After almost 11 months of Maria Su’s service as superintendent of schools, the agreement making it possible lacks the required approval from the Board of Supervisors. Meanwhile, the school district has no deputy superintendent despite the position’s crucial importance to key members of the school board who hired her.
At tonight’s school board meeting, Superintendent Su will ask the school board, in a closed session, to approve a $295,000 contract for a new associate superintendent for educational services without publicly disclosing the name or qualifications of her choice. In contrast to the vacant deputy superintendent post, no “associate superintendent” appears anywhere on the superintendent’s leadership team chart she presented to the board last month.
All of these developments are happening while school board president Phil Kim drives board rules changes that eliminate some rules and weaken the requirements to follow them. At a recent school board meeting, General Counsel Manuel Martinez advised President Kim that he did not have to follow the board’s rules for notifying the public about the special meeting.
Last September, then Mayor Breed sent Maria Su to the school district to lead a City Hall school stabilization team to help address fiscal, school closing and other crises. In October, the then superintendent resigned and Su was installed to replace him under a unique agreement whereby she would remain a city employee but report to the school board who would reimburse the city for her salary and benefits. The agreement and Su’s contract were based upon a Memorandum of Understanding, signed by Mayor Breed and then School Board President Matt Alexander, which stated, “… this Agreement shall become effective only upon approval by the District’s Board of Education and the City’s Board of Supervisors.”
The Board of Supervisors, which needed to authorize the mayor to implement the agreement, never did. The unapproved agreement has been pending at the Board of Supervisors Budget Committee since Oct. 22. Board of Supervisors records from April 23, 2025, show that Budget Committee Chair Connie Chan asked that the agreement be held over for five months until October 2025. Supervisor Chan has a history of insisting on school district accountability and vowed to focus on “school district mismanagement” in 2023. Her April action came a week after supervisors held a hearing about concerns over the SFUSD Student Success Fund. A request to Supervisor Chan’s office for a comment on why approval is being held up did not receive a response.
Whatever the specific reason, the agreement to make Maria Su available to be superintendent remains unapproved and thus not in effect. Financial and operative executive Quincy Yu, a longtime school district observer, alumna and parent of alumni stated, “This is remarkable, but sadly not surprising. . .[For] this to continue for nine months is unfathomable.”
The school board commissioners welcomed Maria Su’s budget and management skills but acknowledged she lacked the teaching and administrator credentials required by state law for a superintendent.
At the time, school board commissioners welcomed Maria Su’s budget and management skills but acknowledged she lacked the teaching and administrator credentials required by state law for a superintendent. On the same night as the school board appointed her, it approved a legal waiver of the credential requirements and appointed a deputy superintendent who could provide the in-school, education experience Su lacked. At the meeting, Commissioner Alida Fisher joined thenPresident Alexander in stressing the importance of the administrative/educational team of leaders and hailed a new era of transparency.
In July 2025, the deputy superintendent moved on to another school district and the position is now vacant. What’s next is unclear. Contrary to school board rules barring late agenda items, which President Kim announced in August he would newly enforce, a new item was added to the closed session of the board’s Sept. 9 meeting involving the appointment of an associate superintendent for educational services. Instead of naming the prospective appointee, the public portion of the agenda contains a contract with “Redacted” in place of the name and without a resume or list of qualifications. Board agendas routinely include the names of new hires from top administrators and teachers to contractors and even student interns. When school district families and the public are denied such basic information for one of the highest level and highest paid school district administrators, they are deprived of any opportunity to provide meaningful input into the decision.
Significantly, this may be just the start of the school board distancing itself from public stakeholders. Tonight, the board will also be voting on eliminating some meeting rules and changing others to increase the authority of the board president. While President Kim appears to be relying on guidance from the Council of the Great City Schools (a group of large urban school districts) to justify eliminating these meeting rules, the Council itself as well as major California school districts in Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Jose, San Diego and Sacramento all rely on the rules he wants to eliminate. More troubling is General Counsel Martinez’s advice, taken by Kim at the Aug. 24 special board meeting, that the school board does not even have to follow its own rules.
Maria Su’s arrival heralded high expectations of a new beginning of strong administrative and educational leadership at the school district. She and the school board have made significant budget progress but face another year of cuts. Now, uncertainty and lack of transparency loom over their decisions. As the Great City School Council points out, “patterns of behavior that are exhibited in the boardroom can reasonably be expected to be found paralleled in the classroom.”
There is work to be done. The Board of Supervisors should inform Maria Su what she needs to do to gain their approval to make the employment agreement legally compliant. And the Board of Education should commit to public transparency and to following its governance rules instead of changing them or ignoring them.