The recall election of three San Francisco school board commissioners is tomorrow, Tuesday. We don’t know how it’ll turn out. We definitely don’t know who the mayor has lined up as potential replacements.
But we do know that after the vote, the seven-member board will have major decisions to make, and the biggest is no less than the repair of an existential crisis. The district must balance its $125 million budget deficit, while losing money due to declining student enrollment.
The December high-wire vote for a budget-balancing blueprint, with dissenters backing down at the last minute, blunted the threat of a state takeover. But the threat remains as details of the plan evolve up to a final vote in June.
With a takeover, the district and board would lose control over nearly all decisions. That’s somewhat ironic, since control has become a major issue of the recall.
Proponents say the current board was out of control during COVID, pursuing priorities like renaming schools and changing Lowell High’s admissions process while showing a lack of urgency to reopen schools, even as evidence grew of virtual school’s toll on student well-being.
Early in the pandemic, the board rebuffed a plea by Superintendent Vincent Matthews to hire a consultant to expedite reopening.
But after a pledge one year ago to focus on reopening (“mistakes were made,” said board president and recall target Gabriela López), infighting broke out: The board stripped colleague Alison Collins of her vice presidency and committee seats after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 resurfaced, dug up by a recall supporter.
Collins promptly sued the board and SFUSD for $87 million despite the district’s budget woes. A judge threw the suit out of court; it still cost the district more than $100,000 to deal with.
Collins and Faauuga Moliga are the other two board members up for recall.
Fewer by the thousands
The board has a lot of responsibilities, even when there is no public health emergency. Broadly speaking, it sets policy for all SF public schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. It also works with district staff in the following areas:
- Budget
- Curriculum
- Educational goals and standards
- Equipment, supply, and construction contracts
- Personnel decisions
- Union contracts
We’ll focus here on two big issues: addressing the budget crisis and making the top personnel decision — a replacement for Superintendent Matthews, whose contract ends in June.
For some of these things, the board says yes or no to plans crafted by district staff. For others, the board has a big hand in shaping those plans. They also have the authority to make big changes — like school names and the Lowell admissions policy. It’s a big job for elected officials who only get about $6,000 a year.
It’s important to know that the SFUSD budget, tabbed at $1.16 billion next year, is separate from the city’s budget. Over time, SF voters have earmarked city funds for the public schools, such as a fund dedicated to sports, libraries, and several other programs, as well as an extra property tax to boost teacher salaries, and more.
But most of the district’s money comes from the state — and a huge chunk of that outlay is based on enrollment. That’s at the heart of the current budget crisis. Enrollment, down to about 50,000, has fallen 14 percent in five years, according to Elliott Duchon, the state representative advising the district about the budget.
At last week’s school board meeting, Duchon chastised the board for failing to take action. “You’re still budgeting for probably 55,000 to 57,000 students, and you have 50,000. Are you going to align staffing with the number of students? This happens in every district every year. In most districts it’s a mathematical calculation, it’s not a process,” Duchon said. “This year, you’ve chosen not to do that.”
There’s relatively good news. A state surplus will turn what seemed like massive SFUSD cuts into something less onerous. The cuts the board grudgingly approved in December — $50 million from school sites, and $40 million from the central office — now look more like $15 million from schools and $35 million from administration.
[Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the amount of proposed central-office cuts in the new budget proposal. We apologize for the error.]
That $15 million is the alignment Duchon was talking about: downsizing staff because of the lower student total. But it was cold comfort to educators getting notice that they might be laid off.
‘Making sausage’
Schools have also received warnings. For example, the central office recently told Lakeshore Elementary it would likely have to cut five classes, based on several factors, including how many families marked it as first choice in last year’s lottery. Not being able to hold in-person tours put Lakeshore at a disadvantage, principal Matt Hartford told The Frisc.
Hartford has protested the preliminary notice, and he called the process and justifications “disingenuous.” (Matthews responded to criticism like Hartford’s at last week’s board meeting: “This is an iterative process. [Feedback] forms just went out last week. We’re making sausage and trying to get to the best place.”)
In coming months, resources could be shifted and jobs restored, but educators getting “you might be laid off” notices often can’t wait around for a final decision. Schools trying to plan for the fall semester also have to move ahead.
“Saying we’ll be able to increase [staff] if we need to, it’s ridiculous,” said Hartford. “There aren’t thousands of people waiting in the wings” at the end of the spring semester. He acknowledged the district must make “realistic reductions” to adjust to lower enrollment, but a 20 percent cut, from about 500 kids pre-pandemic down to 400, is “awful.”
(The district gave schools their preliminary budgets on Friday, Feb. 11. So far, it seems Lakeshore next year will be able to keep the same number of students as currently enrolled, about 437.)
