With squeaky giggles, a few of San Francisco’s youngest students took the mic last week to help school officials and other bigwigs open the city’s first new public school in 20 years. When the school year starts next Monday, Mission Bay Elementary will welcome three- through five-year-olds.
The ribbon-cutting might well be the easiest task Superintendent Maria Su faces this year.
Su took San Francisco Unified’s helm in late 2024 in mid-crisis. On her watch, the district has already stabilized its budget, survived a teachers’ strike, and revamped multiple curricula. Her toughest task could be just ahead. This semester, the district is diving back into potential school closures and mergers.
Su has already said no citywide decisions will happen until 2029. But this fall, the Board of Education will hold several “study sessions” — chances for the board to weigh in on Su’s progress and ask questions in public, but not vote on anything.
Even low-key discussions could become high stakes. SFUSD tried to close or merge 13 schools in 2024, and the effort went so badly it drew Mayor London Breed’s ire and cost Su’s predecessor his job.
Su took over and put closures on the shelf. But she’s never ruled them out completely. As recently as this February, in the sensitive aftermath of the teachers strike, Su reminded the public that closures had “always been on the table.”
And even as the district promised a pause on a district-wide reshuffle, it closed two small schools without asking for the board’s approval.
The underlying problem still exists: with enrollment dropping roughly 8 percent in the past 10 years, SFUSD has more seats than students. Current enrollment, not counting charter schools, is about 48,500.
All of this complicated last week’s celebration. It was an acknowledgment of the popularity of Mission Bay, the only SF neighborhood to grow during the pandemic, and a prime photo op, with everyone from Mayor Daniel Lurie to neighborhood parents smiling in the sunshine. It was also a reminder of the specter of closures hanging over other neighborhoods.
“When we add another school to our portfolio, I can totally understand why families would be concerned about whether that spreads us thinner,” school board member Alida Fisher told The Frisc at the ribbon cutting. “It’s a real concern.”
Just after Fisher’s comment, former city supervisor and school board president Norman Yee chimed in. Yee, a longtime advocate for the Mission Bay school, said the quiet part out loud: “They’ve got to close some schools.”
Out of balance
Now retired, Yee can afford to be blunter than most officials. But the sentiment stems from an undeniable fact: SFUSD’s enrollment has been in decline for years. Since 2016, the district’s student count has plummeted, matching a nationwide trend compounded by the pandemic. SFUSD has space for roughly 14,000 more students than actually attend, and the district projects 1,542 fewer students by 2028-29.
Fewer students mean less state funding — SFUSD’s main source of revenue — and fewer dollars to spread across more buildings and classrooms and staff to run them. Personnel are more than 80 percent of the district’s expenses.
The district has plans to attract more families. But with years of decline, “we have too many vacant seats across the city,” school board president Phil Kim told The Frisc in April. “That imbalance costs us resources we could be using on teachers and programs. Avoiding that reality doesn’t make it go away, it just means fewer resources for the kids who are here.”
Kim initially joined the district to help run the 2024 closure attempt before moving to the board. He stops short of saying that schools must close.
It’s a tack Su also takes when asked about potential closures. “We need to make sure that the number of students in a school meets the number of staff that we have, and the needs of our families,” she told The Frisc at last week’s ceremony.
Su also declined to say that the new school year wouldn’t bring more one-off closures, like what happened with The Academy high school and the Mission Education Center in recent months. “We’re constantly evaluating and adjusting our school portfolio,” she said.
Yet at a May board meeting, she told commissioners, who were upset that they did not have a say in those small-school closures, “there will be no surprises.”
Then and now
The teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, rallied against the 2024 closure attempts with the slogan “School Closures Harm Students.” When asked last week about the balancing act facing the district now, executive vice president Frank Lara said via email that the district must offer “a comprehensive plan and vision for expanding enrollment across all our schools.”
United Administrators of San Francisco president Anna Klafter, whose union represents school principals and other management staff, is mindful that closures may threaten jobs but acknowledges the district’s dilemma.
“Those are our people running those schools,” she says. “At the same time, I recognize that the way we’re working right now is not very sustainable. So something’s going to need to change.”
Despite the backlash two years ago, voters recently backed board president Kim in his run to keep his seat in June’s special election. His position on (and past involvement in) closures has always been clear, and he won 61 percent of the vote. His opponent Brandee Marckmann, who vehemently opposed closures, won only 12 percent.
The third candidate Virginia Cheung, who won 27 percent, said if closures took place they must be done carefully. All three have filed to run again in the November election.
Two of the city’s parent advocacy groups have different takes. Parents for Public Schools has consistently said closures aren’t necessary. “The rerun of the 2024 closures drama begs the question: who wants this?” they wrote last November and re-upped it in May. PPS president Vanessa Marrero did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Judging by the June election results, families might be more open to closures now — at least in the abstract. Families see that the enrollment-to-schools ratio can’t last, says Meredith Dodson, executive director of the SF Parents Coalition. But she cautions that “it’s a different thing when you’re experiencing it directly. No family wants their kids’ school closed.”
Everything in its right place
Su says a wide-scale decision on mass closures won’t come until 2029 because the district has important business to finish first. In fall 2028, SFUSD hopes to roll out a new school assignment system. It’s been in the works since 2020 and delayed three times. The current version is notorious for denying families the schools they prefer.
“We need to do this in the right order,” Su told the board in May. The hope is that a simpler assignment process will keep more families in SFUSD and steer more kids to underenrolled schools.
The district wants to see some results before deciding which schools, if any, to close.
School board leaders said in the spring that they’re not against closures or mergers if the administration deems them necessary. But they want the process to be in the open and want every change, not just a broad reorganization, brought to a vote.
That’s because Su and staff said The Academy and Mission Education Center closures were not “major decisions” — that is, ones that require a vote per board guidelines. Those moves were unilateral shutdowns of schools with a high percentage of special-needs kids and with 100-percent immigrant kids, respectively. Several board members called the situation a failure in transparency.
Su is aware of the criticism. She wants people to know that discussions are coming and to keep eyes on the district calendar and social channels. “I just ask all families who are interested to join us,” she said last week. “Learn more about when all those community meetings are going to happen.”
Mission accomplished
The district often gets dinged for bad communication, but it’s been on message for a decade about the Mission Bay school.
The nearly $100 million for its construction have been earmarked for the purpose since voters approved a $744 million school facilities bond in 2016. The land was marked for school use as early as 1998, a year before UCSF broke ground as the neighborhood pioneer. Housing began to fill in much later. Mission Bay was SF’s only neighborhood with rising sales tax revenue and population during the pandemic.
Until now, it hasn’t had a public school. Mission Bay Elementary will eventually enroll up to fifth grade. In January, it will also become the home of the Mission Bay Hub, a high school STEM program.
The school also has a transitional kindergarten class, which is a big deal for the district. TK, as the grade for four-year-olds is known, is now required by the state. In initial expansion, SFUSD has realized that it’s a hit. It could help reverse the enrollment dip if the district can sort out staffing for the growing number of TK classes.
Other agenda items this semester represent bigger steps to address enrollment. A temporary location for the new Mandarin immersion program will be unveiled in September. The board is also slated in October to provide feedback, but not vote, on the district’s progress redesigning the lottery.
Su has already threaded difficult needles during her tenure. (Not least of which was the Republican Congressional grilling in Washington in June.) Giving families more reasons to stick with the district, all while boosting programs for traditionally underserved groups like special education and immigrants, will be Su’s next tightrope act.
“I think both are possible,” Dodson of SF Parents said last week. “This [Mission Bay] school is a good example.”
