Update, 10/28/25, 11:15pm: This story has been updated to include the Board of Education’s approval and information from Tuesday night’s meeting.
Dragon Gate Academy, San Francisco’s most recent attempt at a new charter school, failed to launch this summer. SF Unified School District staff panned its application, and it couldn’t muster a single vote from the school board despite its promise of Mandarin-language immersion instruction, which many parents have clamored for.
But the board looked more kindly upon two other charter schools at its regular meeting Tuesday night, renewing their contracts for five more years.
One is an elementary school and one is a high school. They’re both in the Bayview and part of the nationwide KIPP Public Schools network.
Despite the harsh rejection of Dragon Gate in August, there was little suspense about the KIPP votes. “We are working under the assumption that both schools will be renewed,” Hilary Harmssen, who leads charter renewal efforts for KIPP’s Northern California schools, told The Frisc before the meeting.
Longtime charter school opponents laid low. Last year, the SF teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, asked school board members, candidates, and others to sign a “no new charter school” pledge. Dozens did so. But UESF did not respond to requests for comment about the KIPP charter vote.
There are big differences between the Dragon Gate and KIPP situations, as well as a notable similarity.
KIPP asked for renewed charters, not for approval of new ones. Four school board members signed the teachers union’s 2024 pledge to fight new charters, but the promise did not mention renewals.
There’s also a matter of quality. The SFUSD staff report said Dragon Gate’s petition, the first the district had seen in seven years, “did not present a sound educational program,” was unlikely to meet its goals, and could lead to an annual loss of $5 million funding for the district.
But both KIPP schools, which opened in the previous decade, have gotten positive reviews from state regulators in recent years. SFUSD’s report also notes that the KIPP high school’s graduation rate is 10 percent higher than the district’s. Both KIPP schools have also produced recent improvements in test scores.
There are problems too, such as chronic absenteeism. But they did not derail a vote that, seven years ago, would have seemed improbable.
No recusal
The Bayview schools are part of KIPP’s nationwide network of 279 public charter schools run by regional organizations, all under the umbrella of a nonprofit foundation.
Charter schools are public schools but have more autonomy than traditional public schools to decide how they’re run. (KIPP Bayview Elementary, for example, teaches its own curriculum.) Charters are also exempt from some state regulations and not required to hire union educators.
In exchange for that freedom, they’re supposed to face more scrutiny than the average public school to see if they’re living up to their charter agreements. Their renewal evaluations come up typically every five years.
Both charters and traditional public schools have to publicly share enrollment and academic data, and both rely on San Francisco’s lottery system for enrollment.
School board president Phil Kim is a former KIPP Public Schools employee, first as a science instructor, then as a national administrator. Despite that deep affiliation and the district’s conflict of interest policies, Kim did not recuse himself from Tuesday night’s vote. It was not immediately clear why.
Despite his deep affiliation with KIPP, school board president Phil Kim did not recuse himself from the vote.
His recusal would not likely have changed the outcome. KIPP’s high school won unanimous approval from the seven-member board, and the elementary school eased through via a 6-1 vote.
In a recent online appearance before the SF Parent Action advocacy group, Kim said that evaluating charter petitions “is a highly regulated process where the board has to ask ourselves questions around the efficacy and the integrity of the proposal, and how that squares up with both our financial picture as a district and what the charter petition [is] as stated.”
Charter school critics say that state funds that follow a charter school student are subtracted from potential funding they could bring to regular public schools.
At tonight’s hearing, SFUSD director of policy planning Chris Armentrout said approximately $1.9 million goes annually to KIPP Bayview Elementary, but it’s speculative to assume those students would otherwise go to a regular public school.
Rejected … and approved
SFUSD first approved KIPP’s high school, San Francisco College Prep, in 2013. Four years later, KIPP went to the school board to open Bayview Elementary and was unanimously rejected, the same fate as Dragon Gate two months ago.
But KIPP appealed to the state, which overrode SFUSD’s decision in March 2018. That means state officials, not SFUSD, have been in charge of oversight for the elementary school in the years since. (It’s unclear if Dragon Gate will appeal its rejection.)
With renewal tonight, oversight of KIPP Bayview shifts to the district. The school is co-located at Bret Harte Elementary, and Harmssen says KIPP is looking forward to more local control, more partnership with the district, and more efficiency in those visits.
Chronic absenteeism
KIPP Bayview Elementary still struggles with chronic absenteeism; 45 percent of its students missed 10 percent or more of the school year in the 2023-24 school year.
That’s well above the district’s 20.2 percent rate, but it’s on par with or lower than other Bayview schools, one of SF’s lowest-income neighborhoods. KIPP’s Harmssen suspects that in addition to the after-effects of the pandemic, families might struggle more getting their kids to school, especially if they’re working multiple jobs.
One reason for KIPP’s optimism about renewal for Bayview Elementary was its absenteeism strategy. The school used a grant from the California Community Schools Partnership Program to hire a full-time staffer who follows up individually with families of chronically absent students.
At least one parent has noticed a difference. Krissia Toyos has a KIPP Bayview Elementary first grader named Naileah, and when a sudden death in the family meant traveling outside the country last April, Naileah missed school. KIPP’s staff called right away.
“They do reach out. They’re very engaging,” Toyos said. Naileah’s teachers sent classwork so she didn’t fall behind.
KIPP Bayview Elementary has decreased chronic absenteeism by roughly half since the absurdly high rates of 2022, the first year data was available after pandemic-era zoom school. “We’re not where we want to be yet,” said Harmssen, “but we’ve seen massive gains taking this very targeted, strategic, one-on-one approach with families.”
There’s also work to do at KIPP SF College Prep. The district says the school has “strong academic rigor, supportive teacher-student relationships, and improved leadership stability.” But the report also highlighted that suspension rates are climbing, enrollment is declining, and math proficiency in 2024-25 was 22 percent lower than the district average — although that gap reflects an improvement over the previous year.
At Tuesday’s board meeting, Commissioner Parag Gupta flagged the enrollment decline and asked if there is a minimum number of students required to keep the school open. KIPP NorCal managing director of schools Greg Tsien didn’t have a clear answer but said they believe they can increase enrollment and are fully committed to the Bayview.
Before the vote, Toyos said she was praying for both schools to be renewed: “I would love for my daughter to go there as many years as she can.”
Correction, 10/29/25: A previous version of this story misstated the gap between KIPP SF College Prep math scores in 2024-25 and the district average. It was 22 percent, not 87 percent.