A contentious recall. A budget crisis and teacher payroll fiasco. Shrinking schools and pandemic learning loss. A new superintendent and school board elections coming in November. As if to put an extra exclamation point on a mind-blowing year, public school officials might also ask voters in November to approve a $1 billion bond for school repairs, upgrades, and more.
It would be the biggest city bond in San Francisco history — for schools or anything else.
There’s been plenty of chatter about this megabond; even the city’s capital planners have flagged it. It’s far from a done deal, however. Several steps remain for it to reach the ballot in November, which would mark six years after the previous school facilities bond, of $744 million, got a thumbs-up in 2016. (The school district has raised more than $2 billion since 2001 despite misuse of bond money in previous years.)
The past six years have also brought serious questions about district finances and spending. Most recently, there’s the payroll snafu, which was dissected at a public meeting this week. There’s also the budget deficit, which, despite a one-year fix thanks to hundreds of layoffs and a state windfall, looms large in future years as student enrollment continues to decline.
There are also concerns about the previous bond of $744 million, which is still being doled out. One of those questions centers on legal expenses around a controversial mural at George Washington High School that an oversight committee has surfaced. By state law, the committee is the watchdog for the hundreds of millions of dollars awarded to an army of architects, contractors, and others to upgrade the highest priority schools and other buildings. The mural is the least of their problems.
Nobody home
In 2016, SF voters gave full-throated approval (80 percent yes) to the $744 million bond, which was also called “Safe Modern Spaces for Learning,” because even municipal bonds need nice names. That’s a lot of money to borrow and pay back, and government entities do it all the time, putting up their vast assets to guarantee that they’re good for it. SFUSD is no different.
In exchange for a lower vote threshold — 55 percent to pass — the district promised the bond would have a citizens’ oversight committee. The committee’s bylaws say it must meet at least four times a year. Until last year, it never did. In fact, it didn’t exist much of the time. Until a new slate of members formed in May 2021, the committee had met only once across nearly three years, according to public records, and not at all from August 2019 onward.
(The first chair of the reconvened committee was Ann Hsu, who was recently named to the Board of Education in the wake of the recall. The committee is looking for her replacement; Rex Ridgeway, whose granddaughter is a Lincoln High student, is the interim chair.)
When asked why the district failed to maintain the committee, known by its initials CBOC, in good standing for so long, SFUSD spokeswoman Laura Dudnick emailed this answer:
“During 2016-18, the chief facilities officer position was vacant.” [Note: The position wasn’t vacant until June 2017, according to the outgoing officer’s LinkedIn page.] “During that time, the majority of CBOC appointments expired. In 2020, as staff were prepared to launch a formal outreach effort, the pandemic hit and SFUSD went into remote mode. The pandemic made recruitment to CBOC difficult, if not impossible. In response to public feedback in 2021, and the successful resumption of in person learning, the facilities division prioritized recruitment of members and convened CBOC in summer 2021.”
When asked why it took until 2020 to start recruiting new CBOC members, Dudnick said there were less formal attempts, which were unsuccessful.
“Facility condition: exemplary”
Soon after the reconstituted committee was seated last year, news began to emerge about the sorry state of the Mission district’s Buena Vista Horace Mann School, which has an 83 percent Latinx student body and goes from kindergarten through eighth grade. The building is a century old. Problems included electrical hazards — a kid plugged in a laptop and received a shock that sent him to the emergency room — pest infestations, and a gas leak that forced an evacuation and could have been disastrous.
Sup. Hillary Ronen, whose district includes the Mission, convened a dramatic public hearing in early October 2021. The Board of Education voted later that month to allocate $40 million in bond money to the school. (Ronen also wrangled $140,000 in emergency money from the Board of Supervisors.)
The report’s comments wax beatific about the school – “the auditorium has an nostalgic elegance that creates a warm ambiance” – but make no mention of problems like, say, rat poop.
Unfortunately, the revelations that spurred the hasty vote were nothing new. In early 2019, a parent tried to bring the school’s dilapidated condition to the Board of Education’s attention. (Mission Local published the letter and detailed the problems.) “We’d been flagging issues even by 2016,” the school’s principal Claudia DeLarios Morán told The Frisc.
Between the early 2019 complaint and the fall 2021 uproar, however, SFUSD issued two annual comprehensive reviews of Buena Vista Horace Mann that read as if produced in an alternate reality. On page 6 of the first report card (“Inspection date: fall 2020”), the facilities are deemed in good repair: a few broken lights and light covers, a water fountain out of order, but overall, a big X under “Repair status: good.”
The report’s general comments wax beatific about the school (“The auditorium has an nostalgic elegance that creates a warm ambiance for the school’s theatre, music, and dance productions”), but make no mention of problems like, say, rat poop: “Routine cleaning and repairs are done in a timely manner.”
The next report card (“Inspection date: fall 2021”), went even further. Facility condition: exemplary.
