As a father of three children in a San Francisco public school slated for closure, it brings me no pleasure to tell you that much of what has been written about school closures has been facile.
While the city doesn’t need to close schools, the San Francisco Unified School District is in an alarmingly precarious state. Its problems go so much deeper than a voluntary decision to cull schools that was curtailed at the 11th hour in October and led to the ouster of Superintendent Matt Wayne. The monomaniacal pursuit of this clearly misbegotten plan remains baffling.
New Superintendent Maria Su may have the most difficult job in San Francisco right now; it is challenging to describe the state of the public school district’s finances and operational abilities without using language that should get you thrown out of a public school classroom.
Mission Local has obtained a pair of reports, one of which was previously confidential, that reveal how bum a hand Su (and our kids) have been dealt and how much work she and her successors will have to do. But perhaps the best place to start is with a very not-confidential report: The Oct. 8 presentation of how closely the district’s estimated revenues and expenditures for 2023-24 adhered to the year’s actual and budgeted revenues and expenditures.
Answer: Not very! The estimated expenditures and actual expenditures diverge by $148.8 million — on a $1.28 billion budget. That is a lot.
The variation between the estimated and actual expenditures went both ways, however: Across several spending categories, the district expended $136.2 million less than it originally estimated — in part due to vacant positions going unfilled. On the one hand, this is good news for a cash-strapped district: It’s spending less than it budgeted. But, on the other hand, this reveals just how deep the district’s problems go.
The true condition of the SFUSD budget is not just that we don’t have enough money — we don’t even know where the money is.
A previously confidential report obtained by Mission Local spells this out. Former longtime city controller Ben Rosenfield in July produced a 27-page assessment of the district’s finances and inner workings “for internal discussion only.”
These must have been the sorts of discussions Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson had in “Marriage Story.” Rosenfield notes that the district is planning “a $120M cut plan and 500 FTE [full-time employee] position cut — almost 8% of the district’s budget and workforce.” This, he adds, “is the most significant reduction plan pursued by any government in San Francisco in 20 years.”
That’s daunting enough. But it’s harder when you don’t even know where the money is. Per Rosenfield’s report:
The district has significant gaps in access to data and reporting needed to manage key parts of its finances and operations. These are long-standing, internally recognized, and largely the result of a patchwork of antiquated and disconnected finance, payroll, and human resources systems. Basic and accurate information on even basic management activities (such as the count and status of hiring processes that are underway or spending versus the adopted budget) require manual data analysis … Basic information that is available with a single “click” in any comparable organization takes hours or days to produce, each time it is needed.
Many of these problems will likely be eased, if not solved, by the pending adoption of an overarching Enterprise Resource Planning management system: A (functional) HAL 9000 to run the district. This would also do wonders for the district’s disastrous payroll situation. Rosenfield acknowledged this. But he also emphasized that “improvements can’t wait for it.”
So, those improvements need to be made without the information “available with a single ‘click’ in any comparable organization” with hours or days required to obtain rudimentary data. That means Maria Su is, in many ways, flying blind. So was Matt Wayne. So was Vincent Matthews, Wayne’s predecessor. That’s a commonality they can all share (along with having first names as last names). This makes it extraordinarily difficult to achieve all the things the district must do, let alone the things it doesn’t necessarily need to do, like cutting schools.
Rosenfield acknowledged this, too — right on Page 1: “Can we really get all this done in one year?” The SFUSD was seriously attempting to adopt its new Enterprise Resource Planning system, pull off its draconian layoffs and budget bloodletting and consolidate schools in the course of 12 months.
“Completion of any one of these projects would be a major accomplishment,” Rosenfield concluded. “Accomplishing all three projects simultaneously, without significant disruption, seems both unlikely and risky.”
Rosenfield was city controller for 16 years. He acquired the reputation of being highly competent and scrupulously nonpartisan as well as being “the best and most subtle politician in City Hall.” If it was smart to hire him to do an assessment, it would’ve been smarter to listen to him.
