For months, advocates at June Jordan School for Equity, a small high school in the Excelsior with a social-justice focus, have been organizing in protest of plans fomented by the San Francisco Unified School District. It’s a plan that could shutter June Jordan and other small public schools like it throughout the city — and one that, parents say, could hurt minority students from working class families the most.
Though the student body of June Jordan is small, hovering between 200-250 annually, supporters tout its specialized programming and vision of showing young people, including those who struggle with conventional curricula, how to confront oppression in their lives.
But they now fear that June Jordan may be on the chopping block, or lose its home in southeast SF, due to a district-wide initiative to close, merge and re-locate schools in the next year. They’re not the only ones, with a swath of parents and staffers from a variety of schools speaking out against what they call an opaque and rushed process to shutter campuses despite lingering questions and unheard demands.
René Peña-Govea, a teacher and parent at June Jordan, says the community there was cautiously optimistic last year when SFUSD representatives floated a plan to redesign the school in order to boost enrollment. One of the ideas was to start programs that could attract students who “normally wouldn’t attend” June Jordan, Peña-Govea said. (SFUSD uses a lottery-based system to assign students based on families’ preference for schools, with a variety of “tiebreakers” used when seats are limited.)
The plans for a redesign didn’t get far, though. In February, Assistant Superintendent of High Schools Davina Goldwasser suggested the school might be shut down or relocated when she visited June Jordan to brief the staff on upcoming priorities, Peña-Govea said.
“They told us SFUSD would not close June Jordan next school year, but that we should kind of be prepared to co-locate or merge with another school in the best case scenario, and that they could not guarantee we would be open for the 2025-2026 year,” Peña-Govea said. “That’s when we felt the threat.”
(SFUSD did not respond to Gazetteer’s questions about this meeting, instead stating that the district “has not identified any schools for closure, merger or co-location.”)
SFUSD itself faces an existential crisis, after a decade of financial struggles. Enrollment overall has fallen by more than 4,000 students since 2013, and broader trends like falling birth rates could mean another decrease of 4,600 students by 2032, by the district’s estimation. The district could serve 14,000 more students than currently enrolled, according to SFUSD.
Fewer students has meant a shrinking budget, which has worsened a long-brewing deficit in the SFUSD’s coffers; SFUSD is set to run out of cash next year. (About 70 percent of the district’s funds come from state grants, which are doled out based on the average daily attendance of students.) The lack of funds is holding up repairs, staffing support and programming across all of the city’s 121 schools, according to the district.
In a May report, state auditors concluded that layoffs and major changes would be necessary to keep SFUSD solvent through the 2025-2026 school year. (The district predicts a $420 million shortfall next year.) The report noted major problems with how the district monitors its budget, manages annual payroll, and trains its staff. One key error: SFUSD has not hired a chief business officer for years, according to the report.
“This has led to a lack of leadership, a lack of understanding of critical elements of school finance, and poor monitoring of the district’s overall fiscal solvency,” it continued.
Last August, the district launched a “Resource Alignment Initiative” to try and dig itself out of the financial crisis — an initiative that will almost certainly include school closures, given how few of the city’s public schools are at capacity.
Then, in the spring, SFUSD began gathering community feedback on how they should pick which schools to close or relocate. The district’s 11-person advisory committee sent out two online surveys to SFUSD families, and in May, held four meetings to gather community input on what criteria will be used to make closure decisions.
On Tuesday, June 25, the Board of Education will meet to discuss the committee’s criteria findings; in the fall, they will begin to choose which schools to close or combine.
In the meetings, parents and students criticized the entire resource alignment process, suggesting that they were caught off guard and felt rushed to respond. The survey was questioned at every turn, and several speakers chastised the district for having so little feedback from students. (Students only represent 1% of the respondents in the second and final survey, according to the Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, which analyzed the results.)
Numerous speakers also noted that under-served communities have been threatened in the past; June Jordan, for one, was placed on a closure list due to low enrollment in 2005, despite being a small school by design. Others asked the advisory committee put a full pause on developing criteria for closures, and pivot to a more thorough outreach process.
After attending the meetings, including the final session on May 20, Gloria Maciejewski, a former SFUSD educator and current parent of students at Willie Brown Middle School and Raoul Wallenberg Traditional High School, was left believing that much of the critical in-person feedback from students and parents was ignored. Instead, she said, the focus was on justifying survey results.
“I think it’s significant that no feedback from the live meetings was mentioned at all,” she said. “They just talked a lot about the data.”
In interviews with Gazetteer, other parents also characterized the meetings as perfunctory, with an emphasis on moving the process forward rather than responding to criticism. They were especially concerned about the online surveys, which they say were confusingly worded and poorly translated, favoring families who primarily speak English, have free time to consider the questions, and are comfortable using digital tools.
Whites accounted for a disproportionate number of respondents (12% of SFUSD students are white, but whites accounted for 35% of responses). Participation from Hispanic and Black individuals, meanwhile, fell short in comparison — the former make up 32% of the district but only 14% of survey responses, while Black people make up 6% of the district but only 3.8% of responses.
Brandie Bowen-Bremond, policy director for the school equity nonprofit Coleman Advocates, told Gazetteer that the closure criteria process parallels how under-served communities — especially Black, brown, immigrant and low-income — have been sidelined by the district in the past.
“We have parents and youth members in our corps who have told us that the language in the surveys was not accessible. That even when they reached out to family liaisons and other staff at SFUSD, even those staff were confused about the survey itself,” Bowen-Bremond says. “People thought it was convoluted and didn’t get at the heart of what the district needs to be asking. The vote is going forward in the summer and a lot of families are going to be disengaged over the summer, taking a break, so I am concerned about the community engagement claims.”
Ana Avilez, whose kids attend Daniel Webster Elementary and James Lick Middle schools, said that it took “constant reaching out” to secure properly translated materials in Spanish and that her suggestions for a printed survey went unheard. She characterized the outreach as a “check-the-boxes” process.
“The short timeframe to do this process is suspicious because [parents] can’t get organized to push back,” Avilez said. “All schools will be impacted because [if] they close schools they will need a place for those students.”
The Resource Alignment Initiative has five areas of focus: Right-sizing staff across schools, reconfiguring the central office, “exploring” generating revenue from district-owned properties, closing/merging schools, and prioritizing schools that “have demonstrated success toward positive student outcomes.” While SFUSD has published estimates for how much it could save through staffing cuts and shifts, it has yet to define how much it expects to save from closing schools.
That omission has left parents and advocates concerned about whether schools with the most vulnerable student populations will be the first ones to lose facilities, in favor of well-monied schools with that score highly because of academic achievement and student “excellence.”
“It feels like they’re going to find the easiest targets and shut down the schools that need the most support, in favor of places that have money and parents who have time to fight all-out for their own needs,” said M. Villaluna, whose child attends Buena Vista Horace Mann.
(Lauren Koehler, who is executive director of the district’s Enrollment Center and facilitated each May meeting, did not respond to Gazetteer’s request for comment on the feedback process.)
For June Jordan parent and teacher Peña-Govea, the push to close schools like hers is another example of the widespread, and short-sighted, use of school closures in response to declining enrollment, which research suggests disproportionately hurts minority students and under-represented families.
“We’re not the only ones who could close, and our social justice lens at June Jordan doesn’t allow us to think only about ourselves,” she said. “We see this more as a whole city, state, national movement, and one we need to be very wary of.”
