When I agreed to run for and serve on my school’s United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) Union Building Committee (UBC), my memories of our last one-two strike votes were far behind me in the rearview mirror.
It never occurred to me I’d have to get on that roller coaster again.
Here’s where things are.
Together, our bargaining team has asked for comparable health care benefits to other public employees in our city, manageable Special Ed workloads, and preserving the programs that keep families in SFUSD. In response — and only if we’d be willing to let the district eliminate pretty much everything of benefit to students, including our acclaimed and successful Advanced Placement support program — the district offered us a 2 percent raise.
In their defense, they also offered to split whatever change they could find between the couch cushions, along with any crumpled grocery lists, lottery tickets, or runaway peanuts, assuming no peanut allergies among the parties.
So in accordance with our bylaws, UESF is holding our first of two required strike authorization votes on Wednesday afternoon, Dec. 3, 2025. These votes need to occur in a tightly choreographed sequence in order to exhaust every possible option before a strike can be called.
What on earth is going on?
Like all public sector unions, UESF is bound by California’s state laws on negotiation, and what’s happening now is consistent with state law.
If the parties — UESF and SFUSD — are able to agree, then they can proceed to a tentative agreement.
Nobody ever agrees a hundred percent with the package their union puts forward, and UESF is no exception. But here’s what parents should understand about some of the most important items teachers are holding out for.
But because they were not able to reach an agreement in spite of having bargained in good faith, then an impasse was declared, and the negotiations moved into the first stage of the structured resolution process for public sector unions in California.
Step 1: Mediation. In this first step, a neutral third-party mediator explores all options with both sides and seeks to identify any shared underlying interests that could become the basis of an agreement. According to UESF leadership, mediation was a bust, so the union asked to move the process forward to the next step.
Sep 2: Fact-finding. If the mediator determines that no mediated agreement can be reached, then “fact-finding” begins. In this phase, a three-member panel is formed, with one member chosen by each of the deadlocked parties and a neutral chairperson either appointed by the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) or agreed upon by both parties. This three-member fact-finding panel holds hearings, analyzes the data, hears arguments, and issues a non-binding report recommending how to settle the unresolved issues. In their recommendations, they are required to consider all aspects of the situation, including the employer’s ability to pay, the public interest, comparable situations and compensations in comparable districts, and state and federal law. The panel must issue their report within 30 days, with release to the public no later than 10 days after that.
Step 3: Try again to reach agreement based on the fact-finding recommendations
Once fact-finding is complete, the parties are required to come back to the bargaining table and try again to reach agreement based on the findings in the panel’s report. If (a) all impasse procedures have been correctly followed; (b) a public hearing has been held in accordance with the Brown Act; and (c) if 10 days have elapsed since the panel’s report was released to the public, then the employer is permitted to impose its Last, Best, and Final Offer (LBFO). The LBFO is valid only for the remainder of the current budget year, and the parties are still required to negotiate in future budget cycles.
Step 4: Concerted actions by labor
Once impasse has been declared and fact-finding has concluded, then UESF has the right to mobilize its membership by holding the two separate, required votes by the membership to authorize a strike.
What’s brought us to this point?
Nobody ever agrees a hundred percent with the package their union puts forward, and believe me, UESF is no exception. But I’d like you to understand some of the most important items we’re holding out for.
Fairer cost-sharing on family insurance premiums
As I’ve written previously, SFUSD educators – alone among public employees in San Francisco — pay close to 50 percent of the total cost of their $32,000 total annual health insurance premiums for a family with two or more dependents.
That’s outrageous when you discover that San Francisco city and county employees in the same family size category pay only 17 percent of their same total annual premium cost. That’s $15,360 a year versus $5,440 a year.
That’s your approach to teacher retention?
And that $9,000 raise two years ago that SFUSD keeps bringing up?
It may have boosted our district salary scale out of “are you kidding me?” territory and into “wow, that’s low” levels when compared to other Bay Area districts, but it got swallowed whole by surging insurance costs for any employees who have families. It sounded bigger than it was.