Mission Local has also obtained the Oct. 11 audit of how equitable the proposed school closures would be for the district’s most put-upon students. Somewhat inexplicably, this audit came out three days after the district released the list of proposed closures.
Its content was apparently brushed aside. Stanford professor Francis Pearman ran 345 hypothetical closure scenarios — and he found that the plan the district chose to go with “would rank in the 12th percentile in terms of achieving equity … 88 percent of the simulated scenarios performed better on matters of equity than the current plan.”
Pearman, in the end, held that the closure plan would achieve “a moderate level of equity.” Well, fair enough: Your humble narrator is a long ways removed from high school math class, but, back then, the 12th percentile was bad. The San Francisco Unified School District seriously chose to run with a closure plan that was less equitable than 88 percent of the hypothetical plans generated by its respected Stanford consultants. Of note, Pearman also found the proposed closures would hit Black students disproportionately hard.
But that is not all. Oh no, that is not all: Pearman further reported that the schools marked for closure, by and large, had “systematically received less investment than other schools in the district over the last twenty years.” What’s more, the schools that displaced students would be transferred to were measured as lower-performing than the schools slated to be closed.
So that’s a hell of a thing. The mantra of the closure process was that district bigwigs could look affected families in the eye and say that this was in the best educational interests of their kids. Instead they moved forward with a process that was measurably less equitable than randomly tossing darts at school names taped to the wall.
They moved forward with closures of underinvested schools and pushed to move the displaced students into lower-performing schools. It’s tough to claim that the children involved would be well-served here.
But that is not all: On the composite scores to assess San Francisco schools that the Stanford scholars helped the district to create, enrollment was, by design, a minuscule factor — 6 percent of the scoring total. That’s because, in schools, underenrollment and inequity are often intertwined. Regardless, the district made underenrollment a main component in crafting its closure list.
In doing so, it re-indexed a factor of inequity that was designed to be mitigated — and counteracted the entire point of collecting composite scores. The district did this under the guise of striving to craft an equitable plan.
So, this is something to think about for the self-anointed opinion-havers who cheered the school closure process without bothering to analyze what this process really was. This is something to think about for anyone who maintained that the school closures were called off merely because of public pressure and political expediency — and not because the process was rotten to the core and indefensible.
As the district’s enrollment dwindles, the notion of consolidating schools is hardly illogical. But it’s not an existential matter of the sort facing a district that can’t properly track many millions of dollars and is gearing up to enact brutal layoffs and cutbacks — lest it suffer further state intervention. The district was adamant that the school closure process was not dollar-driven, was not tied to the SFUSD budget deficit and that cost savings would be minimal — before claiming $22 million in projected savings, a figure that the state Department of Education did not approve and for which the district has not yet revealed its methodology. The SFUSD, incidentally, hasn’t said peep regarding my Oct. 8 request to show its work: Turn over the cocktail napkin or envelope on which this figure was tabulated, please.
Regardless, as headcounts continue to plummet, the school closure process may be revived. But we have not yet seen a competent closure process, let alone a defensible one — and the work product from the prior plan was, rightly, relegated to the circular file. Any future closure processes must be started from scratch. And done right.
But this, again, isn’t close to the district’s biggest problem. There is always a next and bigger crisis. They may not teach you that in San Francisco public schools. But San Francisco public schools teach you that.
Disclosure: Joe Eskenazi’s children attend a school designated for closure and since reprieved.
