This is a critical election for San Francisco’s public schools, which are grappling with falling enrollment, staff shortages, and a fiscal crisis that could trigger a state takeover.
Four of the seven Board of Education seats are up for grabs, with 11 candidates vying for them.
A tech veteran who held an executive spot at LinkedIn last decade, John Jersin now runs his own foundation. He answers our questions below.
For more background on the school district’s situation, our questionnaire methodology (such as: why do some links come with asterisks?), and an overview of all the candidates, please visit our main page. – Ida Mojadad and Alex Lash
The Frisc: If Superintendent Wayne deserves to be fired, what specifically has he done that can’t be blamed on longtime SFUSD dysfunction? If he deserves to stay, please describe why.
John Jersin: Wayne was dealt a bad hand, then failed to get a grasp on some of our foundational issues. This is a recipe for limited progress, and, long-term, the board should of course explore making a change. But this is not that time.
We’re on the verge of a school closure plan, a massive set of budget cuts, and revamps to our foundational systems. Making a change now would be nothing but disruptive, and committing to a change later gives Wayne little reason to keep trying. Right now, we need to create transparency about what’s going wrong, hold Wayne and staff accountable, and have a discussion about his performance when the time comes.
What issue in SFUSD doesn’t get enough attention and what do you plan to do about it?
We talk far too little about the staffing crisis. On the first day of class last year, 20 percent of classrooms didn’t have a teacher*. Roughly 25 percent of the teachers we do have aren’t qualified to teach*. [Editor’s note: SFUSD recently updated this figure.] Education starts with educators, and we don’t have enough. Children are going to school in classrooms where they aren’t being effectively taught. This is a crisis and a tragedy. Kids deserve better.
The district fails to recruit enough qualified teachers. I’m fortunate to have led the world’s largest recruiting platform and can bring in best practices used by organizations which recruit well. We need to start with the basics. Too often I hear teachers apply for jobs here and don’t hear back for months. Or, they hear back and then the answer changes*. I will push for improvement via more transparency and accountability. Specifically, I will propose a set of metrics to more closely monitor our recruiting efforts, review our existing systems and processes, and bring in best practices.
Many candidates bring up the importance of more early education, intervention, and meeting basic needs. What do you recommend, under the current financial circumstances? Please be specific.
The biggest opportunity we have to help kids, especially those facing barriers, is a package of measures I plan to propose to expand early childhood education. The package would include alignment with city programs, fixing SFUSD’s broken application process, eliminating application fees, and eliminating financial barriers.
The city has over $450 million available for early childhood education, while SFUSD’s early childhood programs cover less than 15 percent of kids who end up in TK-5. We know that early childhood education reduces achievement gaps, and improves student outcomes. We can fix the broken systems and expand these critical programs.
That $450 million figure for early childhood education: could you point us to your source or share your math?
Baby Prop C generates an expected $146 million annually, and while in legal challenges the funds went unspent for about three years. With accrual and interest I believe the current exact number is $469 million as of about a month ago, but I rounded to $450 million.
And the 15 percent of coverage: could you specify what you mean? How does that compare or relate to the 85 percent figure of early childhood education being under-enrolled?
The average number of kids per grade in TK-5 is 3,440. The number in all of pre-K is 462. So assuming all the pre-K kids are in the same grade (a very conservative assumption) then there are only 13.4 percent (I round to 15 percent) as many kids in pre-K as in TK-5. I write this both as 85 percent under-enrolled and only covering 15 percent of the kids who end up in TK-5.
There’s a chronic shortage of special education staff. Students have to go outside the district for services, which costs the district a lot of money. What do you propose to fix this?
Families do get special education services outside the district, so the reason we don’t have them is a combination of resources and hiring. I’ve already addressed the hiring question. The biggest issue for most special ed students in the district is how early their needs were identified and addressed. Unfortunately, many families I know in SFUSD experience late identification of needs. Schools interact with these students in a learning environment every day; schools can and should be proactive about helping identify special needs.
