SF School District Unveils Balanced Budget After Cutting Over $110 Million in Spending

After months of budget wrangling, buyouts and the threat of state takeover, San Francisco’s school district will deliver a balanced budget, according to Superintendent Maria Su.

As the San Francisco Unified School District nears the end of its fiscal year, Su on Tuesday unveiled the financial plan she was brought into the embattled system to deliver last fall. The budget eliminates a $113 million deficit, focuses more spending on school campuses, avoids teacher layoffs and cuts down nearly half of the district’s deficit spending.

“We have made a lot of really, really tough decisions and all of those necessary cuts that need to be made to support our budget and, of course, to maintain local control,” Su told reporters last week.

The district’s budget focus will be three-pronged, she said: improving student learning, creating strong and supported schools, and prioritizing effective governance.

“We have worked really hard to strategically invest in what we know our students need the most,” she continued.

The biggest cuts will be in staffing. Nearly 400 positions are being eliminated across school sites and the central office, and 345 more positions are being vacated by retiring staffers who took a voluntary buyout earlier this year. Of those, 315 positions will be filled by mostly lower-paid — and less experienced — workers.

About 180 of the eliminated positions involve employees who work on school campuses, according to district documents, though their exact roles have not been made clear.

Frank Lara, vice president of the SFUSD teachers union, said most were “special assignment” roles that many experienced teachers had moved into to focus on English language learning, reforms to teaching and curriculum, or reducing class sizes.

The district said every school site will have a principal, clerk and classroom teachers for each grade level, but those specialized staffers, along with assistant principals and higher-than-mandated numbers of paraeducators, counselors and social workers, are not guaranteed.

“We’re really facing a major disruption to how schools serve students,” without those jobs, but the effects won’t be fully known until next year, Lara said.

Su said last week that the district was focused on making sure schools still have access to enrichment courses in the arts and physical education, along with language immersion opportunities and improved food options — a hot topic with students, she told reporters.

In the central office, the gaps could be more glaring.

About 190 roles have been eliminated there, which will extend wait times for technology needs and force the office to prioritize certain communications and digital resources that are aligned with curriculum, according to the district. With the reductions, spending on the central office will be about 16% of the district’s total budget, down from 25% five years ago and lower than similar districts in the state.

“That shows the commitment to our students, our schools, our families, and it’s much appreciated,” said board member Matt Alexander.

Union leaders have long said the district spends too much of its resources on the administrative office staff, and they urged for cuts to be kept away from school sites.

Lara said it was a positive step, but he added that the union is continuing to monitor if, and how, central office positions are reintroduced.

In the next year, Su said further reductions will be needed, especially after the district reported that it will receive about $8 million less revenue in state and attendance-related funding than it budgeted for in a fiscal update last month.

The district is also continuing to try to curb deficit spending, which is down from more than $90 million to $47 million this year. Projections for future years show the district continuing to overspend by about the same amount, meaning it will need to take additional steps to reach longer-term stability.

Su said that could mean discussing whether school closures are needed, investing in changes to transitional kindergarten and special education services, and making additional reductions in some programs.

A clearer picture of next year’s budget outlook will come into focus next week, when the district plans to present a fiscal stabilization plan for the 2026–2027 school year.