San Francisco’s school board voted 5-2 on Tuesday to replace the city’s school lottery with neighborhood schools, overhauling a system that has consumed family life in the city for decades — and one that has already divided many of the people who pushed for change.
The decision, among the most consequential school policies in recent memory, exposed a new divide among people who had long agreed the lottery had to go, and marked a turn in the relationship between the board and San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su.
Under the plan, every family would be guaranteed a seat at one neighborhood elementary school, even if it applies late, but could apply elsewhere only to citywide programs such as language immersion, K-8 schools, and special education. The board is expected to take a final vote on a specific plan April 13, and the new system would apply for the 2028-29 school year.
By taking away the escape hatch that allows families to apply to schools across the city, the district is abandoning its status quo, forcing it to make every neighborhood school worth attending in hopes of increasing districtwide enrollment and academic outcomes. Su rallied a majority of the board behind that more restrictive approach, even as some parents warned it could push families out of the district before neighborhood schools improve.
Commissioners who backed the plan celebrated the historic end of a system families have long found stressful and unpredictable. The lottery is “dead now, and that’s a great moment for families and for the city,” Board Vice President Jaime Huling told The Standard on Wednesday.
For parents who opposed the change, the mood was closer to mourning. SF Parents, the advocacy group that has pushed for greater school choice and supported an alternative option, scheduled an impromptu meeting Wednesday evening so members could discuss what some saw as an unexpected breach on Su’s part. The alternative option would have allowed families to apply to any school in the city that had room for students.
“Parents are feeling a lot of grief today,” Rebecca Kee, SF Parents’ executive director, told The Standard. “To not only have the option that parents wanted be rejected, but also feel surprised by who went in which direction, is hugely problematic for groups that need to be working in lockstep.”
Commissioner Matt Alexander, who moved the resolution, made the moral case for the neighborhood school system. “It is every parent’s responsibility to think about what’s best for their kids,” he said. “It is our responsibility to think about what’s best for all the kids.”
“We keep talking about choice, but what about the kids whose families, for whatever reason, aren’t making those choices?” he said, pointing to those who “have to enroll in July because they’re homeless” or are newly arrived immigrants.
But critics question what happens to families while that longer game plays out. Commissioner Alida Fisher, a steady supporter of Su who has the endorsement of SF Parents in next month’s election, said the timing would be “screwing over families in certain parts of the city.” Given current resources and neighborhood demographics shaped by historic zoning laws, she said, “neighborhood schools will, by definition, be segregated schools unless we do things.”
Phil Halperin, an education philanthropist who has been involved in statewide politics for years, told The Standard the tension isn’t between good and bad intentions. Parents, he said, naturally focus on their own children. “Parents are going to play a shorter game, and the superintendent and the board are playing a longer game.”
Halperin called the margin of victory a sign that Su had worked to build consensus with a board that felt blindsided by her in May when she was publicly tepid about making a major policy change. “Maria Su has invested the time and the effort of working with the board, trying to figure out how to build consensus and get to yes,” he said.
A new road ahead
The alliance between Su and the board would have been difficult to imagine just five months ago. In May, board members said they learned about Su’s revised timeline for the overhaul the same way the public did: by reading the Chronicle. Sources, including members of the board, said the episode sharpened tensions between Su and several board members.
It seemed the district could be doomed to yet another fractious relationship between the administration and elected commissioners, similar to those that plagued the tenures of some of Su’s predecessors. Instead, the majority of the commissioners voted in lockstep with Su in the most consequential decision of her term since she became superintendent in October 2024.
The order of operations had been a fight for years. Under Su’s predecessor, Matt Wayne, the district pushed to close schools first, putting the enrollment overhaul on hold. That plan unraveled in 2024 when the district released a list of schools slated for closure without the board’s sign-off, and Wayne resigned soon after.
Su put the enrollment overhaul first. This spring, she unveiled a timeline that would put school closures on the table no earlier than 2029-30. Su also argued then that closures might be less urgent than feared, pointing to the revamped enrollment system, along with the new Mission Bay Elementary and a planned Mandarin immersion program, as evidence the district could win back families.
