San Francisco Parents Scramble for Child Care Amid Teachers’ Strike

With some 50,000 San Francisco Unified School District students out of class on the first day of a teacher’s strike on Monday, parents around the city scrambled to adjust.

The school system’s 111 public campuses were shuttered after the San Francisco Unified School District and United Educators of San Francisco failed to come to an agreement over the weekend.

In the Excelsior neighborhood, the nonprofit Mission Science Workshop decided to open its doors to give refuge to families who had nowhere else to go.

A class was originally scheduled to visit the maker’s space, but when the strike canceled their field trip, the nonprofit offered kids the chance to drop in, tinker with tools, make art or pet a snake.

“Just like during the pandemic, as a small organization, we’re able to really quickly pivot and change our programs on the fly,” said Bart Evans, an assistant director and instructor at the workshop. He brought along his youngest son, a second grader at Sunnyside Elementary School.

Parents who flocked to the workshop were splitting child care duties with their neighbors or friends, or were shuffling their work hours, to adapt to the school closures.

“We wouldn’t know what else to do, so this is great,” said David Andrade, who brought his son, a third grader at Alvarado Elementary School, to the workshop.

Andrade works as a paraeducator, assisting a student who is deaf and blind at the school district. He’s not a member of the teacher’s union, and said that while he supports their fight for “better things down the road,” he’s worried about the student in his care.

“I’m just wondering how he’s doing today, and how his dad is doing. He’s got a single father. And so I was really curious how they’re handling it,” he said.

Emily de Ayora took the morning off to bring her three kids, along with her neighbor’s children and a fellow PTA board member’s child, to the workshop. She belongs to her neighborhood mom’s group on WhatsApp, and said many members have already offered to trade child care responsibilities.

“It’s pretty amazing how quickly parents can organize when we need to,” she said.

De Ayora, who’s also a member of the San Francisco Parent Coalition, said she supports the teachers’ cause, but hopes they can get what they need through negotiations and the strike could end soon.

“My kids are fine. I’m lucky,” she said. “But there are many, many other children in this district that rely on school for food. There are many parents who are emergency workers, and they rely on schools as a safe place for their children to go every day. There are many, many students in this district who are [in] special education, and taking them out of their daily routine is extremely challenging for them.”

The strike brought other parents back to the pandemic, when they were juggling with work and remote learning at the same time.

Abigail Alvarenga tried to get her two kids, who are in second and third grade at Monroe Elementary School, to work on their math and grammar worksheets before giving up and taking them to the science workshop.

Alvarenga and her husband are both firefighters, and they alternate their shifts to take care of the children. The couple can handle an indefinite strike, she said, but other families and older students aren’t so lucky.

“Our kids are young, but I imagine for kids that are trying to do all of their high school stuff and trying to get their grades up for getting into colleges, the more days they’re off, the further and further behind they will get,” she said.

The longer the strike goes on, she said, she’ll have to reach for the workbooks and keep her children up to speed on their writing, reading and arithmetic.