{"id":176957,"date":"2026-02-13T20:16:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T20:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/176957\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T20:16:23","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T20:16:23","slug":"the-san-francisco-unified-school-district-fumbled-the-teachers-strike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/176957\/","title":{"rendered":"The San Francisco Unified School District fumbled the teachers strike"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month\u2019s four-day teacher strike, which mercifully concluded<\/a> this morning, should not have caught anyone off guard. <\/p>\n

The San Francisco Unified School District and its teachers had been at loggerheads since March of last year. On Oct. 10, the two sides formally declared an impasse and ceased negotiating. <\/p>\n

In November, teachers held \u201cpractice pickets\u201d at more than 100 schools. In early December they voted to authorize a strike by a 99-percent<\/a> clip and then, in January, did so again by a nearly 98-percent<\/a> clip.<\/p>\n

So, this was brewing. For many months. Yet, Mayor Daniel Lurie told reporters this week that it wasn\u2019t until Feb. 2 that he first called the teachers union president, just eight days before her members walked off the job.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The district, also, was caught flat-footed by things it should have seen coming. It waited so long to resolve teacher concerns over non-monetary issues, like sanctuary campuses and AI, that these issues ended up consuming valuable time during strike bargaining.<\/p>\n

And the district\u2019s contingency plans for the strike seemed to lean heavily on the ability to run some manner of programming out of school sites during a work stoppage, as the Oakland Unified School District has done during its recent barrage of educator walkouts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But this was rendered impossible in San Francisco when the principals and administrators voted last week to sympathy strike<\/a> alongside the teachers<\/a>, as did SEIU-covered custodians, clerks, secretaries and food service workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This, too, shouldn\u2019t have come as a shock to the district.\u00a0The United Administrators of San Francisco purportedly informed the superintendent in mid-January that such a move was likely. <\/p>\n

By late January<\/a>, Mission Local reported that principals would vote on whether to strike in solidarity once teachers set a walkout date. The outcome of that vote was not in question, and it should\u2019ve been clear that school facilities would be shut.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet, on Feb. 3, a preliminary emergency resolution<\/a> gave Superintendent Maria Su the authority to call for the \u201cuse of volunteers at any school facility during an emergency.\u201d <\/p>\n

The resolution also would\u2019ve allowed her to hire \u201csubstitute employees\u201d at the princely sum of up to $600 a day. The sympathy strikes,\u00a0which were forewarned, imploded this contingency.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The union is celebrating this as a big win. It received fully covered family healthcare, which was the United Educators of San Francisco\u2019s marquee demand. This does away with healthcare payments of up to $1,500 a month for teachers with families. <\/p>\n

But that led to a smaller wage bump for most teachers than the union was demanding:\u00a05 percent. That\u2019s less than the 6 percent that was on the table prior to the fully funded healthcare offer, but more than the four percent the district subsequently countered with.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The district\u2019s monetary issues are real: Cheryl Stevens<\/a>, the primary author of the state-mandated Feb. 4 \u201cfact-finding report\u201d<\/a> \u2014 which largely backed the district\u2019s fiscal claims \u2014\u00a0is respected as a true neutral by both labor and management figures. <\/p>\n

If, as the district is wont to shout from the rooftops, untenable payouts lead to layoffs and contractions a few years down the road, then nobody wins.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Friday, after a grueling week, everybody is exhausted and relieved and only saying the nicest things. But it\u2019s clear that the district\u2019s lack of preparation and write-the-term-paper-in-the-hallway responses put it on the back foot from the get-go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AerialBattalions of unionized teachers and their supporters formed a human message on Feb. 11, 2026 on Ocean Beach. Photo courtesy of Andres Amador<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, when thousands of out-of-towners descended upon the Bay Area for the Bad Bunny concert and adjunct football game, scads of chronically online people posted the same revelation: San Francisco isn\u2019t a dystopian shithole! It\u2019s really quite beautiful!<\/p>\n

It turns out there is a notable gap between real life and the ramblings of angry people on the internet. Those who substitute ramblings of angry people on the internet for real life are, in fact, often taken aback when confronted with real life. Something like this appears to have happened to the San Francisco Unified School District.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the internet, angry people were grousing<\/a> about greedy teachers and the teachers\u2019 strike. There were completely untenable calls to open the schools during the multi-union strikes, despite the fact that this was as plausible as whatever Elon Musk is going on about with AI satellite factories on the moon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you visited the actual school picket sites, however \u2014\u00a0and Mission Local reporters criss-crossed<\/a> the city all week, covering protests<\/a> at schools, large rallies<\/a>, and even giant human messages at Ocean Beach<\/a> \u2014\u00a0they were high-energy, positive and well-attended, with many families and students present and drivers honking loudly in support.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, not every public-school family supported an agonizing work stoppage, but the people who were backing the teachers were a lot more active and visible than the people who weren\u2019t. <\/p>\n

