Non-SF funds make up 42 percent of school board race money

It’s been a rough few years for the San Francisco Unified School District. In 2022, voters recalled three school board members after the board drew intense criticism for slow school reopenings and other controversies. Since then, declining enrollment has exacerbated a budget crisis. The district’s inability to fully staff its schools has led to the dreaded process of closing and merging them, with the names of the proposed schools on the chopping block to be revealed this month. The board faced yet another shakeup last month when then-President Lainie Motamedi abruptly resigned for “personal and health reasons.”

A majority of the board seats — four of seven — are up for grabs this November, making the race all the more important. As with other races, we took a closer look at candidates’ campaign finance filings. Here’s what we found.

1. More than 40 percent of contributions to the race come from outside San Francisco.

It has long been a fact that people who are largely uninvolved with the public school system hold outsized influence over the school board races: Less than 20 percent of San Francisco voters have kids, and many who do send those kids to private schools.

Dive into the money, however, and the external influence becomes even starker. Among itemized contributions — for which we know geographical origin — the funds from outside the city amount to $126,155, representing roughly 42 percent of the nearly $300,000 in total contributions to the race so far. And nearly 15 percent of those total contributions come from outside California entirely.

The percentage of non-San Francisco funds flowing into SFUSD school board races has been steadily increasing over recent years; in 2020, it was closer to 25 percent, while in 2022, it was 34 percent.

All of Homebridge CEO Min Chang’s funds and nearly three-quarters of the funds for Sanyo Denki sales manager Lefteris Eleftheriou come from within San Francisco — but those two are heavily self-funded. (More on that later.) Most of the remaining candidates are 40 to 60 percent funded from within the city.

Central and west San Francisco are donating more to the race than the rest of the city. Zip code 94105 is an outlier: Self-contributions from Chang, the single biggest donor in the race, are tagged with that code.

2. Jersin is vastly outraising the other candidates.

Former LinkedIn executive John Jersin has raised $102,695 — more than a third of the total contributions to the race. The second-highest fundraising candidate, deputy city attorney Jaime Huling, has raised about half that, at $52,913. Both Jersin and Huling have scored simultaneous endorsements from the progressive-leaning teachers union and more moderate groups like GrowSF.

Jersin leads the pack in identifiable unique donors, with 228 (of nearly 650 total), while Huling comes in second, with 149. When it comes to average donation sizes, the heavily self-funded candidates come out on top, as expected. But Jersin is not far behind: His average donation size is over $450 — close to the contribution limit of $500 per candidate per donor.