Five months later, Su and her staff presented the board with the vivid vision commissioners had demanded. On Tuesday, Su urged the board to adopt Option C, which guarantees every family a seat at its neighborhood school but limits where families can apply outside their neighborhood. The plan would still offer school choice but would also radically simplify the current system and offer predictability to those who sought it.
The board agreed. The attendance boundaries, program changes, and final policy will be pitched in a draft policy in March and voted on in April.
Under the current system, families tour and rank any of the more than 100 elementary, middle, and high schools in the city. Where they land with the lottery depends on a complex mix of strategy, tiebreakers, and luck.
The board weighed another replacement. Under Option B, families would get a seat at their neighborhood school and could also apply to any other school with room. Under Option C, families get a neighborhood seat, even if they apply late, and can apply elsewhere only to designated citywide programs, such as language immersion, K-8 schools, and special education.
District projections show that 19 of 58 attendance areas lack enough kindergarten seats for the children who live there, a combined shortfall of about 320 seats, even as the district has roughly 14,000 empty seats overall. Redrawing boundaries could close roughly half the gap. District staff estimated that closing the rest of the gap would take converting citywide schools into neighborhood ones, shrinking the programs families could access outside their attendance areas.
School budgets in SFUSD are set largely by enrollment, so under-enrolled schools get less money and fewer teachers, and often combine grades in a single classroom. The district also recently extended its contract with the busing company, Zum, which has electrified its fleet, for five years, with next year’s cost capped at $47.25 million.
Under the lottery, much of the district’s busing runs one way. In the 2025-26 school year, the three southeastern ZIP codes held 37 of the district’s 87 general-education bus stops, but just four of the 43 schools those buses serve, according to analysis by The Standard.
Every morning, a bus carried dozens of students from Guadalupe Elementary in Crocker-Amazon to West Portal Elementary. No bus brought students to Guadalupe.
“Who is to say that families wouldn’t be coming to Guadalupe or neighborhood schools if the opportunities were equal?” Corey Robinson, Guadalupe Elementary’s community schools coordinator, told The Standard.
Reshuffling programs will also mean reshuffling staff. The district’s planning documents call for assessing how program changes affect staffing at each school and working with the teachers and administrators unions “early and often to ensure we stay within notice timelines.”
‘The certainty they need’
The change could also reshape where families choose to live. Under the lottery, students living in Census Tract Integration Preference areas, the 20% of the city with historically low test scores, some of which lie in gentrified areas like the Mission District, receive priority at any school they list. In 2025, The Standard reported that parents described well-off families using P.O. boxes or empty rentals in CTIP areas to secure what they called “the golden ticket,” and real estate listings advertised the status as a selling point. SFUSD had not confirmed a single case of address fraud in three years, after eliminating its fraud investigator position in 2022.
Under neighborhood assignment, the address that matters will be the one inside a sought-after school’s boundary, and those boundaries haven’t been drawn. What happens to CTIP has not been decided.
The lottery was the product of decades of decades of legal and political efforts to integrate schools. In 1971, a federal court ruled in Johnson v. SFUSD (opens in new tab) that the district had intentionally drawn segregated attendance zones. The district responded with the Horseshoe Plan (opens in new tab), which bused every elementary student for part of their schooling to pursue racial balance. More than 20,000 white students left the district (opens in new tab) over the following decade for private or parochial schools. Later plans capped each school’s share of any one racial group. But families could request transfers out of their assigned schools, and as more did, schools resegregated.
A 1999 settlement barred the district from using race in assignments. In 2010, it adopted the current citywide choice system, with the CTIP priority (opens in new tab). The system was meant to reduce racial isolation. But more affluent families were far more likely to use it, and by 2019, the district said, its elementary schools were more segregated than they had been three decades earlier.
The board voted in 2018 (opens in new tab) to replace the lottery. After two years of community meetings and simulations with Stanford researchers, it adopted a zone-based plan (opens in new tab) that had discouraging simulations and never took effect. Seven years after the first vote, the district was back at the start.
