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.
An executive at a local affordable housing provider and a member of SF’s Democratic Party central committee, Parag Gupta 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.
Parag Gupta: Many critical items need to be fixed urgently in SFUSD, including getting the school closures right, balancing the budget, and a new crisis of special education teacher shortage. I don’t believe that firing Superintendent Wayne right now is a good course of action as stability is required.
I agree with the current board to put Dr. Wayne on a performance improvement plan with clear expectations. If he does not meet the outlined expectations, I believe the BoE should part ways with Dr. Wayne within the next year. As someone who has served in a leadership role, both as a chief executive and board member for 25 years, I believe our schools must have an executive that can rebuild trust and execute with urgency.
Over the past two years, I would point to three instances that I would have hoped for better. First, our financial situation has worsened since Dr. Wayne joined, with the state now having veto power over SFUSD decisions. Second, the lack of a ready school closure plan by Sept. 18* further eroded trust with our SFUSD community. Finally, under Dr. Wayne’s leadership, SFUSD did not hire legally required staff for special education students.
What issue in SFUSD doesn’t get enough attention, and what do you plan to do about it?
While the achievement gap in high school graduation, math, and English scores is often mentioned in public schools, very little attention is focused on addressing holistic student needs. Put another way, if we are only focused on the 6.5 hours a child is in school, we fail to address the other 17.5 hours in which a child may be housing insecure, lack nutritious food, require mental or emotional support, and so on.
I have seen this first hand as the chief program officer of Mercy Housing, the largest nonprofit affordable housing organization in the country, where I oversee national resident services for 45,000 residents, and when I served as a San Francisco philanthropic leader investing millions in student meals, health support, and mentorship.
SFUSD should partner with the city and county of San Francisco to build affordable housing for low-income SFUSD families and coordinate wraparound services that provide our students with the building blocks they need to be successful academically.
Many candidates bring up the importance of more early education, intervention, and meeting basic needs. What do you recommend under current financial circumstances? Please be specific.
Childcare is the second most expensive cost* for San Franciscans after housing. The school district should coordinate closely with the city and county of San Francisco’s Department of Early Childhood to roll out the $120 million in Baby Prop C funding to support universal childcare in a phased manner — first, in the southeast side of San Francisco where 45 percent of SFUSD’s students live and [who are] predominantly students of color.
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After school closures, the district and city should invest heavily in robust childcare, preschool, and transitional kindergarten solutions around the remaining southeast schools to ensure convenience for neighborhood families and encourage enrollment. Subsequently, the same approach should be used on the west side of the city where another 23 percent of SFUSD’s students live.
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?
By both speaking with former teachers who burned out and by listening to the UESF policy showcase, it has been made clear to me that we must shift our workload model for handling individualized educational plans (IEPs). Both teachers and students with IEPs deserve adequate time to work together.
If we can do so early, we have the best opportunity to increase long-term student outcomes, reduce educator burnout, and ensure we meet our legal student requirements. The ability to train and retain teachers is even more critical when supporting teachers who are closing the achievement gap between Black, Pacific Islander, ELL [English language learner], and IEP cohorts of students.
By doing so, we create better outcomes for our students with IEPs and 504s,* mitigate SFUSD lawsuits, and better integrate students in general education classrooms.
If you’re elected, will you abide by the final decisions in December to close schools?
Provided that the decision is made in a transparent manner that reflects the priorities and processes that were shared with the SFUSD community, I intend to abide by the final decision in December to close schools. All SFUSD students deserve a robust ecosystem of “student supports” such as paraeducators, nurses, counselors, librarians, and so forth that is only possible by consolidating schools to reach full capacity given the loss of students over the past decade.
How do you propose keeping families in the district after the school closure decisions and further budget cuts?
For families directly affected by school closures, our school district must offer them emotional and logistical support as they transition to other school sites. In addition, schools should offer advanced curriculum, Career and Technical Education (CTE) pathways, or language offerings based on the feedback of affected families so we recognize the disruption and do our best to retain them.
Too often, I hear from families that the burden of the school assignment system, which feels like a lottery, is too daunting of a process. It favors those with flexibility and time to research and visit schools and has only led to increased segregation of the schools. We must shift to a well executed zone-based school assignment system in the 2026-27 school year so families can predictably enroll in an excellent neighborhood school.
Finally, let’s make staying in San Francisco as seamless as possible by addressing the two largest costs. First, we must build affordable housing for low-income SFUSD families, and second, SFUSD and the city should provide family supports such as child daycare and early childhood education for SFUSD families. As someone who has worked in both youth development and affordable housing, I bring expertise in both that can help support the processes.
You cite the need for a new “well-executed” assignment system in 2026-27. Does the current draft plan need modification? If so, what are your suggestions?
The plan is to migrate to a zone school assignment system, similar to Berkeley Unified School District. If executed well, I believe this can lead to families being able to predictably enroll their children in neighborhood schools. We must then bolster the offerings at these neighborhood schools, including offering language immersion, advanced curriculum, or Career and Technical Education (CTE) pathways as examples.
