San Francisco public school leaders are slowly working through one of the most difficult periods in their district’s history. Solutions to their problems are unavoidably painful, and perhaps the most painful of all is now in motion: school closures across town to catch up with falling enrollment, down roughly 5,000 since 2017 to about 48,000 students, and a budget crunch.
But closures, which the district hopes don’t set off revolts like across the bay in Oakland, are deeply linked to two other crucial initiatives. Both hang in a delicate balance.
The first is a new school “zone” system to set boundaries for elementary schools where incoming kindergartners can attend. It will replace the current citywide free-for-all that sometimes leaves exasperated families with none of their choices.
The second is a huge bond to repair aging schools. Both the bond and the new zone system have been delayed, as the pandemic and politics made leaders kick the can down the road. But they cannot wait much longer.
In fact, a team of Stanford University researchers has begun work on the new elementary school zones. They should produce new maps soon after school closures are finalized in December.
(Closures will take effect in the 2025-2026 school year, and district leaders emphasize that no decisions have been made.)
In similar fashion, a huge bond is queued up for this November’s election, which will take place after the district staff unveil their proposed list of schools to be closed or merged. The bond – once expected to top $1 billion bond, but now likely scaled back – is crucial to fix district facilities that have $6 billion worth of repairs.
It will need a 55 percent majority to pass, which was once a slam dunk in San Francisco. But families have been voting with their feet in recent years, moving either to private school or out of town, while questions of equity and transparency remain.
As the November election approaches, the district finds itself with a knot of intertwined logistics, timing, and politics, all with student performance and well-being at stake. After being pressed about how the district plans for it to all come together, Superintendent Matt Wayne agreed at a recent school board meeting that issues like transportation, enrollment, facilities, and special education programs needed to be looked at holistically.
“If that’s not all being taken into consideration, we’re going to be presenting a school portfolio and a plan that isn’t going to address all the needs,” Wayne said. “We need to get it all in what we bring forward.”
Zone defense
In 2020, the district approved a new assignment system to place elementary students into a school either in their neighborhood or not too far away. The arrangement required breaking the city into several zones, potentially six or seven. Officials promised that each zone would include something for everyone: regular elementary K-5 schools, K-8 schools, special education programs, and foreign language programs.
The new zones were shelved during the pandemic, but their larger goals remain: solving the district’s long-standing racial segregation, giving families more predictability, and equalizing enrollment numbers across schools.
With school closure now on the horizon, the Stanford researchers who began the work in 2018 are now waiting to reshape the zones. No one knows how many schools will be cut, but there’s no doubt the draft map on hand now will change drastically. (As an example, the researchers found that just adding one school to the mix — the Mission Bay school slated to open in August 2025 — significantly redrew the map.)
If we want demographic parity, we would need these very long, snaky zones that are not tenable for families getting to schools.
Irene Lo, Stanford assistant professor and co-leader of the SFUSD assignment zone team
However, the team is confident it can move quickly once closure and merger decisions are announced, said Irene Lo, assistant professor of management science and engineering at Stanford and co-leader of the zone team.
A different group from Stanford is analyzing the impact of the closures, but the two teams won’t be working in unison. The closure decisions will trigger the zone decisions, not vice versa.
“They’re completely interrelated,” Lo said. “The main issue is we really don’t have time to consider them both together.”
While the zones remain unclear, one thing is certain: the Stanford team has already determined that every school cannot represent the city’s larger socioeconomic mix. Lo said this is due to two factors: San Francisco’s racial segregation and its geography. The district can’t gerrymander its way into equity.
“There’s a lot of pockets of racial concentration,” Lo said. “If we want to actually have demographic parity, we would need these very long, snaky zones that are not tenable for families getting to schools.”
But Lo believes her team can generate zones that significantly dilute the concentration of poverty for more integrated schools by measuring students who qualify for free and reduced lunch.
The district’s stated commitment to equity – giving historically underserved communities and students of color a fair shake in the closure process – adds another layer of complexity. There will only be so much repair money to go around when, or make that if, a two-thirds majority of SF voters approve the bond this November.
No slam dunk?
SF voters used to approve big bonds to pay for civic services without batting an eye. The last school bond to pass, in 2016, was the district’s largest yet: $744 million. But school communities felt that promises signaled during the campaign never came true or were delayed, like the aborted move of Ruth Asawa School of the Arts to Civic Center and renovations for Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School.
As the district geared up for the next bond, even larger, it faced persistent questions about how the 2016 funds were spent.
Then in June 2022, voters narrowly rejected a $400 million transit bond, sending chills through the public sectors that rely on debt funding. SFUSD opted to postpone its bond until this fall, but nothing is certain until the school board approves it at a May 14 meeting.
Upgrading all facilities across the district would cost an estimated $6 billion, so even at the size ($1 billion or more) floated two years ago, officials would have to make tough decisions. But now, the district is planning for a $750 million bond, according to community advocates. SFUSD spokesperson Laura Dudnick declined to confirm the amount, but Wayne acknowledged at the April 16 board meeting that it will be smaller than once expected.
Wayne gave a few reasons: the district has to be mindful of SF residents’ property tax burden that shoulder the cost; the need to spend it expeditiously; and, in an admission of shaky political ground, a need to regain voter confidence.
“It would still be a meaningful amount to spend in four years,” Wayne said, noting that the district doesn’t want another eight years to lapse before the next bond comes up.
“I think they gain greater trust from a smaller amount of the bond,” said Quincy Yu, who chairs the district’s citizen bond oversight committee, emphasizing the need for transparency.
However, labor unions including the United Educators of San Francisco and community advocates are united in urging a bigger bond. UESF president Cassondra Curiel acknowledged that one bond isn’t going to solve all problems, but said students deserve safe schools and the district is doing “too little, too slow.”
Physical conditions
The district so far has refrained from giving too many details about the bond spending. But its facilities master plan says the new bond would fund eight school modernizations – significant overhauls – as well as designs for five future modernizations. It would also cover 10 schoolyard upgrades, seven new kitchens, two electrification projects, four new roofing projects, new network wiring for eight sites, and complete security systems at all sites.
When board member Kevine Boggess objected during the April meeting that the facilities plan didn’t list all urgently needed work across the district, Wayne countered that the backlog is another reason to consolidate schools and use resources “to support the kind of buildings we want.”
Transparency is also a common demand these days. Not knowing which schools will get bond funding – the district has learned its lesson from past mistakes – and the district’s insistence that it has not made closure decisions, all add up to uncertainty for families. With the low level of trust these days, it’s a bad combination that puts the district in an awkward spot.
Wayne and colleagues have pledged to hold a series of town halls and gather other feedback on closures before making decisions. So far, it’s not enough, some advocates with the bond coalition say.
Despite this pledge for modernization, which includes “core functionality” like heating, labor advocates want a more granular commitment to plumbing and HVAC upgrades, saying physical conditions for students should be a bigger priority to ensure a comfortable learning environment and discourage chronic absenteeism.
“None of these processes have been made accessible in a way that resonates” with some families, said Lauren Harris, education policy organizer with Coleman Advocates, a nonprofit advocate for low-income families of color. “A lot of our families and students are in a state of fear,” said Harris. “They just want to know.”
Correction, 4/29/24: A previous version of this story misstated the voting majority the school bond needs to pass. It is 55 percent, not a two-thirds majority.
