{"id":497511,"date":"2026-10-16T01:14:22","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T01:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/497511\/"},"modified":"2026-10-16T01:14:22","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T01:14:22","slug":"a-late-pitch-a-split-board-and-grieving-parents-behind-sfusds-seismic-lottery-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/497511\/","title":{"rendered":"A late pitch, a split board, and grieving parents: Behind SFUSD\u2019s seismic lottery vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco\u2019s school board voted 5-2 on Tuesday<\/a> to replace the city\u2019s school lottery with neighborhood schools, overhauling a system that has consumed family life in the city for decades \u2014 and one that has already divided many of the people who pushed for change.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

Commissioners who backed the plan celebrated the historic end of a system families have long found stressful and unpredictable. The lottery is \u201cdead now, and that\u2019s a great moment for families and for the city,\u201d Board Vice President Jaime Huling told The Standard on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s part. The alternative option would have allowed families to apply to any school in the city that had room for students.<\/p>\n

\u201cParents are feeling a lot of grief today,\u201d Rebecca Kee, SF Parents\u2019 executive director, told The Standard. \u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Commissioner Matt Alexander, who moved the resolution, made the moral case for the neighborhood school system. \u201cIt is every parent\u2019s responsibility to think about what\u2019s best for their kids,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is our responsibility to think about what\u2019s best for all the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe keep talking about choice, but what about the kids whose families, for whatever reason, aren\u2019t making those choices?\u201d he said, pointing to those who \u201chave to enroll in July because they\u2019re homeless\u201d or are newly arrived immigrants.<\/p>\n

But critics question what happens to families while that longer game plays out. Commissioner Alida Fisher, a steady supporter of Su<\/a> who has the endorsement of SF Parents in next month\u2019s election, said the timing would be \u201cscrewing over families in certain parts of the city.\u201d Given current resources and neighborhood demographics shaped by historic zoning laws, she said, \u201cneighborhood schools will, by definition, be segregated schools unless we do things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phil Halperin, an education philanthropist who has been involved in statewide politics for years, told The Standard the tension isn\u2019t between good and bad intentions. Parents, he said, naturally focus on their own children. \u201cParents are going to play a shorter game, and the superintendent and the board are playing a longer game.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cMaria 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A new road ahead<\/p>\n

The alliance between Su and the board would have been difficult to imagine just five months ago. In May, board members said they learned<\/a> about Su\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The order of operations had been a fight for years. Under Su\u2019s 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\u2019s sign-off, and Wayne resigned<\/a> soon after.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, pointing to the revamped enrollment system, along with the new Mission Bay Elementary and a planned Mandarin immersion program,<\/a> as evidence the district could win back families.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0predictability to those who sought it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Under the current system<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

The board weighed another replacement<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s cost capped at $47.25 million.<\/p>\n

Under the lottery, much of the district\u2019s busing runs one way. In the 2025-26 school year, the three southeastern ZIP codes held 37 of the district\u2019s 87 general-education bus stops, but just four of the 43 schools those buses serve, according to analysis by The Standard.<\/p>\n

Every morning, a bus carried dozens of students from Guadalupe Elementary in Crocker-Amazon to West Portal Elementary. No bus brought students to Guadalupe.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho is to say that families wouldn\u2019t be coming to Guadalupe or neighborhood schools if the opportunities were equal?\u201d Corey Robinson, Guadalupe Elementary\u2019s community schools coordinator, told The Standard.<\/p>\n

Reshuffling programs will also mean reshuffling staff. The district\u2019s planning documents call for assessing how program changes affect staffing at each school and working with the teachers and administrators unions \u201cearly and often to ensure we stay within notice timelines.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The certainty they need\u2019<\/p>\n

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<\/a> that parents described well-off families using P.O. boxes or empty rentals in CTIP areas to secure what they called \u201cthe golden ticket,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Under neighborhood assignment, the address that matters will be the one inside a sought-after school\u2019s boundary, and those boundaries haven\u2019t been drawn. What happens to CTIP has not been decided.<\/p>\n

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)<\/a> that the district had intentionally drawn segregated attendance zones. The district responded with the Horseshoe Plan (opens in new tab)<\/a>, 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)<\/a> over the following decade for private or parochial schools. Later plans capped each school\u2019s share of any one racial group. But families could request transfers out of their assigned schools, and as more did, schools resegregated.<\/p>\n

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)<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The board voted in 2018 (opens in new tab)<\/a> 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)<\/a> that had discouraging simulations and never took effect. Seven years after the first vote, the district was back at the start.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and without the influential parent group\u2019s backing.<\/p>\n

The mayor\u2019s office was making calls, too, in support of Option C, commissioners said. And in a statement Wednesday, Mayor Daniel Lurie called the vote \u201can important step toward ending the public school lottery and giving families the certainty they need to put down roots in our city.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The materials posted for Tuesday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Su acknowledged that her own staff had \u201clots of hesitations.\u201d The head of the district\u2019s enrollment office, Lauren Koehler, had favored Option B, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Koehler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Su cited survey results showing that 65% of respondents doubted the district could deliver on neighborhood schools. \u201cQuite frankly, I can\u2019t really argue with that,\u201d she said. \u201cThis district, and I will fully own this, have historically made a lot of promises to our families and continually break them.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was not asking families to simply trust the district, she said, \u201cbecause we\u2019ve asked that before of families, and we have broken trust. What I am asking families is to join us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The board ultimately considered only the resolution for Option C. Board President Phil Kim said at Tuesday\u2019s 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 \u201cputs a thumb on the scale for Option C.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u2018Parents will find a way\u2019<\/p>\n

Su herself acknowledged that the change \u201cwill take years\u201d and \u201cis not a switch of a button or a flip of a switch.\u201d Deputy Superintendent John Davis told the board that strengthening struggling schools could take considerably longer. \u201cAny 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t student-assignment your way into great schools,\u201d Davis said. Real change, he said, means \u201chaving great educators in every school, and that\u2019s going to take time, no matter what you all think.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cwe 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.\u201d Leaders of the teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cdo not give me confidence in that particular school\u2019s ability to \u2026 provide an adequate education for my kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf 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\u2019s education,\u201d Tung said. \u201cParents will find a way to put their kids in schools they want their kids to go to, and you\u2019re going to be left with the same equity problems that you have now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kee agreed, calling the new plan \u201crestrictive.\u201d District leaders, she said, have \u2018started to walk off in a direction without us.<\/p>\n

One board member who supported Option C saw it differently. SF Parents, the commissioner said, is \u201cprobably disappointed that they didn\u2019t control the outcome more so than anything else.\u201d After all, the coalition does not represent all parents.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re putting our flag down and saying there will be a good school for every kid in every neighborhood,\u201d said Halperin. \u201cWe have never said that before as a district.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe owe it to the kids of today and tomorrow to try to work toward that day,\u201d he added. \u201cOtherwise we\u2019re going to spend another generation making excuses why some parts of the city have better schools than others.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco\u2019s school board voted 5-2 on Tuesday to replace the city\u2019s school lottery with neighborhood schools, overhauling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[27851,15,33994,101,103,102,44339,104,106,105,15254],"class_list":["post-497511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-board-of-education","tag-education","tag-maria-su","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-school-wars","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-sfusd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497511","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=497511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}