After the San Francisco Board of Education elected to make Dr. Maria Su a permanent employee last month, the superintendent now has the stability required to revisit major structural changes in the district.
Perhaps the most controversial of these are school closures, or what Su has called school “reorganization” in recent town halls.
As it stands, too few kids are spread across too many campuses that cost too much to maintain. State funding is tied to student attendance, and SFUSD has yet to recover from a 9% pandemic-era enrollment decline. The budgetary math makes closures look all but inevitable for a school system that has had to make deep cuts to avoid bankruptcy. The lingering question of which ones will be mothballed is a top concern for parents of the district’s roughly 55,000 students.
Last fall, the district abandoned its plan to consider closures as a way to shore up budget constraints. When the SFUSD administration published a list of 13 schools suitable for closure, board commissioners and city officials were blindsided by which schools were on the list and how little public input was considered.
The debacle led to Matt Wayne’s resignation in October 2024, just before Su was appointed by then-Mayor London Breed to an interim position. While Su put the subject on the backburner during the first year of her tenure, that changed two weeks ago when the SFUSD board discussed a resolution that would ask the superintendent to present a reorganization proposal as soon as August 2026 for implementation in the 2027-28 school year.
Board President Phil Kim branded the draft (opens in new tab) of the “Strong Schools Resolution” as the revival of an important discussion. “This resolution is not meant to override policy,” Kim said at the district’s Nov. 18 board meeting. “It’s meant to say, ‘We are ready to have a conversation about it.’”
Since the draft resolution is scarce on details, board commissioners were tepid at the meeting about how much weight it would actually hold. The resolution was clearer about a timeline for the reorganization’s implementation and vowed not to repeat the communication issues of 2024.
At the board meeting last month, Su said the school closures will not be used to plug the deficit, but rather to achieve long-term fiscal stabilization after the budget is balanced by the start of the 2026-27 school year. The district will then consider “expanding some schools and consolidating others” for the 2027-28 school year as a way to maintain the district’s financial stability long-term. That includes “making the best use” of its “real estate portfolio” to best serve the district’s students.
According to the resolution, SFUSD has space for 14,000 more students in its 125 school campuses. The district estimates that enrollment will decline “by an additional 4,600 students by 2032, leaving some schools half-empty and underfunded while others in high demand turn students away.”
SFUSD schools at risk of closure
Only one school closure has taken place during Su’s tenure — the alternative, vocationally focused high school The Academy, which will be moved onto the Raoul Wallenberg High School campus.
The district has said The Academy’s move is an isolated incident that shouldn’t be seen as the first step in widespread school closures. The school suffered a steep recent drop in enrollment, from 320 students in the 2022-23 school year to just 99 this year (opens in new tab).
But several other schools across the district have seen similar student body losses. The same cost-cutting logic could put them on the chopping block.
Of the 13 schools shortlisted for closure or merger in last year’s scrapped plan, five have had enrollment drops of nearly 50% or more from their peak since the 2009-10 school year, according to data from the California Department of Education.
El Dorado Elementary has seen enrollment fall from 308 students in 2012-13 to 128 in 2024-25. The district suggested last year that the school could close and merge with Visitacion Valley Elementary, a campus a half-mile away that has seen enrollment fall from 469 students in 2012-13 to 239 in 2024-25. Combined, the school’s two populations would add up to just 76% of the student body Visitacion served just 12 years ago.
The same is true of Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, which has fallen from 253 students in 2011-12 to 137 in 2024-25. The district could close Milk and transfer students to George Washington Carver Elementary school, which has a campus three times larger than Milk’s and has seen an even more stark decline: from 282 in 2009-10 to 93 in 2024-25.
The June Jordan School for Equity was purpose-built in 2003 to be a small school offering opportunities to students from low-income backgrounds, and currently has the second-lowest enrollment of any SFUSD high school after the Academy. The school saw its student body shrink by 89 students or 33% between the 2009-10 and 2024-25 school years, and could potentially merge with John O’Connell High School, as suggested last year, which has seen its enrollment drop by 159 students or 26% over the same period. While having the lowest enrollment of any SFUSD high school other than The Academy, Jordan sits on the fourth-largest lot of any school in the district.
Unless a neighborhood-based school assignment system accompanies school reorganization, closing schools will force some families into longer commutes. But, it would save the cash-strapped district in building maintenance — and millions of dollars more if campuses are sold completely. In the case of The Academy, students also get access to more classes and extracurricular opportunities by merging with a better-resourced institution.
The trend away from public toward private education is happening across (opens in new tab) city and state lines, with some local districts elsewhere experiencing even steeper enrollment declines than SFUSD. Over the past year, San Jose’s (opens in new tab) public school district has undergone campus closures as a way to help bridge its budget gaps, and Vallejo’s (opens in new tab) public school district released a list of seven schools which could be shut down by next school year.
Amid the need to further cut its budget, SFUSD is separately involved in a drawn-out contract negotiation with the teachers’ union, which plans to hold a strike authorization vote (opens in new tab) on Dec. 3.
Before the district moves closer to shutting any schools, the SFUSD board said it’s important for the community and the board to agree on why such actions are being taken.
“I think that we are at risk of setting the superintendent and the district up for another round of painful heartache that we can ill afford,” said Board Vice President Jaime Huling at the Nov. 18 meeting.