SF Teachers Walk Out in First Strike in Nearly 50 Years. Schools Will Remain Closed

San Francisco’s educators headed to the picket lines early Monday, kicking off the city’s first school strike in almost 50 years.

The city’s 111 public school campuses are shuttered after the San Francisco Unified School District and United Educators of San Francisco failed to come to a contract deal over the weekend, and the union declined Mayor Daniel Lurie’s call to delay the strike while negotiations continue.

“What this contract represents is stability for San Francisco Unified for years to come,” UESF President Cassondra Curiel said outside Mission High School on Monday morning, where students and families joined hundreds of teachers, counselors and social workers outside the darkened building.

She said the only way to call off the strike would be for the union and district to come to a full contract agreement: “You can expect to see strong picket lines until that agreement is achieved,” Curiel added.

Without a deal, SFUSD’s schools are closed indefinitely. Just before 2 p.m., the district confirmed to families that campuses would remain closed Tuesday.

In addition to the thousands of striking educators, hundreds of custodial and food service workers, principals and administrators also walked off the job in sympathy strikes, making it unsafe for the district to open schools, officials said.

Superintendent Maria Su told reporters Monday morning that the district’s team was prepared to receive a proposal from UESF when negotiations resumed at noon Monday, after an hourslong bargaining session broke down late Saturday night.

“We are ready to sit that down at the bargaining table, work through the remaining issues, and quite frankly, stay here all night as long as it takes to get to a full agreement,” she said, adding that the district hopes to reach an agreement today. “Every day this strike continues has real consequences.”

Many families rely on school for access to food and child care throughout the day, along with instruction, mental health support and social connection, Su said.

During the disruption, the city has set up meal distribution sites, and the district said some of its community partners and Recreation and Park Department after-school programs have been extended to all-day child care for their most at-risk students. Libraries and recreation centers are opening their doors to students older than 8, and the district is also offering independent study packets for children at home.

UESF declared the strike last week after months of state-led mediation ended with the union and district still far apart on many key demands, including fully funded family health care benefits and wage increases. The parties have been negotiating a new contract for almost a year, and educators are currently working under a deal that expired in June.

In addition to health coverage, the union has asked for raises of 9% and 14% for teachers and paraeducators over two years and changes to special education staffing. The district had said those demands are impossible given its financial crisis, and it repeatedly offered a 6% raise over three years and some increases to health care coverage.

Since the union declared it would strike, SFUSD made some movement on key demands, offering a 6% raise over two years and a $24,000 annual benefit allowance to cover health care costs during an hourslong bargaining session on Saturday.

At that session, the district and union reached a tentative agreement regarding the district’s sanctuary schools policy. UESF cited the agreement as an “important win” but rejected the district’s wage and benefits offers.

“The district is clearly not taking our demands seriously,” the union said in a statement. “They are still telling us that any salary increases will come at the cost of previous contract wins. They are still not addressing the widespread crisis in our special education classrooms. And they are still not offering us a contract with fully funded family healthcare.”

Gabriel Farfan, a paraeducator at Mission High School, stood on the picket lines early Monday. He said he was fighting for better wages, after being forced to move out of the city last year as the cost of living outpaced his pay. Now, he said, he has a 45-minute commute from the East Bay to get to school.

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“We are the lowest paid throughout school, and we are the backbone for our students,” he told KQED, adding that most paraeducators only work six hours a day.

“I think everybody here has their hopes up for the negotiations to go through,” he said. “I have a lot of students I’ve been helping from ninth all the way to 12th grade. I know a lot of the students in here; they know me. I get emails saying, ‘I will miss you,’ and I miss them, too, of course. For most of them, we are their second home. We’re their second families.”

Across the city at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, Charlie Macias and her mom, Nicole, had joined an early morning picket.

“I’m missing my classroom a lot,” the first-grader said. She hopes classes will be back in session by Friday, when the school has planned a pajama day.

“We figured if school’s going to be closed, we might as well join our teachers and fight for them and what they deserve,” Nicole, who said she was home from work Monday because of the strike, told KQED.

On Sunday, Lurie pleaded with the union to delay its walkout by three days so that schools can remain open as negotiations continue.

“It is critical that they continue the conversation so our kids can stay in school,” Lurie wrote in a statement, which was echoed by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi on social media.

“Our teachers are custodians of our children five days of the week, and they deserve our support, our students need continuity and our families deserve certainty,” Pelosi wrote.

But San Francisco State University labor historian John Logan said in an email that the union “really can’t delay the strike unless it genuinely believes that a deal is imminent, which is clearly not the case here.”

“It’s honestly kind of mind-boggling that they’ve let it get to this point,” he wrote. “The problems facing the district in terms of teacher retention, morale and staffing levels have been building for years. The district knew that there was enormous dissatisfaction among the teachers, and if they had any doubt about just how bad it was, they saw the result of two overwhelming strike votes.”

Monday morning at the Tenderloin Recreation Center, Lurie spoke publicly about the strike for the first time, saying he said he was frustrated that after Saturday’s bargaining session, where union and district officials said they made significant progress, negotiations seemed to stall Sunday.

“Yesterday, there was a lack of dialogue,” Lurie told reporters.

“I think so incredibly highly of our educators and our teachers. I want them well-paid. I want them to be able to afford health care,” he continued. “And I want our kids in school. So I’m going to work tirelessly 24-7 to facilitate an agreement that educators can agree to and that the school district can agree to.”

KQED’s Ayah Ali-Ahmad and Sydney Johnson contributed to this report.

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