It’s time to scrap the city of San Francisco’s Student Success Fund (SSF) that grants money to SFUSD schools and use that money instead to help the San Francisco school district balance its budget.
Here’s why.
The sucking sound you hear in the school district budget office is the siphoning of millions and millions of dollars from the district’s general budget to pay for increasing special education costs.
This simple fact is one of the main reasons the San Francisco Unified School District is in a financial meltdown.
It’s Finance 101. When expenses grow faster than revenue, you have a problem. When it happens year after year, you have a BIG problem. That’s exactly what is happening to the San Francisco School District.
Unfortunately, the city’s Student Success Fund does not solve this big problem.
Why it’s critical for the city to change course
Federal and state laws mandate special services for students with disabilities. The costs of these services have grown much faster than the funding the state and federal government provide.
The result: Local school districts are picking up the bill and paying more and more special education costs.
State-wide data shows the local school district share of these special education costs grew dramatically from 8 percent in 2004–05 to 61 percent in 2018–19.
Even with declining enrollment, more and more children are found eligible for special education, particularly children with more severe and costly disabilities.
In 2023–24 in San Francisco, the school district paid $196,336,787, or a whopping 74.45 percent, of total mandated special education costs.
Here is the real kicker: These increased special education costs result in less services for all the other students.
That’s right. The less money in the general fund, the less money left for services for all the other students. Not only does the increased cost of special education create a budget imbalance, it denies other children the education services they need.
FACT: The combined special education state and federal financial funding is insufficient to pay for even the most efficient special education programs. This is a statewide problem. All school districts struggle to pay for these higher special education costs. Blaming school districts for these rising costs is a total distraction.
Federal government shortchanges kids
When the federal government created special education laws, there was a pledge by the feds to pay 40 percent of the excess costs. It never came close.
According to the Congressional Research Service, current funding is less than 12 percent, and the shortfall in the 2024–25 school year nationwide was $38.66 billion.
The San Francisco Student Success Fund is not a success.
The Student Success Fund gives grants to SFUSD schools to help with academic success and student well-being. But it’s written with restrictions that make it difficult if not impossible for school sites to use their grants. The SSF is so inefficient that the city has scheduled a special hearing to try to fix it.
Let’s not waste our time trying to fix the bureaucratic and top heavy Student Success Fund. Don’t throw good money after bad.
It’s time to scrap the student success fund and start again.
The City should use the money the City allocated for the Student Success fund to help pay for the increased costs of special education instead.
Luckily, San Francisco may be the only city with the will, capacity, and cash to step in and help the school district balance its budget and protect our children from Trump threats of budget cuts.
The advantages of using the money to help pay for the increased special education costs:
— It directly helps the school district balance its budget.
— The increased money in the general fund can go directly to school sites through the existing school site councils. This eliminates the time consuming Student Success Fund application process.
— It eliminates the costly bureaucratic layers in the Student Success Fund.
— There is built in accountability. The special education spending plan is already reviewed by the District’s Community Advisory Committee for Special Education, by the board of education, and by experts at the State Department of Education through the Special Education Local Plan Area: Local Plan. It also has been reviewed by the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team. There is no need for extra layers of city and school district bureaucracy to oversee the complexities of special education programs.
Current bureaucratic hurdles keep the Student Success Fund from being spent. Replacing it with direct city funding of special education frees up school district funds to be targeted to students in need of other types of educational assistance. We can do more with the same amount of funding.
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