Meanwhile, the teachers union and school district have agreed to a one-year contract extension that would shift $6.7 million in funding for advanced placement (AP) classes to distribute one-off bonuses to teachers and other staff, and give raises to substitutes and paraprofessionals. The side deal has caused a rift in the union. Many teachers feel blindsided, as the AP cuts would force layoffs beyond the budget deficit talks — perhaps a few dozen, according to the union and district, or perhaps 60 or more, according to opponents like middle school math teacher Rori Abernethy, who called the bonuses “blood money.”
“Why would I want a bonus on the backs of my colleagues?” said Abernethy, who organized a sickout in January when the Omicron surge was at its peak.
The board must approve the contract extension. A vote is slated for Feb. 22, a week after the recall vote, but it’s unlikely replacement members, if any, would be in place, according to a spokesman for the mayor.
Cuts to the ‘Puzzle Palace’
State pressure, layoffs, labor turmoil, the uncertainty of the pandemic: All this and more is influencing the board in the run-up to a final budget decision in June.
Between now and then, they must grill the staff — folks like chief financial officer Meghan Wallace and budget director Anne Marie Gordon — and provide feedback that, with each iterative step, gets incorporated into the next draft.
Even if the three recalls succeed and Mayor London Breed appoints replacements, there should be robust debate about remaining cuts — specifically, why the current plan makes no cuts from administrators who are several layers removed from students. Matt Alexander and Mark Sanchez, both former SFUSD principals and authors of an alternative budget plan last December, will still be on the board.
Alexander withdrew their plan and voted for the state-endorsed plan after assurances that a deeper dive into central-office jobs and functions — with a goal of cutting administrative fat — would come in the new year.
It’s unclear where specifically the $35 million in administrative cuts will land. Last week, SFUSD CFO Wallace said that her staff examined the three largest divisions and recommended no cuts. “Cuts in these areas will adversely impact our ability to provide services to students,” she said.
They did, however, recommend keeping $5 million of the $10 million “direct services” cuts, from the earlier budget plan, which would affect the administrative staff who directly support school services.
Board members could say, ‘If you don’t cut this and that, we’ll make a proposal to modify the budget line by line.’ But you have to know what you’re doing, and it becomes very adversarial.
Former Board of Education budget chair Jill Wynns
It remains to be seen how strongly the board will make specific demands. In response to a question from Collins, Matthews said more analysis of central office cuts would start in two weeks.
Compared with the passion for cutting more central office jobs in December, Sanchez last week was low-key: “In cases where we’re offering to cut direct services to students, we should take a second look.”
Easier said than done, said Jill Wynns, who spent 16 of her 24 years on the school board as the budget chair, and knows well the opacity of what she called “The Puzzle Palace.”
To go line by line through the central office budget, perhaps sitting with the superintendent and his staff, board members could say, “‘If you don’t cut this and that, we’ll make a proposal to modify the budget line by line,’” said Wynns. “But you have to know what you’re doing, and it becomes very adversarial.”
It’s incredible what [Superintendent Matthews] was able to get from the board for this final year, essentially a clause that says you people have to behave.
former uesf president dennis kelly, on matthews’ contract extension
Another approach, suggested Wynns, is to examine programs, not specific individuals and their salaries. But the district can deflect the push for cuts — as they did last week — with warnings that everything in the central budget, from substitute teachers to IT professionals to custodians, affects school sites.
The struggle might require hiring a consultant, something Alexander noted in December: “Maybe there is a need for outside help in doing this. It’s hard to ask a division chief to cut their own people.”
The new super
It will be difficult to identify those cuts, let alone make them, in the next couple months.
Here’s another distraction: In parallel to the budget debate, the board has begun the search for a new superintendent. Matthews is leaving in June, and his tenure might have set an unusual precedent. He threatened to quit in April 2021, exasperated by the board’s behavior. The board had to agree to change his contract, essentially promising to act professionally, follow procedural rules, and stop meddling in personnel decisions.
“It’s incredible what he was able to get from the board for this final year, essentially a clause that says you people have to behave,” said Dennis Kelly, who was president of the teachers union from 2003 to 2015. “It’ll be interesting to see if future superintendents try to build that into their contract.”
Candidates might have leverage on that point and others. After the past couple years, the district’s reputation has taken a hit. Enrollment is heading in the wrong direction. Who’s on the board after Feb. 15 could be a big factor in the search. While teacher contracts only last three years, Kelly would love a superintendent to commit long-term for stability’s sake. But in large urban districts, that’s not the way it rolls these days. And SF isn’t in a position to make demands.
“In the past San Francisco has been an attractive assignment,” said Wynns, who knows districts around the state from her time on the California school boards association. “But it’s not a buyer’s market right now.”
That said, if the board buckles down in the next few months and takes on these myriad problems with seriousness and urgency, it would help not just with recruiting a new leader, but also with sending a hopeful signal about the district to students, families, and a city that would love nothing more than to see a departure from the SFUSD of the past.
