and one grades 9 to 12. They can’t move until October because of construction, according to district documents. “We agree that transitioning students into a new school in October is hard,” SFUSD staff wrote in response to board member questions.
We truly do not want to open a big program.
SFUSD head of special education services Jennifer Jimenez-Payne
The building has 11 classrooms, and board vice president Jaime Huling asked last week why the district isn’t using all of them. “We can open [them all] up, but we shouldn’t” because of the need for individualized attention, Jimenez-Payne replied. “We truly do not want to open a big program.”
After the expansion to 32 kids in 2027-28, SFUSD and the county education office, which is partnering on the program, will decide whether to open more classrooms.
Watchdog approves
SFUSD has been under the state’s microscope since 2021, when a California Department of Education team began to oversee finances. The situation got worse before it got better. In 2024, the state gave SFUSD a “negative certification,” expanding its authority to veto budget decisions. A takeover was not out of the question.
One core problem, a yearslong enrollment decline, hasn’t yet stabilized. But in December, the state upgraded SFUSD’s certification.
The state’s Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team, or FCMAT, recommended last year that SFUSD stop relying on outside help for special education. The new program addresses that concern. It’s “an excellent idea,” the state’s fiscal advisor Elliott Duchon tells The Frisc via email. “Hopefully [it] will both save money and make it easier to place [special education students]. That has been a big problem across the state.”
Under federal and California law, districts that can’t meet the needs of special education students must pay for services by contracting out to private agencies. They also have to pay for transportation, and the costs add up.
The new special education school sounds promising, but many families are concerned about SFUSD’s ongoing staffing crisis.
Guadalupe Elementary parent Roberto Guzman Rivera
According to district staff, SFUSD spends up to $200,000 a year per student on private school tuition and more than $2 million on bus service.
The move should also please the United Educators of San Francisco, which campaigned hard in recent contract negotiations for its own members to teach these students. Union representatives did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Still caught short?
“The new special education school sounds promising, but many families are concerned about SFUSD’s ongoing staffing crisis,” says Roberto Guzman Rivera, a parent leader at Guadalupe Elementary in the Crocker-Amazon neighborhood.
Guzman Rivera points out that Latino families are overrepresented in SFUSD special education, and the students who attend regular schools need more help. Guadalupe, where nearly two-thirds of students are English language learners, has not had a bilingual speech therapist all year.
El Dorado Elementary, where SPED CAC chair Valino Bauzon’s son attends part-time, has been missing a “resource specialist” teacher until recently, she says, even though the district claims this help is available at every school. (A receptionist who answered El Dorado’s main line told The Frisc “there was recently a hire” for the position.)
Valino Bauzon agrees that starting small at the Lee Newcomer building is a good idea, especially if it means more support for special-ed students in regular schools. “Let’s get [those] fully staffed first,” she told The Frisc.
SFUSD representatives did not respond to questions before publication. They referred The Frisc to FCMAT’s recommendations, which also urged the district to improve its special-ed staffing.
Asked to evaluate SFUSD’s progress, FCMAT chief executive officer Mike Fine said via email that “implementation and progress monitoring are the responsibility of the district.”
Legal costs
The district could also save on legal bills by plugging its staffing gaps. Failing to deliver education to disabled students invites complaints. The district and county are allocating roughly $4 million to special education legal claims and parent reimbursements in their proposed 2026-27 budget.
SPED CAC member Bernice Casey, parent of a special-ed student, says she’s filed two complaints with the state, which requires the CDE to investigate. Others have filed actual lawsuits.
It’s not just parents. In March, Presidio Middle School special education teacher Sandra Mallon filed a lawsuit after a student hit her with a wooden whiteboard and she suffered a traumatic brain injury, according to case documents.
Mallon alleges she had to supervise her class and couldn’t leave her post, and that in subsequent months, administrators denied accommodations for her injuries because of staff shortages.
The number of disabled students has risen since the pandemic, but the SPED CAC is also worried about overdiagnosis, especially for Black and brown kids who are more often labeled with a disability. “Most of the time it’s not a special education assessment, it’s knowing how to educate students from different cultures,” says Valino Bauzon, whose son has some special needs but was initially misdiagnosed with autism.
FCMAT also flagged the issue last year, and SFUSD’s Jimenez-Payne says the district will run a pilot to help address it in the 2026-27 school year.
The new teacher contract underscores the value of special-ed skills. Paraeducators who offer medical services, often needed for special education, got a 5 percent bump on top of an 8.5 percent raise for all classified employees (paraeducators and other staff without a teaching credential). Teachers and other certificated employees got a 5 percent increase.
The SPED CAC also wants more substitute teachers to become full-time staff and better strategies for retaining current teachers. The committee will present its 2026-27 budget and priorities to the school board next week.
Much depends on what happens in Sacramento, however. Local districts must provide special-ed services by law but are often left to spend their own money. SFUSD paid for 74 percent of its own special education in 2025, FCMAT noted.
Budget negotiations in the capital are in flux. At the moment, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest revision withholds nearly $4 billion from general school funding yet boosts the special-ed allocation by $2.4 billion. The state will finalize the budget mid-June.
There are calls to change how the state funds local schools — “the long game is Sacramento,” as board president Phil Kim told The Frisc recently. But in the short term, SFUSD must continue to chip away at its funding problems and do right by its kids, even if it’s 16 students at a time.
