SFUSD Has Overspent for Years. Major Cuts Could Have It on the Path to Stability

San Francisco’s school district plans to make more than $100 million in budget cuts for the second year in a row to stave off a massive deficit and aim to end a yearslong pattern of overspending, district officials said Friday.

The move, however, won’t come without pain for families and staff, and it could be threatened by ongoing labor negotiations with district teachers, who escalated their threat to strike this week.

“Our fiscal stabilization plan is working, and we are moving towards stability for our school district,” Superintendent Maria Su said Friday. “However, we are still struggling in really tough times. We still need to make additional reductions.

“These reductions will not be taken lightly,” she continued.

The San Francisco Unified School District plans to present $102 million in budget cuts this year, as it faces projected funding shortfalls of $51 million for next year, and $32 million and $19 million for the following two years, Su said. Insight into where those cuts will focus could come as soon as Dec. 16, when staff will present an update to their multi-year fiscal stabilization plan to the school board.

The first year of the plan, which was implemented for the current school year, included $114 million in ongoing expenditure reductions through an employee buyout initiative for hundreds of late-career educators, a strict campus staffing model and layoffs of administrative employees in the central office.

Su has warned that making more cuts on top of those could be harder, but she said her team heard a resounding message from families at town halls across the district this fall: End the cycle of cutting services year after year.

“There’s a strong desire for us to be stable,” Su told KQED. “It’s not fair to students, it’s not fair to parents, [and] certainly not fair to our staff, where we cannot even guarantee the basic stability of a job or the basic stability of a student knowing that their teacher is going to be in their school.”

Making these budget reductions, she said, is necessary to achieve stability.

The district’s cuts last year put it in a position to move out of a “negative” budget certification from the state, which indicates that financial advisors don’t believe it will be able to pay its bills over the coming two years. Now, the district expects a “qualified” certification, which indicates that it might be able to meet its financial obligations.

“Today is good news. Achieving qualified certification is a critical step towards exiting state oversight and fully regaining local control,” school board president Phil Kim said.

Under that certification, the district would still be subject to financial oversight, but Su said it’s a step toward a “positive” certification, which would allow it to operate independent of the state for the first time since 2021.

Su said the district hopes to reach that level as soon as March, but by the end of the academic year at the latest.

That plan could be threatened, though, by ongoing labor tensions between SFUSD and United Educators of San Francisco, which represents 6,500 district educators.

A strike authorization vote held by UESF overwhelmingly passed on Wednesday, the first of two votes needed to authorize a work stoppage, after nine months of unfruitful negotiations over their 2025-2027 contract.

The union can now call for a strike vote at any time, but it will have to complete a two-step mediation process before teachers are legally allowed to walk off the job.

The parties declared an impasse in October and are now in the second mediated negotiation phase, called “fact-finding.” They’ll present arguments to a panel of state-appointed mediators later this month, and that panel will issue non-binding compromise recommendations. SFUSD will be able to make a final offer to the union before educators can legally go on strike.

While the union is demanding a raise, fully paid health care coverage for dependents and a new special education staffing model, the board said it isn’t in a position to offer the union more money.

“The board truly wants to honor all of the hard work and meaningful work that our educators are doing to serve our students every single day. We just cannot give them money that we do not have,” school board vice president Jaime Huling said.

“We will and have offered them everything that we can afford,” she continued.

In October, SFUSD offered UESF a 2% raise in exchange for concessions on its other demands, and at the expense of some existing contract provisions, including a sabbatical program for veteran educators and extra preparation periods for advanced placement teachers.

Union leaders said the results of this week’s vote — which was passed by 99.3% of members who voted — indicate that they’re willing to strike if their demands aren’t met.

If teachers strike, it would be the first in nearly 50 years in the city.

“Right now, we hope district management is really looking at where they’re at in negotiations and preparing to bring us things that could be a potential agreement,” said Nathalie Hrizi, one of UESF’s bargaining coordinators. “No one wants to strike, but we are willing to.”