About teacher housing: SFUSD took 20 years to build one complex (Shirley Chisholm Village). Can the district be more aggressive? What has changed in SF to pave the way for more affordable housing?
Sen. [Scott] Wiener’s bill SB 35 streamlined the affordable housing process* and has made getting approvals much quicker. SB 423, passed earlier this year,* will thankfully make this process even easier for multifamily housing in general.
Closing schools will free up facilities. What should the district do with those buildings? Do you support charter schools moving in?
SFUSD should partner with the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development to develop freed-up facilities, if possible, into:
- Housing — this may be affordable housing for low-income SFUSD families under the McKinney-Vento [Homeless Assistance] Act. SFUSD would help ensure housing insecure SFUSD families received priority. Or it could be educator housing to help defray the cost of living so we may retain our educators.
- Freed-up facilities should also be developed into rentable space such as for retail or daycare. This creates a steady revenue stream independent of student enrollment and attendance.
Real estate development is not a skill set SFUSD currently has nor should it focus on given the other priorities. It should partner with the city to assist in this work.
Research suggests* charter school expansion adversely impacts the financial stability of school districts. Given the particularly precarious financial situation of SFUSD, I do not currently support the expansion of charter schools.
What’s the No. 1 thing SFUSD can do to improve campus safety for students and staff?
When my daughter was in first grade her public school was locked down because a parent entered the school and threatened a six-year- old. No family should have to go through that experience, or worse, what happened recently near the Galileo High School campus.*
We cannot condone physical threats or violence if it jeopardizes the school community in any way and particularly if it is driven by animus towards race, religion, or other immutable factors. I am grateful that the school district is leveraging existing Sandy Hook nonprofit resources* instead of creating an expensive yet potentially inferior bespoke system as has been the case with other school district initiatives.
I would work with the Student Advisory Council to help identify the most pressing safety issues. Our students have staged walkouts like they did to protest sexual assault — we should listen to them. An aggregate report of bullying and assault should be listed for each school.
It would not have any identifying information but rather create transparency around how many incidents there are, if they’ve been resolved, and the satisfaction of the filing party with the outcome. This helps us to dedicate scarce resources in a targeted manner where improvement is most needed.
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?
I was thrilled to serve on the SFUSD 8th grade algebra workgroup and I am proud to see 8th grade algebra brought back. Unfortunately, the bespoke nature of SFUSD curriculum means algebra is being brought back compressed within two years rather than three years of middle school math at my daughter’s school. I am also pleased with the shift to phonics as it follows an evidence-based approach rather than based on politics.
Overall, from my workgroup and School Site Council experiences, I noticed San Francisco would often reinvent the wheel rather than look to other best practices being carried out by other school districts — from curriculum to HR systems. If elected, I will regularly ask what kind of external benchmarking has been done before making a decision so, when and where possible, we may use off-the-shelf products or curriculum that have a track record of success. Some of the first places I would look include Mission Prep[aratory School] locally and the Long Beach School District. Both have made great strides in tackling the achievement gap.
In a May forum, you advocated for more engagement to hear communities and collect perspectives, but also for making data-informed decisions. Has there been enough engagement in the school closure process? How do you know when there’s been enough community input?
For 25 years, I’ve empowered communities to make decisions. Most recently, at Mercy Housing, I went to our frontline employees to understand what they saw as the most important outcomes we should focus on, and those became the organization’s impact goals to which we hold ourselves accountable.
I attended two Resource Alignment Initiative (school closure) town halls. A couple of high-performing school communities came out to lobby against their school being closed, but it made me wonder if all SFUSD school communities across the district had the same ability and time to be able to do so. If not, how does that feedback shape who is resourced (and who isn’t)?
Benchmarks that we may use to determine whether we have had enough engagement are:
- Whether the input we received is representative of the demographics or different schools of the SFUSD community
- Has a statistically significant sample of the families in the school district had input on the process? Qualitatively, is there a coalescing of ideas and concerns that emerge?
The district has acknowledged the school closure input was not representative. But no engagement process in such a large district will be perfectly representative. What should be the threshold that signals it’s OK to move ahead?
Parent teacher associations, School Site Councils, and English Learners Advisory Committees from all 121 SFUSD schools should have been involved. In addition, the Student Advisory Councils should be involved. These are the formal bodies that input into the school district. In addition, I would seek input from family groups such as Coleman Advocates and [SF] Parent Action. I would engage the United Educators of San Francisco and the United Administrators of San Francisco to understand and incorporate their perspective as well.
Click to jump to other candidates:
✏️ Matt Alexander
✏️ Min Chang
✏️ Virginia Cheung
✏️ Lefteris Eleftheriou
✏️ Ann Hsu
✏️ Jaime Huling
✏️ John Jersin
✏️ Maddy Krantz
✏️ Laurance Lem Lee
✏️ Supryia Ray
Ida Mojadad covers education for The Frisc. Alex Lash is The Frisc’s editor in chief.