For several years, leaders of the San Francisco Unified School District have agonized over a growing budget deficit that could put the city’s public schools in a death spiral.
Yesterday, SFUSD Superintendent Matt Wayne announced a list of 11 schools that will be shuttered and merged in the 2025 academic year, allegedly to save costs and boost enrollment levels at remaining campuses.
But in predictable fashion, a slew of parents are furious — not merely because of the closures, but because of the disastrous way it unfolded, with many of their fears coming true despite countless warnings, complaints, and alternatives given to the district over months of deliberation.
Now, there’s just one fair way forward: Acknowledging the mistakes in outreach and missed deadlines, realistically assessing how to help affected families, and, most importantly, delaying implementation of closures until the 2026-2027 school year.
“I think the next step, rather than trying to rush this for consideration by the Board of Education in a month, is to actually put together an implementation plan, because all they’ve got is an outline,” Ed Parillon, an SFUSD parent, told Gazetteer SF. “If they waited a year and delayed the closures to August 2026, it would give time for everything needed to support families and actually mitigate impacts on enrollment.”
The discontent comes after more than a year of debate and analysis. Seeking a fix for its fiscal death spiral, SFUSD announced a “Resource Alignment Initiative” in August 2023, with the goal of assessing where and how to save dollars. It asked for feedback from school parents, and this summer hosted multiple public meetings with an 11-member advisory committee about potential school closures.
Parillon was a member of that advisory committee, and had a front-row view of how the district’s process confused and enraged parents all year. He notes that officials claimed repeatedly in these meetings that school closures were not a sure thing, that they would not lead to substantial savings compared to other re-alignments in staffing, and that parents and students would be consulted all throughout the process, including via an “equity audit” that emphasized impacts on under-served communities.
What unfolded was, in short, a complete letdown for many parents, many of whom were critical of a convoluted online survey used to determine the criteria for choosing which schools to close. In particular, some parents feared that smaller schools serving unique student populations, such as June Jordan School for Equity and SF Community School, would be the first on the chopping block. (Both are now set to close.)
The district’s conundrum has been brewing for a long time, but came to a head earlier this year. In April, a damning audit from state education officials put into focus the risk that the district will not be able to pay its debts, and noted that it has failed to hire a qualified chief business official for years. More bad news came in May, when the state announced it was giving two state-appointed fiscal experts veto power over the district’s spending in San Francisco — a step that emphasized the high-stakes need for SFUSD to right the financial ship ASAP.
Enrollment is a genuine part of that equation: The student body for the district 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. Its current resources could serve 14,000 more students than enrolled today, according to SFUSD.
In response, the district plans to cut $113 million in spending for the 2025-2026 school year, including eliminating more than 500 jobs, according to Wayne’s announcement. But crucially, shuttering schools has never been identified by district officials as a significant source of savings. In its public presentations over May and June, SFUSD failed to clarify a savings estimate, and later admitted to Mission Local that cost cutting was not a “driving motivation” for school closures.
(SFUSD did not respond to Gazetteer’s questions about an updated estimate of savings from school closures by press time.)
And although every step of the public feedback process this summer emphasized equity, the Tuesday announcement highlights the more obvious priority: Boosting enrollment figures in remaining schools by any means necessary, even if it means closing sites that are small by design to address unique needs, especially for Black, brown, and immigrant families.
It’s why advisory committee members such as Parillon and Sarah Wilson, an SFUSD parent who is also a researcher for SEIU Local 1021 (which represents union workers in the district), now feel like their recommendations — including a final report in May — were ignored in spirit, if not in verbiage.
“The district has made claims at different times that closing schools will be a last resort. But as we know now, that’s not at all the approach that they’ve taken. They’ve made it so closures must happen and then gone about trying to manufacture consent around it,” Wilson told Gazetteer.
Parillon, too, feels strongly that the district wasted the time of not just advisory committee members, but SFUSD families overall.
“The district said that this isn’t just about enrollment figures at schools. But we could’ve saved everyone a lot of time and identified which schools were likely targets for closure, and not done all these surveys and wasted the [advisory committee’s] and the public’s efforts,” Parillon says. “You could have gone into the community and had frank conversations with people from the start and we would all be in a better position. Instead they wasted the last 10, 11 months gathering feedback they did not have any intention of using.”
The district is now scrambling to pick up the pieces, and Wayne says he will meet with affected families in the next month, before the final closure recommendation goes for Board of Education consideration at its Nov. 12 meeting. The board will formally vote on the plan on December 10.
It leaves families of some 2,000 students racing for answers. Given the timeline, Parillon and Wilson are incredulous that any meaningful outreach can happen in just four weeks.
As Parillon argues, it would be possible to make things right with impacted families — but not by the upcoming school year in August 2025. Such a major disruption demands careful, personal conversations about family needs, especially given a new wave of distrust and anger among parents. San Francisco supervisors including Connie Chan, Aaron Peskin and Dean Preston have criticized the proposed closure timeline, and some people are investigating potential violations of students’ civil rights, Wilson noted.
The school district promised that talk of school closures would not guarantee it. It claimed it would prioritize feedback from the public and appointed advisors. It spoke constantly about equity for under-served communities and a need to respect unique needs in specialized schools. Instead, what SFUSD parents got was an awful survey, missed deadlines, a superintendent who thinks one month is enough to consult hundreds of families about the uprooting of their educational lives.
Given the context, the only way to move forward and rebuild trust with SFUSD families is for the district to find a way, any way, to delay closures until August 2026. Otherwise, it’s proof the district wants to double down on structural inequities in education, all while claiming it’s done the work to care.