Su told district staff and board leaders she favored Option C late last week. On Oct. 7, she gave a speech to district staff explaining her support, according to a person familiar with the meeting. The next day, she told board leaders at their weekly agenda review that Option C was her recommendation.
By then, Kee of SF Parents had started communicating with board members and staff as she tried to understand how support for Option C had coalesced seemingly without warning — and without the influential parent group’s backing.
The mayor’s office was making calls, too, in support of Option C, commissioners said. And in a statement Wednesday, Mayor Daniel Lurie called the vote “an important step toward ending the public school lottery and giving families the certainty they need to put down roots in our city.”
Commissioners said they received calls from other moderate political groups in an effort to encourage a vote for C. At least one commissioner had not been told Su would make such a strong recommendation at the meeting.
The materials posted for Tuesday’s meeting included two resolutions, one for each option, and no recommendation. Su delivered hers straight from the dais in the boldest and most candid moment of her two-year tenure as superintendent.
Su acknowledged that her own staff had “lots of hesitations.” The head of the district’s enrollment office, Lauren Koehler, had favored Option B, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Koehler’s enrollment team has dwindled from 30 people to 16 in recent years, and there has been talk that a simpler system could shrink its staff even further, SFUSD insiders told The Standard. Koehler did not respond to a request for comment.
Su cited survey results showing that 65% of respondents doubted the district could deliver on neighborhood schools. “Quite frankly, I can’t really argue with that,” she said. “This district, and I will fully own this, have historically made a lot of promises to our families and continually break them.”
She was not asking families to simply trust the district, she said, “because we’ve asked that before of families, and we have broken trust. What I am asking families is to join us.”
The board ultimately considered only the resolution for Option C. Board President Phil Kim said at Tuesday’s meeting that a memo sent to commissioners Oct. 9 laid out the procedure: Option B would come up for a vote only if Option C failed. Commissioner Supryia Ray objected that the arrangement “puts a thumb on the scale for Option C.”
Ray and Fisher ultimately opposed it, but SFUSD insiders who spoke to The Standard this week could not remember a time when commissioners and the superintendent were so aligned on such a major policy decision.
‘Parents will find a way’
Su herself acknowledged that the change “will take years” and “is not a switch of a button or a flip of a switch.” Deputy Superintendent John Davis told the board that strengthening struggling schools could take considerably longer. “Any district that goes through this type of turnover is at least going to take five to 10 years, and I would probably push longer to the 10,” he said.
“You can’t student-assignment your way into great schools,” Davis said. Real change, he said, means “having great educators in every school, and that’s going to take time, no matter what you all think.”
Anna Klafter of United Administrators of San Francisco, the principals union, said the group has not taken a side but warned that under a neighborhood model, “we will see our students in poverty potentially concentrated in neighborhood schools. We want to make sure that schools have what they need to serve the students coming to them.” Leaders of the teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, did not respond to a request for comment.
Nancy Tung, who chairs the San Francisco Democratic Party, is a public school parent in Portola. The test scores at her neighborhood school, she said, “do not give me confidence in that particular school’s ability to … provide an adequate education for my kids.”
“If the only option for my kids were to go to our area attendance school, I would look outside of the school district for my kid’s education,” Tung said. “Parents will find a way to put their kids in schools they want their kids to go to, and you’re going to be left with the same equity problems that you have now.”
Kee agreed, calling the new plan “restrictive.” District leaders, she said, have ‘started to walk off in a direction without us.
One board member who supported Option C saw it differently. SF Parents, the commissioner said, is “probably disappointed that they didn’t control the outcome more so than anything else.” After all, the coalition does not represent all parents.
“We’re putting our flag down and saying there will be a good school for every kid in every neighborhood,” said Halperin. “We have never said that before as a district.”
“We owe it to the kids of today and tomorrow to try to work toward that day,” he added. “Otherwise we’re going to spend another generation making excuses why some parts of the city have better schools than others.”