That could, no doubt, have changed if this strike dragged on for aeons. Blessedly, it didn\u2019t,\u00a0and it\u2019s hard to say the district anticipated families\u2019 largely positive initial reaction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s what happens when you substitute the internet for real life and parents groups for parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The district should not have misread the solid initial support for its teachers. Take a minute and think: Can you name your teachers from kindergarten to seventh grade? I can\u2019t tell you where I left my overdue library books, but I can rattle that one off. <\/p>\n

I can name all of my kids\u2019 teachers, too (I had three public-school kids home this week, exhausting their supply of \u201cWings of Fire\u201d books). Parents know and, generally, like their kids\u2019 teachers. But can you name two people who work in the district office?\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are, of course, exceptions. Maybe you hated your teachers. Maybe you still do. <\/p>\n

But, at least for the one week, most parents were ready to back educators\u2014\u00a0whom they know and whom they trust with their children every day \u2014\u00a0and reserve their animus for the SFUSD, which they only hear from when it sends out simultaneous<\/a> texts, emails and robocalls but, somehow, never seems to tell you the things you really need to know.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what parents do know about the district: It failed<\/a> to pay its employees, driving them out of the district<\/a> or to despair; it ran an abortive and chaotic school-closure process<\/a>; and it has generally made hiring teachers and deploying them promptly to school sites a process more lengthy and convoluted than an Icelandic saga<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AAssemblymember Matt Haney on the picket line Feb. 12, 2026, at Jose Ortega Elementary School. Photo by Corey Cain.<\/p>\n

So, the district missed that. It missed months of opportunities to call for bargaining, even during the mediation period. It missed the significance of the union\u2019s \u201cpractice pickets\u201d in November \u2014\u00a0a move that should\u2019ve raised red flags. <\/p>\n

It, critically, was caught off-guard by the sympathy strikes, which appear to have obliterated whatever contingency plans the district had in place with \u201csubstitute employees\u201d and volunteers at school sites.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The teachers and district had been deadlocked for 11 months, and have met sparsely until recently, so the last-minute, hair-on-fire nature of so much of February\u2019s action and inaction has been bizarre. <\/p>\n

Mayor Lurie told assembled reporters that he only reached out to the union on the cusp of its strike. Better late than never,\u00a0but his call<\/a> for a 72-hour cooling-off period on a Sunday afternoon for a strike set to commence Monday morning came off as facile.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Prior to the Thursday-night breakthrough of a fully funded family healthcare offer, much of the progress made between the teachers and the district was focused on non-monetary issues: The district\u2019s sanctuary policy, provisions for homeless students, and an AI policy. <\/p>\n

It was,\u00a0and is,\u00a0mind-boggling that these issues were left unresolved until after teachers walked out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Su has stated that the district stood to lose between $7 million and $10 million for every day of a work stoppage. So it is astounding that the early part of this week was spent hemming and hawing about these low-hanging, non-monetary issues while teachers marched on picket lines. <\/p>\n

That the district then caved on them adds insult to injury \u2014\u00a0and gave the striking teachers succor.<\/p>\n

Dealing with these issues ahead of time would\u2019ve mollified the communities that served as part of the striking teachers\u2019 coalition. But the opposite happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During the run-up to the strike and in its early days, it felt almost as if the district was going out of its way to antagonize a workforce that needed no additional aggravation. <\/p>\n

On the cusp of the walkout, teachers, principals and others were confused and irritated to receive emails from the SFUSD with Monday \u201credeployment assignments\u201d<\/a> to \u201cStaff Centers\u201d on the first day of the walkout. It was unclear who would choose to cross the picket to show up at a \u201cStaff Center,\u201d and what work was to be done there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well now we know: District employees at A.P. Giannini Middle School, one of eight \u201cStaff Centers,\u201d were filmed sitting around and watching the Winter Olympics on a classroom movie screen as union members picketed outside. Perhaps they should\u2019ve been redeployed to Dave & Buster\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Through it all, organized labor was watching. Police and firefighters are, at present, hammering out their contracts. It remains to be seen how cleanly that process will go, even for some of the most popular and deferred-to city workers. Next year, a multitude of contracts come undone right as the devastating effects of the president\u2019s draconian budget bill come due.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What we saw this week appears to be a coming attraction for next year, with the possibility of coordinated strikes on the statewide level. As this unfolds, there is no one in the mayor\u2019s inner circle with a labor background, or who even seems to be familiar with the ins and outs of public-sector collective bargaining<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is going to be a lot of bargaining in the coming months and a dearth of money. To crib the words from Genesis<\/a>: There\u2019s not much love to go \u2019round.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This month\u2019s four-day teacher strike, which mercifully concluded this morning, should not have caught anyone off guard. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105,15254],"class_list":{"0":"post-176957","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-san-francisco","9":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","10":"tag-san-francisco-news","11":"tag-sf","12":"tag-sf-headlines","13":"tag-sf-news","14":"tag-sfusd"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}