If the 6,000 members of the United Educators of San Francisco are an army, then Cassondra Curiel is their general. And she’s getting ready for war.
Her weapon of choice? To strike.
The 40-year-old president of the city’s teachers union says her members are furious over perceived mistreatment by the San Francisco Unified School District, including staffing cuts, payroll snafus, and years of declining enrollment. She is pushing for raises of between 9% and 14% for educators, far above the district’s current offer of 2% annual hikes over the next three years. If they don’t get what they want, she told The Standard on Friday, San Francisco’s teachers are prepared to go on strike for the first time in 47 years.
As for the possibility that families — still scarred by lockdowns during Covid — will revolt in the face of even more learning loss and school-closure chaos, the former teacher is unflinching: If “families and teachers stick together,” she says, “students win.”
Last Thursday, educators in every SFUSD school began casting their final ballots to strike. A preliminary vote in December showed an overwhelming appetite for a work stoppage, with 99.3% of union members voting in favor. A formal fact-finding session between the parties last week yielded no progress, according to a letter to parents (opens in new tab) sent by SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su Friday night.
Su warned that the union and the district remain far apart in negotiations. “Despite the District’s creative suggestions, UESF did not offer any counter, and terminated our Fact Finding session at 4:30 pm,” she wrote.
She implied that teaching could continue amidst a strike, though a district spokesperson declined to elaborate on how. “If UESF rejects the district’s final offer and chooses to strike, SFUSD intends to meet our legal obligation to provide 180 days of instruction,” Su wrote.
Over the last few years, unions have proved effective at having their most pressing demands granted by the district. In October, the union that represents principals won a $7,500 pay bump and a 2% raise for the next three years. In October 2023, the district granted credentialed teachers a $9,000 raise for that school year and a 5% pay bump for the next.
That contract expired in June, but remains in place until a new two-year deal is reached. The district and the teachers’ union have been bargaining since March. According to Curiel, the sides aren’t just far apart on the terms of a contract, they’re facing a chasm of distrust. The neutral fact finder is expected to deliver its findings in early February.
Now, a strike may very well happen, even as the district maintains it’s in dire financial straits due to an ongoing budget deficit.
The Standard spoke with Curiel to understand the union’s positions and to ask about the impact a strike would have on families, students, and the health of the district.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Bring us up to speed on where your members are right now.
We’re in the biggest fight. This is the longest, most extended situation we’ve been in with the district, where we remain so far apart. We are weeks away from needing to go on strike.
What’s the biggest sticking point at the bargaining table?
They want us to take 0% raises at this moment. With concessions [over sabbaticals and prep periods], they’ll give us 2% annually for the next three years — but those concessions are things that some of our members and schools rely on. So, we’re not willing to sell our schools out to get what we know we need.
If your members strike, thousands of children will need care for days or weeks. What would you say to working parents who will struggle with their kids missing school?
We’ve been organizing with families at school sites, working together to pressure the district to come to a deal. We’ve been working with families very intensely on offering sanctuary information (opens in new tab), as immigrant families are arguably some of the most impacted. The biggest contribution [families could make] is to push the district to come to an agreement. This district is such a mess of neglect and mismanagement. They’re really wasting a lot of time here. Our contract has been expired since June 2025. We’ve been negotiating since March.
Again, what do you say to parents who might need to scramble for childcare during a teacher strike?
Join us at our town hall (opens in new tab). We have a digital town hall we’ve been flyer-ing for families and teachers to stick together, so students win. It’s not us versus them; it’s how do we do this so the board and management do what they have to.
The union’s position is that the district has the money for substantial pay raises. But the district has said it’s facing a $32 million budget shortfall for next year. Where is the money supposed to come from?
Their multi-year projections are outrageous and erroneous. The amount of excess funding the school district had each year is a surplus, even while headline after headline pumped out saying they’re in dire straits and in deficit. We’ve been having this conversation for over ten months. They’re sitting on $400 million in reserve, $100 million of which they put into their reserve account this past November. [The district disputes these figures, reporting it needs to cut about $102 million from its 2026-27 school year budget.]
Superintendent Maria Su is on the other side of the bargaining table from UESF. | Source: Magali Gauthier for The Standard
Declining enrollment has added to the district’s financial problems. Won’t a strike only add to that problem? Will more disaffected families just leave the district?
It’s massive, every time you hear from a family about their school teachers having left — folks who are burning out, walking out of the classroom. When you have special education positions unfilled, and families coming to the Board of Education, saying it’s urgent, they need a teacher. This year, we heard from a swarm of Pre-K families saying their children didn’t have teachers, day after day.
Our proposals are on the table to stabilize that education, to retain teachers in their current positions, and to help the district recruit from a pipeline of educators across the state. If we use a crass analogy, if you have a whole restaurant and only one server, that doesn’t benefit everyone in that restaurant.
Isn’t there a worry that a strike will push away families who are already contemplating leaving the district?
What we know is that this district loses enrollment because of its mismanagement. Ask the district how many students were enrolled in August, and how many are enrolled now. They’ve lost over 1,000 students in this school year because of their behavior. [The district did not verify this figure before press time.] When they say they have an enrollment crisis, they’re right, for entirely different reasons. The school enrollment lottery has so many support groups online because this system, the district has been criticized for, that families beg them to change, that the school board voted on six years ago to change, management has refused to revise that enrollment system.
They cause their own problems. Enrollment is their manufactured crisis.
How do your demands intersect with the school closures the district is considering? And with the technical problems the district has had in paying teachers?
It’s poor management at the end of the day. Like, if you really want to drill down. And it’s not even one singular person, and if I’m being really honest, it’s not because there’s an evil entity twirling their little mustache over there, trying to think of ways to screw us over. Our criticisms lie in that there’s not somebody, and multiple somebodies, in that office, who think, “How do we make this right, forever?”
How damaging was the district’s payroll crisis in the end?
I don’t want to oversimplify, but hundreds of teachers left during that period, many of whom made it clear, I’m leaving because you don’t respect me because of this pay situation. The district was intransigent. To fix this kind of problem, you have to be motivated. And then you have to do something about it.
The district has threatened layoffs, but teachers aren’t the only ones whose jobs are threatened, right?
The nurses, the school psychologists, the social worker, the student advisor who’s out on the yard during recess, that’s a UESF (opens in new tab) member. We took an approach a few years ago to understand if we’re going to talk a game about social justice, about equity, about fighting for our students, then we also have to be about that.
Very frequently, our paraeducators are on the chopping block. The district may say that they respect all of our workers, but who is on the layoff list shows you who’s prioritized. And frequently, our security guards and paraeducators are also the lowest-paid individuals in our school district and are the first ones to get those pink slips. We know that doesn’t help our students.