Further, the district often fails to provide the support owed to these students, even creating resistance for families seeking support. This results in many costly lawsuits, and the cost of those lawsuits would be much better directed to supporting students earlier instead. That’s what every student deserves.
If you’re elected, will you abide by the final decisions in December to close schools?
There’s an obvious way to solve the budget crisis and avoid a state takeover without closing more schools: mass layoffs, a solution as terrible as it is simple. The superintendent and staff suggest that school closures are projected to save around $1 million per school, depending on size, for a total of perhaps $12 million to $14 million per year. If we fail to follow through on these school closures, our most likely alternative is even more layoffs. We’re facing a choice between two painful answers, and, unfortunately, we don’t get to pick “neither.”
If elected, I would ensure that we prioritize people above buildings. I would also do the hard work necessary to minimize the layoffs and school closures to the extent possible. I have a plan for how to approach the budget, including specific areas where we could find savings to avoid layoffs and cuts that impact students most.
For example: We should increase revenue through improvements in enrollment by fixing the worst issues in our student assignment system, aligning pre-K programs, and improving attendance. We should also address revenue gaps with our funding partners, including the city and Spark*. We should work to monetize our existing properties and schools that will close.
Where did the district say it might save $12-14 million a year from school closures?
Enrollment information and salary information, which are the basis for these estimates, are available publicly. The district has also shared publicly that it would like to achieve 90 to 95 percent capacity.* [Editor’s note: see slide 80.] Leveraging that data, I believe 12 to 14 schools being closed is a reasonable estimate (this would not achieve 90 to 95 percent capacity at every school, which I believe is very unlikely to happen).
The savings per school will vary based on the size and details of the school, but $1 million is an estimate of the average savings per school based on the fact that each separate school requires overhead costs including a principal, counselor, nurse, social worker, maintenance staff, and security staff. This estimate also aligns with insights from conversations with people close to [the school closure initiative].
How do you propose keeping families in the district after the school closure decisions and further budget cuts?
Trust in our schools has been broken. Parents are simply worried about sending their kids into a system which is in financial crisis, is without a full staff of teachers, is unable to pay its teachers on time, and is facing school closures. We need to address these most fundamental issues to have a hope of restoring trust, and therefore, enrollment.
With trust restored, we can reduce the loss of students by focusing on how students come into the system. First, our city’s Early Childhood Education program is not aligned with, and does not feed into, SFUSD in a sensible way, creating another transition between pre-K and TK/K where students might leave for private school.
Second, the lottery limits enrollment in top choice and nearby schools, pushing families to leave the district more often. We can fix these issues, save students in the system, and improve our revenues.
Closing schools will free up facilities. What should the district do with those buildings? Do you support charter schools moving in?
Unfortunately, the city and district’s efforts to address teacher housing shortages have been limited. As a silver lining to upcoming school closures, it’s likely that a significant amount of property may become available. This would enable development of teacher housing that is 100 percent affordable, defined appropriately. I would fight for creating such housing.
There are cases where charter schools can perform well, especially when focused on under-resourced communities. However, the danger of a growing number of charter schools is a slow replacement of the entire public system with a privatized system. This has happened and led to disaster elsewhere, and absolutely must not be allowed to happen here. Especially in light of school closures, I do not support increasing the number of charter schools but am open to any revenue generating arrangement for closed school properties.
Do you believe housing built on SFUSD property must be 100 percent affordable, full stop? What do you mean by “defined appropriately”?
I do believe that we should develop teacher housing, and it should be affordable housing. I do not think we should exclude other productive uses of closed property, as it’s unclear that covering every closed property with only teacher housing would be necessary to meet the need. By “defined appropriately,” I just mean that the housing needs to be actually affordable for teachers, as opposed to meeting some legal definition that you can find by googling “affordable housing definition san francisco,” which may or may not be truly affordable.
What’s the number one thing that SFUSD can do to improve campus safety for students and staff?
Children are easily among the most vulnerable among us, and their safety is a top concern at school. They need protection from others, but unlike adults, they also need some degree of protection from overly harsh consequences as they learn about their place in the world. They can’t be thrown into the justice system during their formative years for making mistakes.
