As SFUSD Cuts Spending, Dozens of Classroom Roles Still Need to Be Filled

While San Francisco public schools will avoid teacher layoffs thanks to hundreds of buyouts offered this spring, the district’s work to make significant budget cuts as painless as possible has left schools needing to fill about 150 classroom positions before next fall.

According to tentative budget documents district officials plan to present to the school board on Tuesday evening, the early retirement plan will save the district more than $7.5 million through educator buyouts, and layoffs in the administrative central office total more than $28 million in spending reductions, although those numbers could change since the district temporarily reopened buyout applications in April.

However, the staffing changes also leave the district with classroom vacancies to fill and strict limits on how to fill them.

“The efforts that the leadership took to close the deficit in the ‘easiest pill to swallow’ way … [mean that] right now there are hundreds of positions because of the shuffling [that] need to be filled this spring,” said Meredith Dodson, the executive director of advocacy group San Francisco Parents. “But the state is preventing them from doing any external hiring.”

The San Francisco Unified School District’s hiring process comes at the end of a whirlwind school year marked by a botched school closure plan, a new superintendent and public scrutiny tied up in the city’s contentious election cycle. This year, the district must make $114 million in budget cuts to avoid state takeover after years of overspending, and it has faced mounting pressure to do so without cutting teachers or classrooms.

Because of the budget shortfall, SFUSD has been under heightened state oversight since last May, including a hiring freeze that requires state advisors to approve any district plans to bring in new staff. Earlier this month, the California Department of Education partially lifted that freeze, allowing SFUSD to begin hiring eligible internal employees for classroom positions after they were affected by layoffs in the central office or cuts to other special assignment roles and offering renewals to temporary teachers on one-year contracts.

But Dodson said that if the district is not allowed to recruit candidates from outside, whether those vacancies get filled fully depends on where teachers want to work — and if they choose to remain at SFUSD at all.

“There is the challenge of a principal being like, ‘Wait, it’s the end of the year, I need to fill my school for the next year,’ and they’re not being allowed to,” she told KQED. “It’s really bad, especially for those high priority, high need schools, [that] are typically the schools that are harder to staff.”

Even if the district is allowed to begin hiring externally and fills its classroom roles, it is still set to have hundreds fewer staff members next year and lose some of its most experienced teachers to early retirement.

Dodson said parents are especially worried about “the cuts in para[educators], the cuts in counselors.”

“You can’t have counselors with hundreds and hundreds of kids on their caseload; they’ll never be able to meet with them all,” she said. “And then, of course, paras [serve] our kids in special education who need that additional support. There are a lot of concerns about some of those cuts that we’re seeing.”

Superintendent Maria Su recently said SFUSD is within $10 million of balancing this year’s shortfall, but the district isn’t out of the woods financially in the long term.

It is forecasting deficits in the tens of millions in each of the next three years. Those projections would spend down the majority of SFUSD’s restricted and unrestricted fund balances and wipe out its rainy day reserves, and they don’t reflect any salary increases that could be negotiated with employee unions.

The district said some of the excess spending it plans to do in the next few years allows it to utilize one-time money in its restricted fund, but it will need to make more reductions as that money is spent.

“The Fiscal Stabilization Plan has a significant positive impact on our financial forecast, but additional steps will be necessary to achieve sustainability in the long term,” according to district documents.

Dodson said the district’s new leadership is making strides in the right direction, but without better collaboration with the state, long-term problems will continue to loom.

“We need to see the state giving San Francisco Unified a little more carrot and a little less stick,” she said. “If they don’t allow principals to hire to fill classrooms, then the state is as much responsible as our district for denying kids a quality education.”