San Francisco School District to Eliminate 837 Positions to Cut $113 Million

The decline in school attendance has affected the district’s revenue from the state government.

San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su speaks at a news conference on Feb. 25, 2025. Lear Zhou/The Epoch Times

SAN FRANCISCO—The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) plans to eliminate 837 positions to cut $113 million in spending from its budget for the 2025–2026 fiscal year, with another $13 million expected to be cut the next year, according to district officials.

Preliminary layoff or reassignment notices will be sent to affected staff in the next few months, Superintendent Maria Su said in a Feb. 25 news conference, just before the Board of Education voted to authorize the issuing of such notices to 395 certified positions.

These positions include teachers, social workers, counselors, and 164 teacher’s aides.

“We will process all separations from the district, including resignations, retirements, and leave,” Su said in the conference. “Our HR department will then use a seniority list and other tiebreaker methods to determine which employees will receive those layoff notices.”

The SFUSD Board of Education on Feb. 11 approved layoff notices to 149 administrators and will expand layoffs to another 43 office workers and 96 civil service employees.

“These are not easy decisions,“ Su said. “I acknowledge that what we’re doing here is impacting people’s livelihoods.”

The district received more early retirement requests than expected before the Feb. 21 deadline, officials said. Because of these and a number of resignations, the final number of layoffs will not be as high as expected.

The final layoffs will not be issued until May 15, when the amount of funding from the state budget is determined, according to Su.

“The district has experienced a significant decline in overall enrollment, consistent with statewide trends, and yet we’ve kept staffing levels largely the same,” Phil Kim, president of the SFUSD Board of Education, said. “It simply is not sustainable.”

SFUSD has an annual budget of $1.3 billion, 80 percent of which goes to staff.

However, the district’s enrollment tumbled from 61,031 in the 2019–2020 school year to 55,592 in the 2021–2022 school year.

The decline directly affected SFUSD’s revenue from the California Department of Education, which uses attendance data to allocate its funding for various programs.

In May 2024, SFUSD received a negative certification of its budget report, meaning the state doubted the district’s ability to pay bills for the next few years and gave state fiscal advisers the authorization to veto the budget.

The expenses of SFUSD have outpaced its revenue for years; however, the board has been reluctant to make cuts, arguing that students need services from social workers, coaches, nurses, and so on.

“Nobody in this room would say that we don’t want a social worker, we don’t want other mental health staff, we don’t want other things at school sites,” Elliott Duchon, one of the financial appointees overseeing the district, said in a Feb. 11 board meeting.

“Every student in California deserves that, and so do your students,” Duchon said. “The problem is you simply don’t have the money until you go through the budget process.”

Recently the district received nearly 700 more transitional kindergarten applications and more than 150 more kindergarten applications for next school year, according to Kim.

“We are taking the structural deficit seriously, and there are critical but necessary decisions in front of us,” Kim said in the news conference. “While these decisions are tough, we are on the path to regain local control of our budget and to deliver our vision to improve student outcomes.”

Cassondra Curiel, president of United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), said the number of preliminary layoff notices is “excessive.”

“UESF is concerned that these inflated numbers are influenced by a state fiscal adviser determined to impose austerity on SFUSD despite over $100 million in yearly investment from the City of San Francisco,” Curiel said, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report.