San Francisco school district Superintendent Maria Su and her staff are fully focused on the financial future of our public schools. Over the next four weeks, Superintendent Su will recommend that the Board of Education take initial action on administrator, teacher, and staff layoffs and report to the State of California budget overseers where the district stands for the future.
Less visible than deciding how to cut $113 million from next year’s budget but larger in scope will be choosing how to spend the first $400 million in school construction bond funds. School district officials, school board members, and school communities must address the two together in order to spend the money well and build back the trust of San Franciscans.
Last November, San Francisco voters by a 3–1 margin passed Proposition A, the $790 million school improvement and safety bond measure. While the margin surprised some observers amidst the controversy over potential school closures and the resignation of the prior superintendent, San Francisco voters have consistently and generously supported the public schools by approving parcel taxes for teacher salaries and special supplemental appropriations for student success and public education enrichment. Nonetheless, the bond program has raised questions over the years. How the new bond funds will be spent can either assuage those concerns or raise new questions.
California law requires citizen oversight boards to scrutinize the amount and appropriateness of school bond expenditures.
Despite involving major amounts of public dollars, their complexity allows bond decisions to escape public scrutiny. For that reason, California law requires citizen oversight boards to scrutinize the amount and appropriateness of school bond expenditures. The school district started off on the right foot for spending the 2024 bond when it agreed to empower the citizen panel that already reviews the existing 2016 bond funds to have the same role for the new funding. This is a significant step forward from its recent history when, from 2019 to 2021, it had no citizen bond oversight committee at all in violation of the law.
Giving a vigorous citizen bond oversight committee the tools and information they need to scrutinize bond expenditures will provide Superintendent Su and her team the benefit of independent evaluations of major investments in our students and schools and will provide the public some assurances that the school district is making wise decisions going forward. It will undo the uncertainty of where and how the money will be spent.
Last fall, in contrast to what it told the voters when it sought approval for previous bond measures, the school district did not produce a list of school sites where the 2024 bond would be spent. Instead, the voters were told that the single largest expenditure would be not for a school or classroom but for a central kitchen to fulfill the school district’s new role as the single largest provider of daily meals in San Francisco. Since then, the Trump Administration now threatens to end Biden-era expansions to school lunch programs and the State of California’s reimbursement to school districts for the Universal Meals Program hangs in the balance of state appropriations. It is important for the school district to explain how these new developments affect the prioritization of the central kitchen. Hungry kids have a harder time focusing and learning. While it is forced to cut from the classroom, does San Francisco double down on the lunchroom without certain state and federal support?
Despite pledging to seek and listen to community input on how to spend 2024 bond expenditures, the school district has already proposed to spend $400 million (over half the total) to complete projects it planned, but lacked the money to complete, with 2016 bond funds. Two projects that have not reached the construction phase are a $105 million renovation of Buena Vista/Horace Mann K–8 School with 620 enrolled students and a $25.7 million gym and auditorium for Thurgood Marshall High with 515 students.
For years, parents have documented the environmentally and physically unsafe conditions of Buena Vista/Horace Mann. Renovation or new construction is clearly warranted and was initially estimated to cost $40 million in 2022 to be paid out of funds that had been promised for a downtown school of the performing arts in the 2016 bond campaign. Now Buena Vista/Horace Mann is slated to cost $105 million plus an additional $7.5 million to upgrade the school its students will attend during the renovations.
School construction industry experts estimate that schools should provide approximately 180 square feet of space for each elementary or middle school student. At Buena Vista/Horace Mann’s current enrollment of 620 students, an adequately sized school building should cost $36 million using New York City construction costs which, at $320 per square foot, were the highest in the country in 2024. In these economic times, could any of the additional almost $70 million for this project serve the needs of other schools?
In its 2024 Bond Report, the school district pledged to delay new bond projects until after the school board decided on school closures. Later in 2024, Superintendent Su and the school board pushed the school closure discussion to the 2025–26 budget year. Will the school board feel compelled to keep open a school to avoid appearing as if it wasted tens of millions of dollars for an auditorium and gym in a closed school? These are some of the questions that school district officials must be able to answer for San Franciscans to have confidence that the new bond funds are well spent for all school children.