SFUSD Reverses Over 150 Layoffs, But Hiring Teachers May Still Be an Uphill Battle

After months of uncertainty, San Francisco’s teachers union is celebrating a win in the district’s move to rescind nearly all of the layoff notices it had planned for school-site staffers. Now, union representatives say the district’s staffing woes have shifted to filling classrooms that will be left empty by retiring and resigning teachers next month.

Earlier this year, grim budget predictions suggested that hundreds of teachers, counselors and other San Francisco Unified School District employees could be laid off as part of significant cuts to patch a $114 million deficit. But on Friday afternoon, the district announced that it would pull back pink slips that had been approved for 34 school counselors and 117 paraeducators, who provide instructional support to teachers,  leaving just nine remaining notices going out to school-site staffers.

District officials said they were able to cut the number down significantly through collaboration with the county and state boards of education, along with a successful early retirement buyout offer to educators. About 100 staffers in SFUSD’s administrative central office were also laid off.

Frank Lara, the vice president of SFUSD’s teachers union, called the announcement a victory and commended the district for its work to balance the budget, but he emphasized that there is still work to be done. Before children return to campuses next fall, he said, the district will have to replace classroom teachers taking the voluntary buyout as well as others who could announce their resignations this summer.

“We still have a lot of work to do to fully staff classrooms, and we very much are in collaboration with the district to get that done,” he told KQED.

A spokesperson for SFUSD said the exact number of classroom vacancies throughout the district’s 120 campuses fluctuates significantly, but each year, a couple of hundred teachers often leave their roles.

A hiring freeze has limited the district’s ability to make staffing decisions without state approval for the last year, but according to a spokesperson, it’s been approved to hire 77 additional classroom teachers, on top of the 162 hires it was granted to fill open positions earlier this month.

Lara said SFUSD’s hiring allowance is enough to offer every eligible temporary teacher in the district a new contract for next year.

“Right now, principals have a list of all these individuals and principals are calling these folks to get into the classroom and offering them contracts,” Lara said.

He’s more worried that some schools will be unable to fill classroom openings, especially if the number grows.

“Once they end the school year, [teachers] often announce in their email threads to their school community that they’re leaving, so we expect that number to increase while the pool of candidates will decrease,” Lara said. “We’re not out of the woodwork yet in terms of staffing, but at least everybody now knows what the rules are.”

The volume of open positions at this point in the school year has some principals worried, according to Anna Klafter, the president of the district’s administrators union and principal at Independence High School.

Every school has open positions, she said, and a principal at one of the westside high schools is looking to fill about 30 open roles.

“School is over in two and a half weeks,” she said, adding that principals aren’t paid to work throughout all of summer break. “Principals will be forced to work over the summer to staff their schools because the alternative is not working and not having staff in your schools, and that’s just not OK. And then we’ll be asking for money to be paid because it is a lot of work.”

SFUSD said it plans to first offer open roles to internal candidates who were laid off from the central office or are on temporary contracts, then open hiring to others, which could extend the hiring timeline.

Klafter said her union is pushing to open hiring to all as soon as possible.

“We’re quite late in the hiring season to have this many open positions,” Klafter told KQED. “Other districts around us are done hiring teachers in May, and we’re just beginning our opening hiring. That makes school leaders nervous because we have to assume first, are we going to get enough candidates for these positions? And then second, are these going to be the best candidates out there?”