Nine months after being elected by his colleagues to lead the San Francisco Board of Education and over a year after being appointed to office by Mayor London Breed, school board President Phil Kim plans to lead his colleagues in a discussion at Tuesday’s board meeting on what decisions belong to Superintendent Maria Su and what decisions belong to the board. This process is triggered by four commissioners having joined the board over the past year, but it overlooks a larger question: Where does the public fit into decision-making about education and school children? President Kim has postponed the creation of a board committee to address that more fundamental question until 2026.
Through a series of recent actions, the school board and superintendent have distanced themselves from public accountability.
– In July, the superintendent gained school board approval of a controversial ethnic studies curriculum without first sharing the learning materials with the school board or interested parents.
– In August, the school board held a special meeting without the public notice that its own rules require, but with the approval of the school district’s general counsel, who advised the board it could meet in violation of its own rules.
– In September, the school board eliminated reliance on Robert’s Rules of Order (first published in 1876 in response to unruly San Francisco meetings) and revised its remaining rules to give President Kim greater authority.
– And in October, the superintendent extended her policy of refusing to let the public know the identity and background of top administrators she seeks to appoint until the start of the school board meeting at which they are voted on.
The first question the school board should be asking itself and the superintendent is why it has enrolled fewer students despite admitting more?
While establishing its relationship with the superintendent is important, the school board risks weakening public faith in our local public school system. This Saturday, the school district will hold its annual school enrollment fair, where it will attempt to attract parents to send their children to public schools in the fall of 2026. Last year’s fair and enrollment process resulted in over 10 percent more new students receiving assignments to public schools. The response, however, as documented in a recently released memo to the superintendent, was a net drop in enrollment of 1.2 percent. The first question the school board should be asking itself and the superintendent is why it has enrolled fewer students despite admitting more? One answer may be a drop in newcomer students as a result of the Trump Administration immigration policies, but it is not the only explanation.
The problem of fewer students enrolling is compounded by the level of chronic student absenteeism — the percentage of students who do enroll but are absent more than 10 percent of the school days. Meaningful parental engagement is an essential factor in reducing student absences. The school district, in conjunction with its philanthropic organization partner, SPARK-SF, recently embarked on a social media-driven public awareness campaign relying on local sports teams and celebrities to encourage parents to send their children to school. While it is possible that a few parents may not know that children benefit from attending school, the school district should first hear from and listen to parents identify what the obstacles are.
Currently, the school district website describes what parents can expect if a child has many unexcused absences — an auto-dialed telephone message followed up by a letter if there are additional such absences. Omitted is any mention of direct, human-to-human communication that could both personalize and strengthen the message and provide a parent the opportunity to explain their situation.
Beyond the individual outreach, systemic solutions to chronic absenteeism also require public and community outreach. This goes beyond the schools’ current focus on belonging at school to assessing what keeps students from school. Students and parents deserve to be heard on the extent to which other day-to-day concerns such as students’ safety going to and from school and the ease, availability, and dependability of public transportation, contribute to student absenteeism.
Student enrollment and attendance are but two examples of challenges faced by the school district, where it can make progress by involving the community more. The school district continues to depend upon parents to send their children to the public schools, and taxpayers as a whole to send their dollars to the public schools. Beyond discussing whether a particular decision belongs to the superintendent or the commissioners, President Kim, Superintendent Su, and the entire school board should collectively recognize that the public schools belong to the public and create effective means by which the voices, preferences and needs of all stakeholders can be heard and acted upon. Until then, it will lurch from crisis to crisis.