Fiscal advisors say SFUSD must plan job, program cuts

Fiscal advisors told the San Francisco Board of Education this week that The City’s school district will have to cut programs and lay off workers — in addition to already planned school closures — to stave off a possible state takeover.

The San Francisco Unified School District is staring down a $420 million deficit at the start of the 2025-26 academic year in the absence of such measures, and state auditors said last month that the system has a high risk of bankruptcy.

Findings presented at Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting threw a wrench into the district’s goals for student success — specifically, the rate of students reading and performing math at grade levels, as well as the percentage of graduating high-school seniors who are college- or career-ready — that the board implemented in 2022.

The district’s Vision, Values, Goals and Guardrails roadmap has a self-imposed 2027 deadline, but the question now is whether SFUSD will be able to meet it as it sets out to reduce staff and programming.

“The 2025-26 [academic year] will be a difficult one for San Francisco Unified,” said Candi Clark, who is interim associate superintendent of business services at SFUSD and CEO of The Education Experts, an organization that provides finance solutions to educational agencies.

The district has said it will close, merge or relocate an unspecified number of its 132 schools ahead of the 2025-26 school year. Officials are currently exploring staff reductions based on seniority, and the district will soon need to determine what programs to cut to satisfy an audit by the California Department of Education that found SFUSD’s bankruptcy risk to be high . The district is projected to run out of cash by 2025.

“If it doesn’t happen, the stakes for this district are just too high,” Clark said. “There is no other option at this point.”

The fiscal report commissioners reviewed Tuesday is “predicated on reductions of staff and a hiring freeze,” board President Lainie Motamedi said.

“The big questions [are] how and when do these decisions get made at school sites,” she said.

These challenges present a “new reality” for the district, SFUSD Superintendent Matt Wayne said. Eliminating the structural deficit, and avoiding state takeover, is now the district’s “top priority,” he said.

“We need to make sure we’re looking at every expenditure now, and any expenditure — even if it’s budgeted — will need to be reviewed,” he said.

That translates to cuts across all staff positions, including teachers, assistant principals and counselors.

The district can only afford 70 counselors, Wayne said, but it budgeted for 160 counselors this year. SFUSD would still satisfy the state’s recommended 350-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio with the reductions, but Wayne argued that doing so “won’t serve [students] the way we intend to serve them, to meet our goals of career and college readiness.”

SFUSD’s state-appointed fiscal expert, Elliott Duchon, said the district has ambitious goals for student success and academic literacy, and recognized that cuts will be difficult.

“Those programs involve people, and commitments, and they don’t go easily,” he told commissioners. “[But] you’re using a lot of resources on a diversity of programs — and I’m not using diversity in a positive way.”

School board Vice President Matt Alexander pointed out that employee raises, which went into effect this year, should help the district reach its student-success roadmap.

“If we have a theory that [the raises] will increase staff retention, which will then increase literacy, math and career readiness, we can say that was a strategic investment,” he said. “We’ll see the results, I hope, by next year.”

The district committed to fulfilling those raises despite fiscal shortfalls , Wayne said in a statement.

But school board Commissioner Kevine Boggess questioned how those employees will meet the board’s expectations of student achievement with dramatic cuts looming.

“I don’t want to be a commissioner telling staff and families that we’re going to give you less and expect you to do more,” he said.