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 contractor, former biotech researcher, and member of the board that oversees SFUSD’s infrastructure bond spending, Laurance Lem Lee 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.
Laurance Lem Lee: Wayne should definitely stay until the new Board of Education in January gets their bearing, to give staff some stability. Is he doing a good job? He’s doing some good, and he’s leaving many things unsatisfactory. If I were a commissioner today, I would give him clear direction and a time schedule so that he can have the district act with focus and urgency on the numerous boiling crises right now.
What issue in SFUSD doesn’t get enough attention, and what do you plan to do about it?
As a professional general contractor and a member of the Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee,* I am acutely aware of how we are not doing well maintaining our school buildings. Teachers and families have long-standing concerns about falling ceilings, poor heating and cooling, lead in water, and other areas where maintenance is not being done.
As a school board member, I will push to make sure that there will be dashboards showing how long maintenance requests take at each school. I will work with the district [to ensure] that the maintenance staff are compensated in line with other city departments of similar level of work. Let’s take care of the safety and maintenance of our school buildings so that we can have our students focus on learning!
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.
I like spreadsheets and have been deep in the weeds on how we spend money poorly. We have a $1.3 billion budget, and we don’t have position control*, don’t know our teacher seniority, and can’t track if our money is helping student outcomes.
Compared to other school districts, we still spend way too much for central administration* and consultants. Let’s move money over to early education, intervention, and meeting basic needs. Let’s focus on getting all our students to read at grade level or better. Immigrant families want high-dosage tutoring. Let’s focus on doing the basics well.
You say the district should move money to early education, intervention, and basic needs. Where would the money come from, and how can this be done with state oversight?
There was a good fiscal meeting on Sept. 3. Former Controller Ben Rosenfield flagged spending on consultants as high versus other districts (about the 24-minute mark). If you go to some comparative data from Ed Data, you can see we are way higher than other California school districts. (See object code 5000-5999 and object code 5100.)
The state uses comparable metrics to discourage SFUSD from spending too much in areas they don’t think have been needed in other school districts (e.g., elementary school assistant principals).
Also, we are not sure if the district is moving restricted money around legally to fill deficits. Thus, I would like to have a forensic audit to see if things are being spent correctly.
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?
This area is such a tragedy, bordering on a long-term crisis. I’ve worked with many special education families to hear their concerns. Let’s definitely work to fully staff our special education. We can ask our current staff if we can help with their working conditions. We can temporarily add contract staff to help fill some of the gap. Let’s reduce spending on lawsuits by working to address many special education family needs, particularly those that need translation services.
If you’re elected, will you abide by the final decisions in December to close schools?
Yes. My goals related to this topic are to balance the budget, get the state off our backs, and to bring up enrollment.
How do you propose keeping families in the district after the school closure decisions and further budget cuts?
A: As the only candidate who is an SFUSD K-12 graduate, I remember many of the successes and gaps of the school district over many decades. For a time, we have been able to grow enrollment by having kids learn, and by providing great programs. Let’s expand language immersion, as those are valuable, in-demand programs.
Let’s do better year after year on improving our students’ math and reading scores. Let’s give families what they want in encouraging kids to come back to school and give them more mental health support. Let’s do the basics well. Let’s also poll families when they are leaving the school district and work on ways to fix such concerns.
Closing schools will free up facilities. What should the district do with those buildings? Do you support charter schools moving in?
As a former Civil Grand Jury member and a current Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee member, I have looked deeply into our facilities usage. We can lease our buildings to any number of programs, from nonprofits to tutoring to small businesses.
We can convert sites to workforce housing, an area that I have ideas about that will make construction faster and cheaper than current decades-long practices. I don’t support charter schools moving into these vacated spaces.
Some people say housing on SFUSD property must be 100 percent affordable, and for teachers and staff only. What are your thoughts about the mix of income levels or who lives in the buildings? And how would you speed up construction?
Folks definitely have different ideas about how to do housing on school land. I am flexible on much of that level of details, beyond just having housing built. I have heard that educators would prefer to live around a more mixed group of folks versus living only with people that they work with during the day, hence the workforce housing idea. As for income levels, it’s definitely hard to build enough housing for everyone, so let’s try to do 100 percent affordable, with a mix of income levels, such that paraeducators and a variety of income levels can afford at least 20 percent of the units.
How to speed up housing? Let’s consider how Daly City built teacher housing quickly. They had financing by bonds and less regulations. They had a plan to build quickly. Mountain View also built teacher housing recently, and San Mateo has a new task force looking into doing such work well.
There are ways districts are partnering with experienced affordable housing construction people to help make things work more quickly. There are ways to make school construction by doing lease-leaseback, and this model could help with building teacher housing.
What’s the No. 1 thing that SFUSD can do to improve campus safety for students and staff?
As a former SFUSD student, I feel so much for the current students who have to deal with so many recent safety concerns like weapons in school and the need for campus lockdowns. I accompanied the students when they rallied for safer schools and advocated for a number of better practices.
The No. 1 thing to do is to install the long-promised Columbine locks on all school building outer doors to make our campuses more secure. [Editor’s note: Officials said in January that all schools would be outfitted with locks by this summer.]
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?
Yes, it’s been a period of good intentions and failure of execution. The district has failed their own goals of reducing chronic absenteeism, and improving reading and math outcomes. The school board and superintendent haves reoriented our district to student outcomes, which is good. Yet, we still are doing too many custom practices that are not well proven elsewhere.
It’s important that we follow the examples of other places that have put in low-cost, proven practices to reduce chronic absenteeism, help students behind in reading, test earlier for dyslexia, and use better curricula. Let’s keep our goals to be steady improvement year after year and have good monitoring of our progress so we know which plans to reduce and which plans to expand.
Can you give us a specific example of a “custom practice” that’s not working, and how you suggest replacing it?
The EmPower payroll software was a custom practice that wasn’t proven before. The school district is now using a system that has worked in other school districts.
Did the district have to follow a program in Japan* to have John Muir [Elementary] get better scores in math? There are other Bay Area school districts who the SFUSD can learn from. To have this program scaled up to a few other schools,* the SFUSD needed $8 million from the city.
You acknowledged in May that your child goes to private school, but you want the district to attract families like yours. What specifically would have changed your decision about your child?
For my wife and I, we as scientists were particularly disappointed that the schools did not offer algebra in middle school. Now voters have overwhelmingly told the district to bring algebra back. Let’s continue to give students opportunities to excel in what interest they want to pursue, should it be math, languages, the arts, or other areas.
Click to jump to other candidates:
✏️ Matt Alexander
✏️ Min Chang
✏️ Virginia Cheung
✏️ Lefteris Eleftheriou
✏️ Parag Gupta
✏️ Ann Hsu
✏️ Jaime Huling
✏️ John Jersin
✏️ Maddy Krantz
✏️ Supryia Ray
Ida Mojadad covers education for The Frisc. Alex Lash is The Frisc’s editor in chief.