S.F. school district needs to cut from the top

Those of us who’ve worked in San Francisco schools, or have students in the schools, know that our classrooms are hardly overstaffed. Many elementary schools have more than 30 students to a class. We have middle schools with 1,000 students that only have one social worker. Too many high schoolers can’t access college help because counselors have caseloads in the hundreds. Parents help fill the gap by funding additional staff through raffle tickets and auctions.

But there is one part of our district that is overstaffed: upper management. Over the past decade, spending on central office management has consistently increased. A decade ago, the district had two deputy superintendents, three division chiefs, and 24 executive directors and directors.

Now we have three deputies, 12 chiefs, and 76 executive directors and directors. Salary and benefits costs for these positions range from $160,000 to over $300,000 per year. San Francisco far outspends other California school districts in this regard.

San Francisco Unified, with 50,000 students, has the largest top management structure of any district in California. It spends less on direct services to students than it does on indirect services (staff one level removed from the student experience) and administration (staff two or more levels removed).

Most of California isn’t like this. Long Beach Unified School District offers an especially interesting model for comparison. Long Beach enrolls more students than San Francisco and has a track record of positive achievement results, especially for Black and Latinx students. Long Beach has a central office with fewer than 500 staff, compared to San Francisco’s 1,000. If San Francisco’s schools reduced the proportion of our budget devoted to administration and indirect services spending to match Long Beach’s level, we would save about $90 million — very close to the size of our structural deficit.

The San Francisco district staff is proposing that we mostly make cuts from school site budgets to undo the deficit. If we did this, a small elementary school could lose a literacy coach, two teachers, and a paraprofessional. With many students already struggling to learn to read, what will be the impact of no literacy coaching, larger class sizes and less adult support in that classroom?

The impacts of site-based cuts on our students are not the sacrifices we should be making when we can keep the cuts far from them. This is exactly the kind of budget balancing plan a wealthy state like California with a pro-public education budget like the one Gov. Gavin Newsom has passed should reject.

As commissioner of the San Francisco Board of Education, I’ve been working with educators, parents and youth to develop an alternative budget balancing plan that is student-centered. The plan prioritizes students and maintains school-based staffing ratios. It closes the structural budget gap by making reductions in the central office, particularly high-paid management staff.

We face tough choices as we work to solve a deficit that’s almost 10% of our operating budget. There is no doubt that we can, however, meet the challenge in a fiscally responsible manner based on strategic priorities and rooted in our values. We need to face the fact that our central office has grown disproportionately large and keep cuts as far away from students as possible. Our budget balancing plan should be rooted in the experiences of educators, parents and students themselves — particularly our most vulnerable students. Doing so should set us up for a brighter future for our San Francisco public schools.