About the author
Mission hit-and-run driver makes U-turn, strikes woman, then flees
A woman appears to have escaped serious injury after being hit by a car on Shotwell and 21st streets at approximately 1 p.m. on Tuesday. The victim, a 21-year-old woman, was crossing Shotwell Street when another woman driving a gray Honda Accord hit her. The motorist was driving along 21st Street, made a wide U-turn at Shotwell, accelerated and ran into the victim, according to another driver who witnessed the incident and called the police. Three eyewitnesses separately told Mission Local that the driver intentionally rammed the pedestrian. The motorist was traveling East on 21st St. when she made a U-turn at Shotwell St. The victim was crossing Shotwell St., heading East, when the car struck her. The motorist made another U-turn on Shotwell, before escaping on 21st St. The motorist was traveling East on 21st St. when she made a U-turn […]
Teargas, fireworks, water cannon used at Tbilisi protest after the country's EU bid was suspended
Teargas, fireworks, water cannon used at Tbilisi protest after the country's EU bid was suspended Source: www.yahoo.com
Closing arguments begin in Cash App founder Bob Lee’s murder trial
After six weeks of testimony, prosecutors charging Nima Momeni with the murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee started their closing arguments — and urged the jury to convict Momeni of premeditated, first-degree murder. “There is only one reasonable conclusion about what it is that happened that night,” said Dane Reinstedt, a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office, in a monologue that spanned nearly three hours and most of the day. “All of the evidence together paints a very clear picture, one that is actually pretty simple.” Reinstedt pieced together witness testimony and other evidence to illustrate Momeni’s motive and guilt in killing Lee in the early morning of April 4, 2023. He said the stabbing was not self-defense, as Momeni has claimed, but a willful attempt to avenge the alleged sexual assault of his sister by a man Lee introduced her […]
Oil Tanker and Container Ship Collide in Strait of Gibraltar
An oil tanker and a cargo ship collided in the early hours of Tuesday, December 3, in the Strait of Gibraltar, with no injuries or spillage reported.According to Salvamento Maritimo, Spain’s maritime rescue service, the collision occurred between the oil tanker Gloria Maris, with 25 crew members, and the container ship HMM St Petersburg, with 24 crew, around 8.9 miles southeast of Algeciras.“The Maritime Captaincy of Algeciras has ordered the retention of the two vessels and will carry out inspections by the safety inspectors,” Salvamento Maritimo wrote on X.Footage released by Salvamento Maritimo shows damage to the Gloria Maris’s hull.Local media said no spillage or injuries were reported. Credit: Salvamento Maritimo via Storyful Source: www.yahoo.com
Merriweather Lakehouse Is The Perfect Winter Getaway
“A little tranquil lake is more significant to my life than any big city in the world.” – Munia Khan (author and poet) Consistently making it to the top of Money Magazine’s best places to live in the U.S. each year, and named the “safest city” by Forbes Magazine, Columbia, Maryland is a perfectly landscaped example of a tree-lined suburban utopia with urban conveniences. Close to both Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Columbia’s rapidly expanding downtown, also known as the Town Center, draws both locals and travelers to its entertainment and events, but also to shop at the Mall of Columbia, where there are over 200 places to shop and eat. The newly developed Merriweather District in Columbia’s Town Center is quickly becoming a hub for arts and culture, with a variety of unique dining options that include […]
Hospital worker, 23, killed in car crash at Potrero and 24th
Glenn Achampon, a 23-year-old technician at San Francisco General Hospital, was killed in the early morning of Saturday, Nov. 23 when a car crashed into a building at Potrero Avenue and 24th Street.At about 2:13 a.m., the San Francisco Police Department responded to a collision. A vehicle with possibly two occupants collided with a building, according to the department. The car struck the building at 1170 Potrero Ave., according to Robert Sharp, a neighbor who lives on the block. Achampon, the victim, was in the passenger seat. There was no information available about the driver. Achampon, a contractor with AYA Healthcare, a travel nursing agency, was on a one-week contract in San Francisco, his girlfriend Kayla said. He was scheduled to head back to New York state, where he lived, on Friday. But Kayla said that Achampon’s employer mixed up his flight […]