What does that mean?
In practical terms, it means that while city and county employees come to our city and stay, building their expertise and making positive contributions over their years of service in city government, SFUSD continues to hemorrhage experienced teachers.
SFUSD is known among California teacher prep programs as a great place to build your foundations so you can move on to a better job and a more secure future for your family only a couple towns away. Too many promising teachers here head for the exits the moment they’re ready to have kids. That’s the hidden cost of paying at the “wow, that’s low” level.
SFUSD’s offer of a 2 percent raise without any reduction in family healthcare premiums wouldn’t even keep us at breakeven, much less cover a third of the monthly premium increase for a relatively young teacher’s first child. Their offer of this pittance in exchange for killing off our few enviable success stories like the Advanced Placement (AP) support program and partially paid sabbaticals — was just laughable.
Equitable staffing and workload model for special ed
Honestly, I don’t know how Special Ed teachers manage. They are my heroes. It’s clear that their existing workload model in SFUSD is hopelessly broken and unsustainable, and that our state can’t train and credential Special Ed teachers fast enough to meet the growing need. I also know that it requires grievances every year to battle it back to a merely unreasonable level. The paperwork burdens grow exponentially with the teacher’s caseload, leaving highly specialized and experienced teachers and paras little time or flexibility to use their best skills to serve student needs, comply with IEP requirements, and deal with the avalanche of testing, reporting, and outreach they are required by law to do.
This is not frivolous wishcasting. We are breaking Special Ed teachers as fast as we can hire them.
SFUSD will do almost anything to kill its own AP support program
The AP support program is one of SFUSD’s greatest successes. It’s considered a model for equitably helping all students master the skills they’ll need to succeed in college and careers. It’s one of the key reasons why so many families stay in the district.
Unlike other districts that provide only bare-bones AP courses, requiring parents to rely on purchased, third-part support services for their children on a pay-to-play basis, SFUSD’s AP program provides a comparable level of support to all AP students, regardless of their ability to pay.
The level of support that SFUSD AP students receive is closest to that of The Princeton Review’s service levels. Purchasing their support program to earn a passing score of “4” on the AP exam starts at $6,000 (per student per course course) and support to earn a perfect score of “5” starts at $8,000 (per student per course).
SFUSD high school students enrolled in AP courses receive a comparable level of coaching as part of their regular AP course program — regardless of their ability to pay. Our students benefit from the additional coaching it takes to be successful in doing college-level work. And this investment in our students pays dividends. Passing the AP exams can save SFUSD families thousands in tuition and living costs at college — even tens of thousands. And we do it for a fraction of the cost of private pay-for-play programs.
But SFUSD’s labor negotiators talk about the AP program as if it were some kind of all all-expenses paid vacation for teachers instead of an alternative way of structuring teacher work time so that individual public school parents don’t have to pay out of pocket to buy the lab experiences, coaching, and support their child will need to master college-level writing and earn a passing grade on the AP exams.
Who knows how this ended up in the teachers contract, but it did — and we will fight like hell to preserve it. We’ll also encourage you to fight for it too, since it’s one of the things parents like you value most in the whole SFUSD high school division.
What comes next
All of which is to say thanks, but no thanks. If I wanted to teach in a worse-performing district, I could do so. We all could. There are plenty of districts that perform worse and pay better.
But I’d rather stay and fight.
So like a dutiful UBC member, I am reaching out to colleagues across the union with the info I can provide on the strike vote, as well as ideas about replacing lost wages for the time we might be on strike.
This is nobody’s idea of a good time.
I think I’ll reserve a Waymo and recruit some friends and colleagues to join me. That way we can avoid the Wednesday afternoon parking nightmares near the voting site.
It’s the least I can do.
Elizabeth Statmore teaches math at Lowell High School and was the 2024 San Francisco Democratic Party Educator of the Year.