“How can Buena Vista Horace Mann get a blessing of good standing when everyone knows it’s falling down?” said Ridgeway, interim chair of the bond oversight committee.
DeLarios Morán said this about the report cards: “I don’t know how those things happened. It doesn’t feel like a terribly transparent process. We were not consulted on it.”
Don’t get too specific
In the 2016 bond measure language, voters could peruse a list of more than 40 schools and facilities. It didn’t explicitly name them as top priority (bond-funded projects were “authorized at all district sites … including but not limited to” the sites listed), but calling them out set up certain expectations. After all, the bond push emphasized that $100 million, nearly 15 percent of the total, was to help move Ruth Asawa School of the Arts to a Civic Center location.
Horace Mann was fifth on the list. In an October 20, 2021 presentation to the oversight committee, SFUSD chief facilities officer Dawn Kamalanathan said Buena Vista Horace Mann had received $250,000 in bond money for upgrades — or in district parlance, “modernization.” DeLarios Morán said she wasn’t aware of that dollar amount, but one pre-COVID problem — buckling ground that shut down the school’s play structure for months — was eventually fixed with what she told was bond money.
Dudnick did not respond to questions about the earlier funding, but she did tell The Frisc that the school’s modernization project launched in January 2022. DeLarios Morán said she’s now meeting with district staff regularly and feels optimistic that the school community will have intensive input. “The phrase ‘nothing about us without us’ is not historically where the bond process has come from,” she said. “We have the opportunity to get the process right.”
School board commissioner Matt Alexander was in the middle of the negotiations for the $40 million last fall and told Mission Local: “I’m grateful to the Buena Vista Horace Mann community for their incredible organizing work to advocate for justice.” Asked about the 2016 bond funding, he told The Frisc he had “thoughts based on what we learned,” but wanted an update from Kamalanathan before he could comment.
District lawyers ‘fight you to not get too specific with the [bond] language so you can manage expectations.
SFUSD chief facilities officer Dawn Kamalanathan
It’s hard to say whether Buena Vista Horace Mann would have gotten more attention earlier if an oversight committee, as required by law, had been minding the $744 million store. District officials, including Kamalanathan at the oversight committee’s meeting Wednesday, have repeatedly said that the 2016 bond document’s naming of facilities was not a specific to-do list. Kamalanathan added the language was “very clear” about this, and noted that district lawyers “fight you to not get too specific with the language so you can manage expectations.”
When asked about spending priorities, SFUSD spokeswoman Dudnick stressed that flexibility is important and that for every bond, the district “identifies more projects as eligible for funding than will be delivered.”
The biggest example is the $100 million pledged to move Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and create an arts institute in the sprawling, landmarked complex where Kamalanathan and staff have their offices — it’s a project long-dreamed of in the district.
But the school board decided against it last fall. Some of that $100 million is now going to Buena Vista Horace Mann; DeLarios Morán worries that the $40 million won’t cover crucial safety fixes and the long-term renewal of the school. “I’m preoccupied making sure that whatever we dream up can be actualized and that we hit all the safety needs,” she said, but officials have told her there’s at least $7 million more they can divert from the $100 million. Kamalanathan said Wednesday that money would come from funds currently earmarked for improvements to outdoor school spaces.
Mural, mural on the wall
Last year, the new oversight committee was digging through records and found that SFUSD had apparently used bond money to pay Sacramento lawyers to defend against a lawsuit after the school board voted in 2019 to cover up a controversial mural at George Washington High. (The lawsuit, which said covering the murals would violate California environmental law, is ongoing. The murals have not been touched.)
After months of queries, SFUSD chief general counsel Danielle Houck sent a memo in late March that acknowledged bond funds were used — and that the use was legitimate. The committee has gleaned that at least $143,000 went to the law firm, but according to interim chair Ridgeway, that figure seems low. He wants to know the total. In her memo, Houck wrote that the amount is confidential due to attorney-client privilege.
However one might feel about the Washington mural — and there were plenty of feelings on either side before it hit the courts — it’s arguable that the legal fees are within the bond’s scope.
But the committee shouldn’t be prevented from doing its state-mandated job, according to David Casnocha, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in school bonds. “Does the oversight committee have the right to see the amount of money being paid for attorney fees? The answer is obviously yes,” Casnocha told The Frisc, noting that he was speaking generally about California law. “You can’t evaluate expenditures unless you’re told exactly what the expenditures are.”
The committee is working through a backlog of audits that piled up when it was dormant. This week, it began digging into the school year that ended June 2020.
In dollar terms, the mural legal fees are likely small potatoes. But the issue amplifies questions of transparency and accountability just as the district is trying to make its biggest bond request — the city’s biggest bond request — ever. The volunteer committee, after all, should be a proxy for all San Franciscans who want to understand how the district is spending taxpayer money to help students thrive.