Board of Education President Matt Alexander made the news last month when he called for Superintendent of Schools Matt Wayne to resign, mainly over recommendations by Wayne to close and consolidate schools due to the San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) ongoing fiscal crisis. Ten days later, he got his wish. Amid this struggle, Alexander oversaw the board’s retroactive approval, without discussion, of a no-bid contract that has close ties to Alexander’s former colleagues at the district, including those who have donated to his campaigns.
The contract, retroactively approved Oct. 8, is with Awaken Education Consulting for teacher training and coaching at Lowell High School. Awaken is run by Jessica Wei Huang, a former codirector with Alexander at June Jordan School for Equity and, most recently, before consulting, was the director for principal leadership and support in the high school division at SFUSD.
The training and coaching, for which Huang would be paid $333 per hour, is in a teaching method called “Warm Demander Teaching,” an equity-focused approach that both Alexander and Huang championed while at June Jordan, which is in the Excelsior. The Warm Demander pedagogy has grown in popularity in K-12 schools since the 2000s. Regardless of the validity of the approach, the outcome of its implementation at June Jordan appears unimpressive: the most recent data shows June Jordan has an 80–85 percent graduation rate, but no students qualified as “college/career ready” based on their performance on state tests and in college prep courses.
More problematic is the way the $20,000 contract was presented and approved.
In seeking retroactive approval of the contract, Lowell High School principal Jan Bautista explained that her login information in GoFast, SFUSD’s financial information system, had not been updated in a timely manner. “We had begun working out this contract in the spring with my previous principal when I was an assistant principal, but we waited for our July budget to load,” Bautista explains in her application. Bautista has been at Lowell since 2022, starting as assistant principal, and was promoted to principal in July.
Retroactive contract approvals are a periodic bugbear at City Hall and the school district because of accompanying transparency and accountability issues.
Retroactive contract approvals are a periodic bugbear at City Hall and the school district because of accompanying transparency and accountability issues. At SFUSD, a special application, with a separate contract sponsor, certifying that services were accepted before full contract approval due to an emergency or similar contingency is required. On the Awaken application, the contract sponsor is Tony Payne, the district’s executive director for high schools. That would seem appropriate enough, except that his brother, Barnaby Payne, a principal at a high school in Larkspur and an adjunct instructor at the University of San Francisco’s education department — is Huang’s husband.
Additionally, Barnaby Payne and his mother, Judy, donated to Alexander’s campaign for school board in 2020; Magdelene Huang, Jessica Huang’s mother, also donated. The elder Hwang also donated to Alexander’s 2024 re-election campaign.
And so, at a time when scrutiny of spending at SFUSD is at its highest, the school board approved an albeit small contract months after services were already accepted, based on a highly technical excuse and without even lip service to scrutiny of any possible conflicts of interest posed by Matt Alexander’s close working relationship with the contractor, or campaign donations from the contractor’s family members.
Moreover, this is not the first retroactive contract that Huang has been awarded from the district. She was awarded another contract last September (but dated “for convenience” July 1, 2023) for similar staff training and coaching services at $667 per day.
One person formerly close to SFUSD leadership whom The Voice spoke to on background described the situation as “a gray area” and said that Alexander should have abstained from the vote given the upcoming election. Moreover, the state government code prohibits parties in any contract from making campaign contributions to public officials during the proceeding and for 12 months after a final decision on a contract.
When we reached out to Commissioner Alexander about these issues, he replied in an email:
“There is no conflict of interest with me voting on the issue you mention.”
“As you probably know, I spent 20 years as a teacher and principal in SFUSD, and I have many relationships with current and former SFUSD staff members,” he adds. “ In addition to carefully following our Board’s ethics and conflict of interest rules (which I helped draft as chair of our ad hoc committee on the subject), I’ve also been especially careful not to initiate discussions of school district business with my former colleagues, to maintain the appropriate boundaries between our respective roles.”
All well and good, but even if no laws were broken, contracts like these still present an appearance problem. They may also provide some insight into why the San Francisco Unified School District went broke in the first place.
