Dr. Maria Su is bringing down the hammer.
As superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, Su, in tandem with a state-appointed monitor, is the primary mover working furiously to institute layoff notices for hundreds of teachers. This week, the pair revealed just how quickly, and dramatically, they are moving to reshape the city’s public schools.
The most telling development, at the Board of Education meeting Tuesday night, was the uncontested, unanimous support Su won for her plan to issue layoff notices for 559 teachers. The vote followed another, at the Board’s Feb. 11 meeting, authorizing similar notices for 149 administrators.
Tuesday’s Board meeting lasted almost six hours, concluding after 11pm. Speaking with Gazetteer SF afterwards, Su was bleary eyed, as she often looks lately, but nimble and unwavering in her answers. She is a woman on a mission — one who had just won another round in her quest.
“We’re going to do another 150 positions in April,” Su told me in an interview. “So in totality, we’re looking at possible separations of up to 837 positions.” (Her numbers didn’t quite add up, which was understandable given the hour. But based on past and future rounds of layoffs she cited, the total would be 858).
Su and other district officials, in public appearances and press releases, have adopted a mantra that SFUSD is reducing “positions not people.” More on that in a moment. For now, let 837 teachers and administrators sink in. It’s an astounding number — one that represents about 14 percent of the district’s teachers and administrators.
She has been on a tear since she was recruited to the position in October. Her sober (and sobering) approach has been, if not refreshing, at least straight-forward, and an antidote to the confusing mismanagement that created the $114 million deficit she says the district faces next year without the cuts. While SFUSD still serves more than 50,000 students, revenue depends on enrollment, which has declined. One-time funding sources, like federal dollars for Covid relief, have dried up.
“There are people here that are beloved, and doing an amazing job,” Su told me. “Unfortunately, with the budget situation, the budget crisis that we are in, I have no choice but to make a $114 million reduction in our budget.” The district also repeatedly points out, as Su did again in our interview, that 80 percent of SFUSD’s budget is spent on people.
“There's very little space for me to reduce our budget without reducing staff,” she said.
The breakneck pace is due in part to the fact that under state law, any teacher who might be laid off has to be notified by March 15. But as layoffs become reality, Su’s triage has spooked parents. To try to make sense of the developments, the San Francisco Parent Coalition held a Zoom meeting Tuesday, hours before the Board of Education vote.
At noon, more than 200 parents of SFUSD students joined to listen to Elliott Duchon, the mysterious monitor appointed by the state’s Department to Education to oversee SFUSD’s expenditures because the district’s finances are such a mess.
Meredith Dodson, the group’s executive director, set the tone of the meeting with her opening remarks. “This is not San Francisco being doom and gloom again, as it often is,” Dodson said. “Things are actually very bad.”
The meeting with Duchon lasted only an hour and seemed to leave parents more, not less concerned. Duchon clarified some of the key issues in an interview afterwards with Gazetteer.
He explained why, as SFUSD finalizes its list of which public school teachers will get laid off, families might lose the best teacher they’ve ever had — and remain stuck with an educator they’d sooner forget.
Layoffs will be determined by seniority, Duchon said. Essentially, teachers who were hired more recently will be the first to be laid off. But there are wrinkles to the process, because if someone has certain teaching credentials that the district is in need of — special education credentials, for example — they may get “skipped” in the layoffs.
Probably the most important development that Duchon described, which most parents don’t understand, is that through the layoff process, SFUSD may reassign teachers to different schools. While some have enough teachers and staff, others don’t, and San Franciscans have grown stubbornly accustomed to keeping the same teachers at their public schools year after year, which is unusual in California.
“When enrollment at a school changes, its allocation of staffing should change, either plus or minus, depending on how many more or fewer students it has,” Duchon told me. “Every Fall, in most districts, teachers get moved around.”
But where the total number of layoffs are concerned, even Su allows that she may be overshooting. At Tuesday’s meeting, the Superintendent also revealed that at least 314 employees had accepted an early retirement plan, the minimum required for the program to move forward.
The development stands to offset the number of employees the district eventually lays off. Su declined to tell Gazetteer how many in total had accepted early retirement, but implied that it may allow her to apply more of a scalpel to the layoffs, reducing the final number determined and announced by May 15.
“We’re doing this out of an abundance of caution, just in case we just don’t have the resources to continue to fund all the services, or to continue paying for all our staff,” Su said, referring to the 837 notices
The superintendent said SFUSD is shaking its piggy bank, combing through all of its funding sources that don’t come from the state, and renegotiating contracts. Issuing preliminary layoff notices also involves some guesswork and speculation, she said, because the final calculation also depends on revisions Gov. Gavin Newsom makes to the state budget in May.
“I think we will reduce our total layoff notices at the end of the day,” Su said. “We just don't know how much yet, so we have to wait and monitor.”
