‘I’m Ready for Kindergarten’: San Francisco’s Mission Bay Gets First Public School in 20 Years
San Francisco’s Mission Bay on Thursday morning celebrated the grand opening of the neighborhood’s first public school campus, more than a quarter century in the making.
Mission Bay School, the district’s first new school in twenty years, will welcome its inaugural students, from pre-kindergarten to kindergarten, on Aug. 17.
The campus will eventually serve transitional kindergarten through fifth grade students, plus pre-kindergarteners in a connected early education program and older Mission Bay residents who are part of SFUSD’s Mission Bay Learning Hub. SFUSD has estimated that the school will be fully enrolled by 2032.
“This building is fulfilling a promise that we made to our communities,” San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su said during a star-studded ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday, featuring appearances from Mayor Daniel Lurie to Giants’ mascot Lucille.
“When we said, ‘As we build Mission Bay, we were going to make sure that there was a public school that was going to serve our families that were going to move in,’” Su said. “Here is a realization of that dream.”
The modern, four-story building, funded by San Francisco’s 2016 school bond, features bright, airy hallways, colorful classrooms and breakout spaces and a well-stocked library, which overlooks a hard-top school yard. According to district documents, SFUSD contracted with McCarthy Building Company to complete the project for a sum of $95,390,000.
Surrounding the campus is burgeoning Mission Bay, which has nearly doubled in population size in the last 15 years. In that time, thousands of housing units have gone up in the neighborhood, which is near both Oracle Park and Chase Center. More than a dozen restaurants, coffee shops and community spaces have opened surrounding the venues and new builds.
What’s been missing, parents and city officials said Thursday, was a neighborhood school.
While SFUSD continues to see enrollment declines and is considering campus consolidations in the next few years, Mission Bay families have often had to travel to Daniel Webster Elementary, about a mile and a half away in Potrero Hill, or Bessie Carmichael Elementary in South of Market.
“When my daughter Mary was less than a year old, I would bring her to the building and grounds meetings for the school board and give public comment about how there really are families in Mission Bay and these kids are going to need a school,” resident Sarah Bertram said. “Mary’s now 13, but I’m thrilled that there are families here who are getting ready to send their kids to this school.”
Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who represents the neighborhood, said the opening was a “giant leap forward” for Mission Bay.
“[It’s] becoming the kind of complete, thriving, family-friendly neighborhood that every San Franciscan deserves,” Dorsey said. “A great neighborhood needs more than just housing, retail and offices. It also needs neighbors who know each other, and it needs a school where kids can walk to class and grow up together.”
For many families, that proximity is one of the biggest perks.
Lauren Loui, whose daughter Maggie is starting kindergarten, said the family takes Muni’s N Judah line three stops to get to school.
“We come here all the time. She knows it,” Loui said during Thursday’s grand opening.
Transitional Kindergarten teacher Tonecia Harvey lives even closer — a 12-minute walk, or four-minute bike ride.
“I can see my house from my classroom,” she said.
Parents were also excited about the campus’s facilities, built from the ground up over the last four years. The land, which was transferred from UC San Francisco to SFUSD in 2022, has been set aside for a school much longer, since 1988.
“The building, the classrooms, everything’s so well thought out,” said mom Mythili Iyengar, whose son Seelan will enter kindergarten in just under two weeks.
Early education classrooms on the first and second floors include low tables and a mini play kitchen, while the fourth floor, where the Learning Hub will now be housed, features multiple rooms with group work stations, whiteboards and mounted television screens.
Seelan’s favorite part, he said, is his classroom, which he said even has hot glue guns.
On the first day of school, he’s most excited to hold up a sign he made: “It says ‘I’m ready for kindergarten’ on it.”