While in the past, police have had the ability to determine disciplinary measures for students, I believe that school leadership, including teachers, should be in charge of discipline for the students they spend every day with, and SFUSD should prioritize restorative practices. I would ensure that SFUSD uses a graduated approach to discipline, prioritizing restorative practices and support for students who need help to find their way, such as counseling services.
It’s been two years since 5-year academic reforms began: math, literacy, and high school curriculum. What’s gone right? What’s gone wrong? How should the board address the next three years of the plan?
More than half of all students are not meeting state standards. These numbers are a tragedy. Among other changes, we need to improve our curriculum to teach them better, and ensure teachers are trained on and follow the curriculum.
[Editor’s note: The most recent state assessment showed more than half of SFUSD students are above state reading standards, but less than half are above math standards.]
Some curriculum improvements are on their way. We have already adopted a new curriculum for literacy and will do so soon for math. However, the board has failed to hold the district accountable for actually using the new curriculum. What good are new books if nobody reads them? I will push for the new curriculum to be adopted in every classroom, so every kid gets the benefits.
What evidence shows the district isn’t using the new literacy curriculum?
I know many teachers are using it, but not all. The district has no strong requirement that teachers exclusively use the new literacy curriculum. It was also a topic of discussion in a board meeting a couple of months ago or so. To summarize the conversation, the superintendent asked the board to clarify if they were seeking to create such a requirement, and the board essentially clarified that they were not. As an aside, I believe this issue springs from a core cultural issue we have faced in SFUSD for many years: a tendency to attempt to innovate and act independently at the wrong times instead of leveraging best practices. Another symptom of the same core issue was our poor selection of a payroll system a few years ago.
You’ve touted your financial expertise. Please explain a specific SFUSD budget problem that hasn’t been discussed enough.
People tend to think of our fiscal crises as a matter of making cuts. It’s worse —we don’t even know which cuts we can make. The [state’s] FCMAT report from a few months ago* exposed deep failures in the systems and processes we use to manage our finances. For example, hundreds of unfilled roles exist in our systems and many of them are not real. In many cases, a person’s job title would change, and the finance team would create a new position while leaving the old one open, so both positions would still be on the books.
With a lack of accurate data, it takes months to reconcile unfilled roles. Students are being impacted today; for example, we have yet to fill roughly 150 paraeducator roles. The old process of double budgeting for internal hires and external contractors was eliminated, but we failed to create a new process to replace it, leaving those roles out of the budget.
I have a plan to review the systems and processes we use, compare to what works for other districts — as we should have for our payroll system — and scale up the Ad Hoc Committee* focused on these issues.
You cite 150 paraeducator vacancies. Could you point to your source?
Given your question, I think I may not have been clear in my very brief summary. The paraeducators I am referring to are paraeducator positions which had historically been double budgeted. In the past, we had expected that some of these roles would be hired directly and whatever remaining roles we couldn’t hire for would be contracted out. Prior budgets had counted each of them twice, as both direct hires and contractors. Double budgeting is a bad practice that was rightly eliminated in this case.
However, these paras were then accidentally excluded from the budget entirely because the double budgeting wasn’t replaced by an appropriate budgeting process. The 150 number for this category of paras was a number I had heard during discussions with multiple people close to the issue.
However, the very nature of the issue as I’m describing it suggests the number may not be accurate. In short, the number is not the important part of my message, but rather that there are deep failures in the systems and processes we use to manage our finances and that these errors are affecting students today.
Click to jump to other candidates:
✏️ Matt Alexander
✏️ Min Chang
✏️ Virginia Cheung
✏️ Lefteris Eleftheriou
✏️ Parag Gupta
✏️ Ann Hsu
✏️ Jaime Huling
✏️ Maddy Krantz
✏️ Laurance Lem Lee
✏️ Supryia Ray
Ida Mojadad covers education for The Frisc. Alex Lash is The Frisc’s editor in chief.