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SFUSD Announces Multiple School Closures Are Likely For 2025
Declining enrollment, massive budget deficit are two of the largest issues to blame
By Evan Symon, March 5, 2024 2:58 am
San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Superintendent Matt Wayne announced at a school planning summit during the weekend that the district will likely be shutting down multiple schools beginning next year due to declining enrollment and a massive budget shortfall.
For years, the SFUSD’s future has been unstable at best. Thousands of students have left as the city’s population has dwindled. In 2015, the SFUSD boasted 53,000 students. This year it is around 49,500, with enrollment in 2032 projected to be at about 44,000. Not helping matters has been the rise of teacher pay and pension costs, which shot up dramatically in October after a near strike by teachers. Unexpected costs also struck the SFUSD too, such as $34 million being spent on a payroll system that didn’t work, and millions more being spent on abuse claims.
This all caused the SFUSD’s deficit to grow dramatically from $169 million in 2020 to a projected $421 million deficit in 2025. The SFUSD slashed 927 vacant positions in an attempt to lessen the deficit amount by $103 million, but those cuts are being challenged. The city, usually having the money to fix department finances, also can’t help because of their own $780 million budget deficit. Not wanting the state to take over, the district played the best card they had left at the summit on Saturday: school closures.
According to the plan, the district will go over which ones to possibly close over the next several months. Community input will be a factor, as would savings amounts, potential sale prices, what schools would be needed, which are convenient, which schools would hurt students the worst, and many other factors as well. In August, a shortlist of schools would be announced. Further discussion would follow, including more community input, before a final decision on the closures in December.
SFUSD officials defended the closure plan over the weekend, saying that SFUSD had the same number of schools with far fewer students, with many schools now being far from full.
Big problems at the SFUSD
“We feel like in order to create the schools our students deserve and our families expect we need to have fewer schools,” said SFUSD Superintendent Matt Wayne. “I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone. The bottom line is that resources are stretched too thin.
“We want supportive learning environments for each and every student, in each and every school, each and every day. The reality is, people are not satisfied with the status quo in San Francisco so rather than just continuing to figure out how to maintain the status quo, we want to say, ‘Look, we need to have real conversation about how we use our resources to create a new school portfolio that better serves our community.’
“We want to do this in a way that’s as respectful and sets us up for success as much as possible. It’s recognizing we need to handle this with real care and transparency.”
School budget experts told the Globe on Monday that the SFUSD would really need to work towards a balanced budget to help stabilize matters, with the closure and sale of schools probably being their best option left short of getting rid of more teachers.
“The SFUSD keeps saying that they are going to have a balanced budget by 2026,” added Belle Green, an accountant and advisor to many school districts in Great Lakes states, to the Globe. “They need to take a look at how other schools solved the problem, and a big way was school closures and more teacher and staff lay-offs. With closures, you have the benefit of at least reducing staff. And yes, it sounds heartless to just announce all these job losses, but you need to take emotion out of the equation when you fix a financial problem.
“I’ve been at budgetary meetings when parents don’t want closures because of convenience or because the school is historical or other reasons like that. And you need to look past them. You also need to consider that you don’t need to sell school sites once closed. The district can always lease them out then revert them once attendance goes back up. I’ve seen closed schools become community centers, churches, even filming locations. Or they can rent them out to a private school, which is another reason why school attendance is falling in San Francisco they don’t like to discuss. At least that way they could make money from it.
“The point is, with San Francisco now serious about closing schools, they need to do so logically, not with emotion. They have hundreds of millions to walk back on, and they can’t keep schools open for sentimental reasons.”
More on the potential SFUSD school closures is to come out soon.
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August 18, 2022
Unconvinced that this is not primarily an attendence problem.
So-called union educators have lost an entire generation and priced themselves out of a livelihood.
Lol! You have convinced yourself that it’s an attendance problem? And what does so-called union educators mean? Your comment reeks of ignorance.