As parents, teachers, and students brace themselves for another $100 million in cuts to San Francisco’s public education spending next year, Parent Teacher Associations offer islands of refuge — for the schools that have them.
The traditional role of a PTA is to fund activities, school supplies, and extracurriculars. In recent years, though, budget cuts have driven many San Francisco schools to turn to PTAs for operating costs, including funding teacher positions. The spending can be opaque to outsiders — and even to the district, which tracks only a fraction of what the PTAs are raising and spending.
What is clear, however, is that for at least a few years, some schools have been turning to wealthy PTAs to pay for more teachers than they were originally allotted by the district.
Rasheq Zarif, a parent and recent chair of the School Site Council for McKinley Elementary, in the Duboce Triangle, said that the school was allotted two teachers for 43 fourth graders in the 2023-2024 school year. But for 47 fifth graders, they were only given one.
The district left the school to figure out how to divide three teachers among 90 students in two grades, Zarif said. Instead, McKinley used PTA funds to hire another teacher, in addition to a social worker, and literacy and math specialists to help struggling kids.
“Why is the district trying to shove more kids into a classroom at an earlier grade, when there needs to be more attention at that grade level before they get into middle school?” Zarif told Gazetteer SF, to explain the decision.
Each year, the city’s better-funded PTAs collectively raise millions of dollars to pay for additional educators, including gym teachers, language and math teachers, and extra teachers to reduce class sizes. It’s a system with the potential to heighten disparities between schools across San Francisco Unified, according to teachers and education experts.
The great benefit of PTA funds is that they “get spent pretty much where the people in the school decide, whereas a school that doesn’t have a functioning PTA doesn’t have those discretionary dollars to spend,” said Paul Gardiner, the creator of SFEDup, a newsletter covering the San Francisco Unified School District.
That discretion comes with downsides — including a lack of mandated transparency, at a time when the district is struggling to maintain parent trust in the face of a $400 million deficit. The district only tracks PTA funding when organizations choose to keep their funds in the SFUSD system; many PTAs maintain their own accounts and lump all their expenses into one or two broad disclosure categories on public tax filings.
Viewed through a wider lens, the fundraising points to schools with wealthier student bodies — which, thanks to the district’s complicated funding structures, generally receive less funding per student — relying on their PTAs to raise ever-larger sums to fill gaps in resources, including by paying for teachers to reduce overcrowding in classrooms.
But the loophole that has allowed parents to fill holes left by a crumbling system may soon close, according to district documents. Last year, as part of its “resource alignment,” the district announced a new staffing allocation model, which some insiders worry will do away with PTAs’ ability to pay for more teachers. Parents, in turn, wonder if the school system can survive without it.
‘PTAs as a whole are not funders for SFUSD’
Across San Francisco’s 112 public schools, there are a total of 63 PTAs, which support elementary schools, and their middle and high-school equivalents, called Parent Teacher Student Associations. Forty five of those parents’ groups are partnered with 72 elementary and K-8 schools; the remaining 18 assist public high schools.
Last year, as part of its public-facing effort to overhaul the SFUSD budget, the district released an estimate of per-school funding for the 2023-2024 school year, including PTA budgets.
But the list only tracked funds that PTAs keep in the district’s financial system. “Funds that are maintained outside of SFUSD cannot be tracked or reported on by the District,” according to the document.
The district’s list may be incomplete, but it does offer some indication of the significance well-funded PTAs can have. For the 2023-24 school year, the district lists the PTA budget for Claire Lilienthal, a public K-8 school in the Marina, at $636,440, or approximately $921 per student. That’s on top of the district funding of $7,633 per student.
Those numbers may not be entirely accurate. According to its most recent tax filing, Lilienthal’s PTA spent $922,000 in the fiscal year ending in June 2023, finishing the year with $1.4 million in cash. While the public tax filing lumps all that spending into one generic line-item, labeled “Support educational programs at Claire Lilienthal,” it’s clear from the PTA’s website that at least part of those funds are being used to pay outdoor science and horticulture instructors, as well as arts, music, and physical education teachers.
Molly Pope, Claire Lilienthal’s principal, declined to answer detailed questions from Gazetteer about PTA spending, referring all inquiries to SFUSD. The district responded with an email that said it is “not restricting how schools use their PTA funds.”
The need to fill holes that SFUSD can’t or won’t cover has stretched the role of PTAs way beyond their official mandates, according to Tina Paul Mulye, president of the overarching San Francisco PTA. The founding principles were more about “community bonding” than filling budget shortfalls, Paul Mulye told Gazetteer.
“Somewhere along the line, PTAs became more focused on, and associated with, gaps, and budgets, and spending and funding from the school districts, which has become a big problem,” she said.
SFUSD has been in financial trouble for years, due to mismanagement and shrinking enrollment. Last year, the district launched a “Resource Alignment Initiative” in an attempt to balance the budget, which included the elimination of 900 positions. The initiative includes the closures of still-unknown numbers of schools.