Related
Mission hit-and-run driver makes U-turn, strikes woman, then flees
A woman appears to have escaped serious injury after being hit by a car on Shotwell and 21st streets at approximately 1 p.m. on Tuesday. The victim, a 21-year-old woman, was crossing Shotwell Street when another woman driving a gray Honda Accord hit her. The motorist was driving along 21st Street, made a wide U-turn at Shotwell, accelerated and ran into the victim, according to another driver who witnessed the incident and called the police. Three eyewitnesses separately told Mission Local that the driver intentionally rammed the pedestrian. The motorist was traveling East on 21st St. when she made a U-turn at Shotwell St. The victim was crossing Shotwell St., heading East, when the car struck her. The motorist made another U-turn on Shotwell, before escaping on 21st St. The motorist was traveling East on 21st St. when she made a U-turn […]
Closing arguments begin in Cash App founder Bob Lee’s murder trial
After six weeks of testimony, prosecutors charging Nima Momeni with the murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee started their closing arguments — and urged the jury to convict Momeni of premeditated, first-degree murder. “There is only one reasonable conclusion about what it is that happened that night,” said Dane Reinstedt, a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office, in a monologue that spanned nearly three hours and most of the day. “All of the evidence together paints a very clear picture, one that is actually pretty simple.” Reinstedt pieced together witness testimony and other evidence to illustrate Momeni’s motive and guilt in killing Lee in the early morning of April 4, 2023. He said the stabbing was not self-defense, as Momeni has claimed, but a willful attempt to avenge the alleged sexual assault of his sister by a man Lee introduced her […]
Hospital worker, 23, killed in car crash at Potrero and 24th
Glenn Achampon, a 23-year-old technician at San Francisco General Hospital, was killed in the early morning of Saturday, Nov. 23 when a car crashed into a building at Potrero Avenue and 24th Street.At about 2:13 a.m., the San Francisco Police Department responded to a collision. A vehicle with possibly two occupants collided with a building, according to the department. The car struck the building at 1170 Potrero Ave., according to Robert Sharp, a neighbor who lives on the block. Achampon, the victim, was in the passenger seat. There was no information available about the driver. Achampon, a contractor with AYA Healthcare, a travel nursing agency, was on a one-week contract in San Francisco, his girlfriend Kayla said. He was scheduled to head back to New York state, where he lived, on Friday. But Kayla said that Achampon’s employer mixed up his flight […]
Do, or do not
Do, or do not Source: missionlocal.org
Four data takeaways from San Francisco’s November election
It’s been three weeks since the Nov. 5 election in San Francisco, the votes have all been counted, and we can identify some interesting data tidbits from this year’s races. We’ve already written about the role that redistricting played this year. Here are some other takeaways.1. TurnoutIn 2020, turnout reached a near-record high of 86.3 percent in the presidential election. This November, turnout was a far cry from that: 78.9 percent. San Francisco’s average turnout in presidential elections, going back to the 1916 election of Woodrow Wilson to a second term, is 77 percent. So this year was just slightly above average; there was no “Trump bump,” as in the last two general elections, but numbers were more in line with other years.“There wasn’t that last extra spark that takes presidential turnout from good to great,” said Eric Jaye, a San Francisco […]
Maire Farrington has been solo camping on Angel Island for 31 years
If you remember wondering why Mission Local broke the news of the Angel Island ferry’s mechanical failure in September, you may have put two and two together. I was a “direct informant” stranded on Angel Island alongside seven other campers. The city’s ferry had suffered a sewage malfunction. According to the customer service representatives I talked to, campers had never been stranded on the island before. I would soon learn this wasn’t exactly true. Mission Local has learned that the Angel Island ferry is not running today, leaving anyone hoping to return to the mainland today stranded on the island. More when we know more.— Mission Local (@MLNow) September 17, 2024 After plugging my phone into an outlet outside the ranger’s booth, the first call I made was to my editor. “Don’t tell me your boat is sinking,” Joe Eskenazi said. I was […]
Be the first to leave a comment