[Note: This story will be updated with developments.]
The clock is ticking and families are scrambling. If the city’s school district and the teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, don’t come to an agreement on a contract by Monday, the union’s roughly 6,000 members will go on strike. About 50,000 students will not be able to come to school.
The union and district have been deadlocked in negotiations for nearly a year. The union wants a 9 percent raise (4.5 percent each year for two years) for certificated employees, such as teachers with credentials, and a 14 percent raise (7 percent each year for two years) for classified employees, such as paraeducators who help teachers in class.
The union also wants fully funded family healthcare, new workloads for special educators, and protections for immigrant and homeless students.
SFUSD offered a 2 percent raise per year for three years. A state labor mediation board, which had been working with both sides, issued a report Wednesday and proposed compromises, such as 3 percent raises this year and next year. The district stuck with its pay proposal but added up to $2,000 per month for family healthcare.
The labor board also recommended a 10-day cooling-off period, which the union rejected. “The time is now. Our students cannot wait,” UESF president Cassondra Curiel said Thursday morning. “The district has every opportunity to come with the spirit and proposals to make a deal.”
Last night, the sides met again. SFUSD superintendent Maria Su said this morning that UESF rejected the district’s proposal “and declined to provide a counter offer.”
As of this writing, it seems the two sides will meet again Saturday; according to Su, the union said it will not come to the meeting with a counter offer.
Su then said through tears that families should prepare for schools to close Monday.
Update, 2/6/26, 4:35pm: SFUSD announced this afternoon that all schools will be closed Monday. Spokesperson Laura Dudnick tells The Frisc that “we will communicate to families if anything changes.”
SFUSD has said that a deficit of $102 million keeps them from meeting union demands. Its offer of a 6 percent raise over three years also asks teachers to make concessions, including larger class sizes and less paid leave.
Veto power
Looming over the negotiations is the state’s education department, which partially controls SFUSD’s finances. Years of declining enrollment have hurt the district’s budget, and it mismanaged finances for years, including a disastrous switch to a new payroll system in 2021.
State watchdogs can veto budget decisions — including labor contracts — that the district cannot afford. The labor board report sided to some extent with this view. It encouraged a “conservative approach” to raises and said the union “has not met its burden of proof that the district has more non-restricted resources at its disposal,” a nod to the union’s charge that SFUSD has more money available than it’s letting on. The report is not binding.
City Hall has limited influence over the school district, although roughly 25 percent of SFUSD’s budget comes from city funds. Mayor Daniel Lurie briefly joined a parents advocacy group meeting last night. “I really trust that both sides will stay at the table throughout the weekend until a deal is reached,” he said.
In an email to members, the head of that advocacy group, SF Parents Coalition, called the union’s decision to forgo the cool-down period “shocking.” “This is not the time to escalate,” said president Meredith Dodson. “This was the wrong call.”
A strike will be hard on everyone. Striking educators won’t get paid. The district would hemorrhage money — between $7 million and $10 million a day in lost attendance funding, according to Su. There could also be state fines.
More than half of the district’s 50,000 students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, and many rely on schools for meals. Working parents also rely on before- and after-school programs for their kids. “We are having conversations with our city partners every day to activate our city’s safety nets,” Su said this morning.
City Hall officials say they’re working on stopgap solutions. But the logistics are complicated, and many details have yet to be explained. For example, many of those morning and afternoon programs, run by nonprofits, are on school grounds. It’s unclear how many will be able to move off-site.
Going offsite
If teachers strike, the two unions representing janitors, principals, and other administrators said they would strike in solidarity. Su said all school sites will be closed. That means the camps, afterschool programs, and other services that usually use school grounds must move off-site, perhaps to city parks and libraries.
City Hall will coordinate extra services for the first day of the strike, according to Kunal Modi, the mayor’s chief of health and human services, who was also on the Thursday night call. As of this writing, officials haven’t announced plans beyond Monday.
Su and other officials could not say on Friday morning how many students they could serve, but they said the number is increasing. In an emergency meeting Tuesday, the school board authorized Su to make contract changes without board approval to quickly adjust service locations.
But moving off-site might not be an option for some programs. The San Francisco Beacon Initiative is an umbrella agency for many of the community-based organizations, or CBOs, at school sites. Beacon executive director Sally Jenkins-Stevens told The Frisc that some CBOs have rules attached to their state funding that don’t let them operate outside of schools. “All of them get a good chunk of their money from state funding sources,” said Jenkins-Stevens.
It’s unclear how many sites the rule would affect.
The Richmond Neighborhood Center is one of SF Beacon’s affiliates and works with 11 SFUSD schools. Acting executive director Cliff Yee estimates there are at least 50 RNC workers spread across the schools they serve. Yee says his staff will be ready to work, no matter where. Some will continue RNC’s food pantry and delivery program, and others who run school-based programs will work out of parks and library sites. “Our program will be serving students because they’re our priority,” he said.
The district also has about 7,500 special education students. So far, officials have only addressed plans for those with the highest needs. Su said they will be sent to nonpublic school partners, whose contracts she can renegotiate thanks to last week’s resolution.
‘Scab’ decisions and ripple effects
CBO workers aren’t union members, but they’re also grappling with potential consequences of a strike.
Some nonprofits are worried about paying their part-time hourly employees if they can’t work at school sites. Some organizations are paying out of pocket. SFUSD and the city’s Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families (DCYF) — a major funder of before- and after-school programs — told Beacon’s Jimmy Le, who runs the group’s programs at Francisco Middle School in North Beach, that his team will be reimbursed for staff and materials.
But will employees show up? Le said they might not want to be “scabs” and cross picket lines, even metaphorical ones, by working off-site. It’s a lot of pressure, says Le: “Our capacity to be able to serve families may interfere with the types of negotiations, or the leverage that teachers may have over the city.”
There’s another bottleneck. Some nonprofits have contracts that only allow for part-time work and workers, or simply don’t have the capacity to shift into a full-day program. DCYF executive director Sherrice Dorsey-Smith said Thursday night that the department is “only allowing agencies who have the flexibility and capacity within their budgets to be able to open up and be full-day programming.”
A strike could also add pressure to the city’s childcare ecosystem, already under strain. Kim Garcia, who runs the Escuelita Las Mañanitas preschool in Westwood Park, notes that early education and childcare workers often have SFUSD students: “Preschools and childcares may see a shortage of their own teachers if those teachers have to find coverage for their own children.”
SF Parents Coalition’s Dodson hopes that the city can dip into its early childcare funds — known as baby Prop C money — for “emergency subsidies.” Lurie promised recently to expand those funds, but on a longer timeline. Many childcare centers are already at capacity.
With so many potential ripple effects of a strike, everyone potentially affected is scrambling to make plans. The best plan is to reach a deal that avoids a strike. “We can support teachers, and we can keep students in school,” says Yee of the Richmond Neighborhood Center. “These are not mutually exclusive goals.”