The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) will soon announce a plan to buy out educator contracts to ward off a state takeover for fiscal insolvency. The plan will be unveiled and voted on by the Board of Education on Dec. 10, the current board’s final meeting before three new members are inaugurated in January. These new board members and the new Superintendent of Schools Maria Su will face mounting financial and political uncertainties resulting from the current board halt of school closures and termination of the prior Superintendent’s contract and from Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
As a consequence of its history of financial troubles, SFUSD has been placed under tight fiscal controls by the California Department of Education. While other school districts have until June to adopt their annual budgets for the next school/fiscal year, SFUSD is under a reporting requirement to show it can fund next year’s programs and still have enough in reserves to be a going concern. While it committed to cutting approximately $118 million from next year’s budget, SFUSD walked away from an area of significant savings when it abandoned a plan to consolidate or close 13 schools. Mayor Breed’s and school board members’ dissatisfaction with the plan outweighed the $22 million in savings it would have brought SFUSD. The funding gap now will be closed by a variety of means, including laying off up to 500 educators.
To reduce the number of teachers forced to leave, SFUSD will offer higher-paid teachers the opportunity to retire and receive 60 percent of their pay. To qualify, teachers, as well as administrators and classified employees who work full time, must have five years of SFUSD service and be over 55 years of age. How many SFUSD employees will take this offer and how much it will cost will not be known until March. The retirees can’t back out of the plan but the SFUSD can. But they can go back to work — in some cases right away — and receive up to 70 percent of their pay (as a group) without sacrificing their retirement pay. Other districts are also employing educator buyouts to reduce costs. Piedmont Unified School District in the East Bay, for example, offered a select number of its teachers a $40,000 buyout in February. School communities lose senior, experienced educators right away but achieve payroll savings that will increase in later years.
The funding gap now will be closed by a variety of means, including laying off up to 500 educators.
The SFUSD must act to beat the state deadline in a time of increased uncertainty. The board’s December action will limit the options for cuts to be made by the new board members who start in January. Any city bailout plan will depend upon the ability of Superintendent Su — a well-respected City Hall veteran of multiple mayoral administrations — to convince incoming Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie and five new members of the Board of Supervisors to augment already historically high city funding support of the schools while city departments are facing 15 percent reductions. To complicate matters further, additional state aid is subject to various economic factors which, while generally positive (e.g., $2.8 billion for new education commitments), are subject to their own uncertainties. The retirement of former Assemblyman Phil Ting who chaired the Appropriations Committee for many years reduces the city’s clout in Sacramento.
Looming over all of this is the dark cloud of the incoming Trump Administration and its pledges to eliminate the federal Department of Education and to shift more money to independent schools. These decisions, set to be made by a Republican-controlled U.S. House and Senate early next year, could affect funding for states and local school districts as early as this spring and certainly for the SFUSD’s next budget cycle starting in June.
Finally, San Francisco will face its own relatively unique Trump Administration budget challenge if the incoming federal administration makes good on its threats against sanctuary cities to cut off funds to jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement and assist in deportations. Beyond threatening to revoke federal funds to San Francisco, the administration may also target for elimination federal support across the country for students who lack, or whose parents lack, legal immigration status. Any action along these lines will put the Trump Administration at odds with the United States Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. Doe that a child’s immigration status is not a legal dividing line or basis to charge tuition, as Texas school districts in the case imposed in the late 1970s.
These larger issues await SFUSD and others around the nation in 2025. For next week, SFUSD has major budget decisions on its agenda.