When those cuts weren't enough to cover the deficit, in May, the state gave greater control of the budget to state-appointed advisors, including a mandate to review any potential new hires, regardless of where the funding comes from.
Last spring, many school principals turned to their PTAs for money to preserve staff from the anticipated coming budget crunch, Paul Mulye said. The inquiries prompted city and state organizations to remind local PTAs that they’re prohibited from hiring anyone who is already employed by SFUSD, Paul Mulye said.
“It's a very tough thing to remind both SFUSD cabinet members and PTA groups, who may be fundraising a ton of money, that those funds should not, and cannot, be used to” hire people who are already working for the district, Paul Mulye said. “PTAs as a whole are not funders for SFUSD.”
‘Trying to fill the shortfall’
McKinley Elementary’s PTA spent $247,394 in 2022, lumped together in its tax filings under a generic mission statement about “advocacy, leadership and communication.”
The group ended the year with assets totaling nearly $400,000, disclosing on its website that the school's annual fund aims to raise $365,000 more this year, or $1,431 per student. The PTA funds arts education and math and literacy specialists, according to its fundraising call.
“McKinley’s lower enrollment in response to the pandemic means less district funding and fewer families to fundraise from, which is why your annual contribution matters so much,” the site says.
SFUSD funding is allocated based on a complicated formula that attempts to even the playing field across the district, including giving schools more per pupil when a larger portion of the student body comes from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, speaks English as a second language, or requires special education, Zarif said.
The process for PTAs to hire new teachers is not an easy one. They must first get a detailed plan approved by PTA members, then win approval from SFUSD and the state advisors. In the past, the district has sometimes rejected such requests, including retroactively, after the new employee was already working at the school. Soon, PTAs may not be able to push beyond the allotted teacher numbers at all.
Regardless of how many teachers a school has per student, SFUSD requires them to meet state performance standards laid out in the School Plan for Student Achievement, or else lose district funding. It’s an impossible standard to meet without external funding, according to Kelly Gillease, president of McKinley’s PTA.
“If the district actually had real plans for funding at the required levels, we would not be doing this fundraising,” Gillease told Gazetteer. “We’re trying to fill the shortfall.”
Disparities: ‘The more you have, the more you get’
Mirna Vasquez knows the difference a PTA can make, as both a parent of three kids in SFUSD schools, and as an organizer at Coleman Advocates, a community group fighting for equitable public education in the city. She helps parents navigate public schools in the Excelsior and Bayview neighborhoods, including Cleveland Elementary, Carver Elementary, and Bret Harte Elementary. None of them have PTAs, which Vasquez says is a distinct disadvantage.
While schools without PTAs may have similar groups, or get help from organizations such as Americorps, those organizations can’t hold a candle to a well-funded PTA, Vasquez said.
“The schools that have strong PTAs are more often in the wealthy communities,” she said. “They’re providing and supporting the school with resources, sometimes they can raise the funding for staff the school doesn't have.”
The schools Coleman works with struggle to get basic classroom materials, such as bilingual books that SFUSD doesn’t provide, she said. It’s exactly the type of problem PTAs are supposed to solve. But the parents she works with are struggling to pay for food and make rent.
“They don’t have the capacity to get involved in the schools,” she said.
A former SFUSD teacher who taught for years at a half-dozen San Francisco public schools echoed Vasquez’s experience. The teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss their employment, now teaches in a different California school district. The teacher noted how PTA funding can widen disparities between schools.
“The realities are so different” between schools with and without PTAs, the teacher said. “The more you have, the more you get…You can see it play out real-time with what PTAs can provide to the schools, by how much they’re able to fundraise.”
The end of PTAs paying for teachers may be a ‘done deal’
When SFUSD closes schools next year, those students will be absorbed by surviving schools. At least in the near term, resources will be stretched further, putting even more fundraising pressure on PTAs and similar nonprofits. And yet, some parents believe that SFUSD is moving to prohibit PTAs from funding teaching positions, at a time when they may be more needed than ever.
In May, as part of its restructuring process, the district published a document explaining the possible change. It said the district will move from a “weighted student formula,” where it doles out money to schools based on “individual student attributes,” to a “foundational staffing allocations” model, which will allot teachers to schools based on enrollment.
The district’s rationale: The old approach “created uncertainty for schools regarding what they can expect year-to-year to have available for staff and materials,” according to the document. SFUSD didn’t respond to an email asking about the new policy.
Though no decision has been finalized, communications from SFUSD in the spring made the end to PTA-funded teachers sound like a “done deal,” according to Gillease, McKinley’s PTA president. Some parents who spoke with Gazetteer worried that enrollments will increase at the schools that stay open, increasing the need for teachers beyond what the district is willing or able to fund itself.
“We’re not raising the money to try to give our school some advantage,” Gillease told Gazetteer. “We’re raising the money because the district has goals, and we want all the students in the school to meet those goals.”
