San Francisco public schools have a new superintendent, the threat of school closures is off the table, and the district is heading straight for more turmoil.
On Friday, the Board of Education convened an emergency meeting to accept the resignation of Superintendent Matt Wayne three days after Mayor London Breed publicly rebuked him. Breed’s statement was an exclamation point on growing anger over Wayne’s proposal to close 11 schools, and a signal that the board could no longer wait to act.
Wayne will receive one more year of his $325,000 salary and benefits.
Wayne’s replacement is Maria Su, director of the city’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. Su has agreed to run the district through June 2026. Last month, Breed sent Su as part of a City Hall rescue team to help stabilize the district – a compromise that led the board to keep Wayne for the moment. Su will technically remain a city employee on loan but with an SFUSD salary.
“San Francisco public schools are the city’s greatest asset,” Su said in a statement. “We must come together as a community to take care of our school district.”
How Su brings people together remains to be seen. The district will no longer close schools by next fall, but existential threats remain. Between now and December, SFUSD must show California regulators not only that it has a plan to stabilize its finances for the next school year but also, crucially, that it follows through.
All of this still points to major cuts that will be felt across the district, with battle lines already drawn by the school closure effort.
Here’s what’s comes next.
Hundreds of layoffs
In Breed’s takedown of the school closure process, she said she had “lost confidence” in Wayne and called the plan “mismanaged.” She underscored that the district must focus on its budget crisis.
“Whatever this current proposed school closure process was meant to accomplish, or could have accomplished, is lost,” Breed said. “This has become a distraction from the very real work that must be done to balance the budget in the next two months to prevent a state takeover.”
There’s no indication if or when SFUSD will return to school closures. But it will almost certainly be cutting staff.
What the state needs to see [from SFUSD], whether they close schools or don’t close schools, is to streamline their staffing.
Elliot Duchon, California Department of Education fiscal advisor
Unless the new superintendent changes course, the district, which has a budget of $1.3 billion, must cut $113 million from the 2025-2026 books. In May, the state issued a negative certification of SFUSD’s budget report, which meant doubt in the district’s ability to pay bills the next few years. The rating expanded state authority to pause or veto budget decisions.
At a press conference Monday to introduce Su, California’s education chief assured the assembled crowd that San Francisco would not lose local control of its schools.
‘There will not be a state takeover in San Francisco. Let me be clear about that,” said state superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond. “Our staff has been working with the staff of the district to work through some of the financial challenges and to build better systems. But the role of the Department of Education is never to lead the district.”
Update, 10/22/24: The story has been updated with Tony Thurmond’s remarks.
SFUSD has until December to show the state’s watchdogs how it’s going to happen. “They really need a makeover on their fiscal stabilization plan,” Elliot Duchon, the fiscal advisor appointed by the California Department of Education, said earlier this month. “What the state needs to see, whether they close schools or don’t close schools, is to streamline their staffing.”
About 80 percent of the district’s budget goes to staff. In June, officials spelled out a plan to cut 535 full-time positions before the 2025-26 school year, with 200 of those positions coming from the central office. Another 82 cuts are projected for the 2026-27 year.
One milestone is coming soon. By mid-November, staff will have updates on seniority – a major factor in deciding layoffs – and potentially other ideas for budget cuts. SFUSD is building toward potential layoff notices in March.
Meanwhile, the district has consistently struggled to hire and retain staff. This school year began with a hiring backlog as Duchon’s team reviewed positions. Most worrisome, the district wasn’t filling legally mandated special education jobs. It reversed the problem in early September and found an unspent $30 million.
It blamed the problem, which triggered a heated Oct. 1 hearing before the Board of Supervisors, on miscommunication and an accounting error. The district is still trying to extract itself from a disastrous HR and payroll system, originally installed in 2022, that has complicated its current crisis.
A yearslong decline in enrollment, which initially spurred school closures, is expected to continue. With many schools under-enrolled, Wayne, his staff, and his supporters on the Board of Education have said that fewer schools would help students by consolidating crucial support and services. They also said it would save $22 million, but did not explain how – or if state auditors had verified their math.
Troubled from the start
SFUSD first said in mid-2023 it would likely shutter some of its 102 schools because of declining enrollment – down 4,000 since 2017 and expected to drop more. Since then, little has gone right.
Part of the rating system used for school closures was based on community surveys that critics said were flawed. The much-anticipated release of school names, slated for mid-September, was delayed; Wayne said it was important to get it right. That week, the board called an emergency session to review Wayne’s job. He kept it but had to agree to city intervention.
Three weeks later, the list suddenly came out. SFUSD stressed that it wasn’t final and more discussion could come. Yet the announcement was riddled with confusion and blunders. First, it listed 13 schools eligible for closure, but in effect, the list was 11. (Two were in fact “welcoming schools” meant to absorb affected students.)
For a while that day, the district cut off public access to the page showing school scores in the rating system. When it became public again, the rankings had changed. The district also struggled to answer questions about how welcoming schools would incorporate students and programs.
Protestors gathered outside the schools marked for potential closure. “I have no confidence in them,” Renee Kwong, a parent at Yick Wo Elementary School, told The Frisc. “I feel like they’re just playing with the numbers to get what they want. There’s no transparency in how they determined this closure.”
By Thursday, less than two weeks after releasing the first list, Wayne resigned under pressure.
Schools vs. central office
Some parents feel cuts without school consolidation remain a potential for “chaos.” The cuts “threaten to strip away the essential staff & teachers needed for quality SF schools,” the advocacy group SF Parents said over X (formerly Twitter) late Friday.
With closures off the table for now, all sides are turning their attention to the budget battle. The teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, is planning an Oct. 30 rally and is calling first for cuts to the central office and for better fiscal controls.
Cutting administration staff instead of teachers has been a long-running battle. In 2021, when the state first intervened in SFUSD finances, current board president Matt Alexander and outgoing board member Mark Sanchez proposed an alternate budget that cut heavily from the central office. Months later, a state budget windfall saved the district from making tough decisions.
A UESF report released this March said the central office, and the enrollment department in particular, remained bloated.
That follows other critical reports about the district’s lack of accounting of data, budget, and vacancies: an SF civil grand jury report on teacher shortages and self-inflicted hiring issues, a City Hall analysis of SFUSD’s higher-than-average central office spending, and the state’s negative rating in May when it escalated its authority.
One week before Wayne’s ouster, the teachers union president Cassondra Curiel said the district’s fiscal outlook was in fact getting better and that using “the threat of state takeover as a justification for the terrible disruption happening now is incorrect at best and ultimately neglectful.”
Curiel acknowledged that management might have to make “further cuts,” but again emphasized they should come from a “bloated central management… responsible for decades of negligent errors.”
State advisor Duchon has said during past board meetings that focusing on central office reorganization won’t be enough to minimize direct cuts to schools, as UESF and other advocates believe it can.
The union representing school administrators, the United Administrators of San Francisco, is also calling for more input to determine district-wide cuts and school closures, as well as better information about the ongoing hiring problems.
Meanwhile, Duchon says the state likely won’t dial back or increase its oversight any time soon: “The next step is really far away. It’s going to take some time to show that their fiscal stabilization plan is being implemented and is producing results.”
Correction, 10/21/24: Due to an editing error, the description of the state’s future oversight of SFUSD was incomplete. It has been updated.
