SFUSD’s $30M Special Education Error Adds More Stress for Families, Teachers

Since the start of the school year, San Francisco special education teacher Rebecca Fedorko has had much more work than usual. One special education class at her school, Yick Wo Elementary, hasn’t had a full-time teacher all year, and Fedorko often has to fill in. 

“These are kids who need a lot of support,” says Fedorko, adding that most are nonverbal and need help with basics like handwashing and greeting people. “I can’t teach them or deliver services to them,” she says, because she has her own students to tend to.

The vacancy at Yick Wo is one of dozens across San Francisco’s public schools. Staff shortages aren’t new, but an egregious error last year made them worse. The school district’s central office somehow managed to cut $30 million from the special education budget last summer, after it was sent to state officials, resulting in unfilled positions before the error was discovered and reversed. 

No one has been held accountable for the mistake, which violated state and federal rules, and no one has been able to explain what happened. The mess caught the attention of the Board of Supervisors, who called a special hearing in October to grill school district leaders. San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Matt Wayne said at the time that the vacancies affected thousands of students. “Our processes broke down,” he told the supervisors. 

It’s not just special education; vacancies have become chronic in SFUSD schools. There are teacher shortages nationwide, but the district’s slow and confusing hiring practices are exacerbating the issue locally.  

There remain 63 special education vacancies out of 516 positions, the district said last week. In late November, there were 198 vacancies out of 1,312 positions for paraeducators who assist teachers, according to the district’s community advisory committee for special education. That number of vacancies is unheard of, says the committee’s chair Havah Kelley.

Kelley says in the first two weeks of the school year, she’d “never in my life fielded more calls from families” who didn’t have a teacher for the district’s self-contained special education classes. “I knew when I had 12, something was really wrong.” (Some students have separate classes, and some are mixed in with regular classes.) 

By the time officials noticed the gaffe and hiring freeze in August and reopened the positions in September, it was too late. Candidates are few and far between by late summer; the mistake is still being felt across the district. 

In addition, now everyone is bracing for $113 million in district-wide budget cuts this spring, bringing more instability in planning to avoid a similar scenario in the 2025-26 school year. 

‘Heartbreaking’ 

For the 14 percent of SFUSD’s students who need special education, having a substitute teacher – or as often happens, a rotation of substitutes –  is disruptive, even more than for general education students. 

Badriah Algahim, the parent of a kindergartner in special education, says her son has regressed. Lacking structure and routine with a series of substitutes, he is more anxious and irritable. Like all special-ed students, he has an individual learning plan. About halfway through the school year, they haven’t met even a third of the goals. 

“It’s heartbreaking for me seeing my son like that,” said Algahim, who declined to share his name and school for privacy reasons. “It increases my child’s stress and my stress. It’s been a setback. Sometimes I feel helpless.” 

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Even if Algahim found a new place for her son, starting over would add more stress. Keeping him home would remove even more routine and time with his classmates. 

The staffing crunch has rung up costs for the cash-strapped district. SFUSD must pay to send kids to places that can provide services, like in Marin County, or to settle lawsuits. The shortage isn’t new, but it’s “much, much, much worse than previous years,” says Alida Fisher, a school board commissioner who previously served on the special education advisory board. “We have students who are in unsafe situations. That is absolutely unacceptable.”

SFUSD recently determined that it owes 546,246 minutes to 129 students for unfilled services last fall, according to district spokesperson Laura Dudnick. It’s offering $1.8 million in compensation to those families alone. But calculating how much is owed is complicated, says the special education committee chair Kelley; there’s a workshop Wednesday to help parents understand their rights. (The Chronicle reported last week that the district notified some families of the potential compensation via letter, then had to send corrections.) 

“We want to make sure families know there are very caring staff working on making it right,” Dudnick tells The Frisc. 

Managing from afar 

Teaching special education classes requires special skills, educators say. Without proper training and support, substitutes get burned out like their permanent counterparts, leaving more school staff to fill in where they can.  

Chris Clauss, a special education teacher at George Washington High School who went on parental leave at the beginning of the school year, managed her class in the fall from afar while trying to find a replacement. Without a consistent substitute, she also graded assignments while on leave.

“Some kids on the caseload haven’t gotten the attention they’ve needed,” Clauss says. “When you’ve got too many to work with, someone is going to fall through the cracks. We’re getting to a point where it’s killing other people’s ability to actually stay in the profession.” 

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Even after officials found the error and ended the hiring freeze, a bottleneck remained. The state’s fiscal advisor, now overseeing SFUSD’s dire situation, had to review new positions. This led to delays that sent candidates elsewhere, says Emily Patterson, United Educators of San Francisco board member and special education specialist. This year, she hopes the district’s hiring practices improve significantly in order to hire in a timely fashion.

Special education committee chair Kelley is still struggling to make sense of the error. The district seems to be struggling too, even though Wayne, who oversaw the fiasco, resigned soon afterwards.  

Confusing numbers

Under California law, public school districts must provide detailed accounting of their special education budgets, which receive federal, state and local government funding, through what’s called the Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA). For the 2024-25 school year, SFUSD’s approved allocation was $231 million, with 70 percent ($162 million) coming from the district itself.  

Or so people thought. The district submitted the budget last June to state regulators with Board of Education approval. But last month, SFUSD staff told the board that the district is contributing $183 million to special education this year – more than what it reported in the SELPA. It was surprising because the district had just gone through the embarrassing ordeal of finding and fixing the $30 million accounting error. 

Even more confusing, SFUSD said the $183 million figure reflected a $41 million increase, which also doesn’t line up with the official SELPA plan that the district sent to the state in June. 

“No one has effectively explained how the SELPA budget that [the board] passed did not get implemented or how the $30 million was cut,” Fisher says. “There are a lot of questions.”

Asked about the discrepancies, SFUSD spokesperson Dudnick first said via email that the budget office is reviewing the SELPA and special education budget: “We don’t want to draw preliminary conclusions before we have had a chance to thoroughly review these data.” (Dudnick later clarified that numbers in last month’s interim report are the most up to date, but she didn’t explain by publication time how the $41 million increase came about.) 

In September, SFUSD announced that the city controller would review the situation and even appointed a former education official to work with the controller. But the district is no longer committing to that report. 

However, a broader review of SFUSD’s special education from the state’s Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), already in progress when the budgeting snafu came to light, is expected by February. When asked about the city controller’s review, Dudnick says the district is “awaiting the final results [of the FCMAT review] before determining any next steps for future assessments.”

Even if some answers and accountability come next month, the district, already in turmoil, will be hard-pressed to make significant changes before the next school year. Meanwhile, its most vulnerable kids aren’t getting the care and attention they require, as UESF’s Patterson notes: “Any delay that happens affects our students.”