SF School Serving Spanish-Speaking Immigrants Is ‘Severely Understaffed,’ Parents Say

Updated at 6:30 p.m.

On its first day of school last week, the San Francisco Unified School District announced that it had fully staffed schools — albeit some with substitute teachers — and was prepared for a year of smooth sailing, focused on the “basics.”

But that was far from the scene at Mission Education Center, a campus serving pre-kindergarten through fifth grade for newly arrived Spanish-speaking immigrants.

“It was just kind of a cacophony of catastrophe that first morning, because as the conversations unfolded throughout the morning, we realized to what extent the school was just severely understaffed,” said Jeremiah Mayfield, whose daughter started transitional kindergarten last week. The school recently expanded to add Spanish-immersion transitional kindergarten classrooms for the district’s youngest students.

Mayfield and a coalition of 13 other parents wrote in a letter to the district on Wednesday that when they and their 4-year-olds arrived on campus that morning, there was no smiling principal waiting to greet them. That role remains vacant, along with three classroom teaching positions and multiple paraeducator jobs.

“We are writing to raise urgent concerns about the unsafe and unacceptable conditions at Mission Education Center,” the letter reads. “We love SFUSD. We believe in public education. We trusted the system — and the system failed us and our children.”

SFUSD said in a message to families Monday afternoon that it had offered the principal and pre-kindergarten teacher roles to candidates, and extended offers for instructional aide positions to three other people. It said it was still looking for two TK teachers.

“Please know that we see and understand these challenges, and we are truly grateful for your patience and partnership during this time,” the message, which the district shared with KQED, reads. “We are fully committed to providing the very best care and quality education to each of the 76 students enrolled at MEC.”

After the children lined up and were led to their classrooms, the site’s interim principal — who himself has been teaching one of the classes, according to Mayfield — corralled worried parents in the cafeteria.

“We don’t have teachers. We don’t have staff. We are scrambling to try to get resources here the rest of the week,” Mayfield recalled the interim leader saying. “It’s going to be pretty chaotic and pretty much adjusting targets every day.”

Mayfield said before the school year started, his daughter’s class had been assigned a teacher, a longtime bilingual educator in SFUSD who taught older classes prior to this year. He met her during a back-to-school event the previous week, but on the first day, she wasn’t there.

“The parents showed up and we’re being told, ‘[This teacher’s] class line up here,’” Mayfield said. “We’re lined up, and this woman is in the front of the line, and I said, ‘Well, that’s not [our teacher]. I met her on Friday. Who is this?’

“That’s when we found out, oh, this is a substitute,” he continued.

Mayfield said the school later told him and other parents that the teacher who was assigned to the classroom didn’t have the necessary early education training, and that they were working all week to “get her credentialed.”

In the meantime, his daughter has had three substitutes.

“She’s progressively gotten worse and worse about wanting to go in after they line up in the morning — crying, hugging me, saying to me, ‘I don’t know who those people are,’” Mayfield said. “It’s hard to see your kid … you want them to have a great educational experience. You want her to love school. You want her to feel safe at school. And literally she’s showing up every day, and she doesn’t know who’s going to be her teacher.”

Mission Education Center has operated for years as a small pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade campus meant to serve as a transitional school for newly arrived immigrant students, helping them get up to speed with the district’s grade-level learning standards and move into general education classrooms.

SFUSD announced it would introduce Spanish immersion TK at MEC for the 2022–23 school year, and last year, the site had 47 TK students, according to state data. Mayfield explained the site as almost containing two separate schools.

The early education expansion appears to be where most of MEC’s staffing issues are.

As of Friday, two of the three TK classes and the pre-kindergarten didn’t have permanent teachers, according to parents. All but one paraeducator position across those classrooms — since state staffing rules say each group of 20 TKers should have two supervising adults — were still vacant.

While Mayfield said he and other parents were assured that a principal had been hired in June and was being onboarded over the summer, the interim principal said last week that the position hadn’t been filled.

The letter from concerned parents to the district said that on the first day, one paraeducator floated between three rooms. By Wednesday, the district had sent in central office employees as support, Mayfield said.

The letter also said that on the first day, parents anxiously lingering around the school until midmorning saw one child go to the bathroom alone, while others were left in the halls. They say they had to step in to lead early morning circle time for a group of TK kids. Substitute staff sent to teach the Spanish immersion classes, which include some children who only speak Spanish fluently, don’t have the necessary language skills, according to multiple parents.

“These conditions are unsafe, inequitable, and a violation of the state’s expectations for early education,” the parents wrote in their letter. “On-site staff have been transparent and honest about these challenges to us and are doing their best — and for this, we are grateful, we applaud them — but this clearly needs immediate support from the district.”

Lucia Gonzalezz Ippolito’s daughter, who started TK last week, had been in a Spanish Immersion preschool for the last two years. She said that the program was great, and her daughter could have continued there for one more year before enrolling in kindergarten, but she felt pressure to put her in TK at SFUSD so she would have a better chance of getting one of the district’s competitive Spanish immersion spots.

“If I want her in a Spanish immersion program, I have to stay in MEC,” Gonzalez Ippolito said. “If you go to a regular TK or if you stay in preschool, then you’ll probably be like number 50 on the wait list.”

Since she took the helm as superintendent last year, Maria Su has said that one of her goals is to expand the district’s TK offerings, first adding 16 classrooms this year, and looking at potential locations for more early education programs in the future to meet enrollment demands. This fall, an influx of applications to the grade level, which California now guarantees access to for all students, boosted the district’s struggling enrollment.

But, “if you’re going to focus and make this an early education hub and have multiple classes of TKs there, you need to give it the attention that it deserves,” Mayfield said.

After the parents’ letter, a follow-up message on Friday morning, and more individual emails asking district leaders for information throughout the week, Mayfield said parents finally got a response from SFUSD’s assistant superintendent of early education late Friday morning.

“We are working closely with HR to address the staffing needs at MEC, and by end of day Monday, we will be able to share additional updates regarding staffing plans and next steps,” Christie Herrera wrote in the message shared with KQED.

While parents wait to see what those updates will be, Mayfield said it feels like too little, too late.

“If this is the way that the district acts and carries itself and works with parents, then I understand why parents don’t trust the district,” he told KQED. “I understand why the district has the reputation that they do for being very mismanaged and chaotic and disorganized and probably wasteful. It just feels like the district is there to try to protect the district, and nobody’s thinking about the kids.”