Proposal gives S.F. schools $70 million
San Francisco voters may decide this fall whether to set aside $70 million per year to finance new programs in the city school system that backers hope will boost enrollment and improve the quality of public pre-K-12 education.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen and five colleagues on the Board of Supervisors are proposing a City Charter amendment that would fund public school initiatives designed to enhance academic achievement or student wellness. Those could include accelerated math and literacy curriculum as well as academic specialists, nurses, psychologists, social workers, after-school programs, athletic or artistic offerings, and more.
The 25-year fund would use money from existing state property taxes — voters would not be asked to raise any new public dollars if the charter amendment makes it to the November ballot.
The proposal is also an effort to shore up the San Francisco Unified School District after it was battered by the pandemic and a series of controversies that culminated in the February recall of three school board members. SFUSD has lost nearly 3,600 students in the past two years. That loss could have an impact on the district’s budget in the coming years since state funding is tied to enrollment.
Through the charter amendment, supporters hope to make the city’s public schools more attractive to families.
“The purpose of this ballot measure is to get students back on track,” Ronen told The Chronicle.
Too often, the only public schools that have extra “bells and whistles” — such as a cutting-edge arts program, for example — are those with rich families whose parent-teacher associations “raise hundreds of thousands of dollars per year,” Ronen said.
“That’s fantastic, but some schools don’t even have a PTA
because the students’ families are struggling to put food on the table and don’t have time to do that,” she said. “This is now, finally, a fund where you don’t have to be a rich school to have the special programming.”
In addition to Ronen, the proposed charter amendment already has support from Supervisors Myrna Melgar, Ahsha Safaí, Shamann Walton, Dean Preston and Gordon Mar. Ronen expects the full board to vote in about one month on whether to send the measure to the November ballot, where it would need approval from a simple majority of voters to pass.
Supporters think it’s an opportune time for the city to invest in public schools, given the influx of new school board members and a new SFUSD superintendent on the way.
“We basically have a new day,” said Carol Hill, executive director of the San Francisco Beacon Initiative. “This felt like a really good moment to collaborate with this group and see if ... us working together can make a real impact.”
School board member Matt Alexander, who helped draft the charter amendment, said it could help restore some of the kinds of programs that many campuses around the state have lost in the decades since Proposition 13 imposed sharp limits on property taxes.
“You talk to people who went to public schools in California before Prop. 13 passed, and they talk about librarians and art teachers and nurses in every school and all sorts of other things that we all know make a difference in the education of kids but have gradually disappeared over the years,” Alexander said. “That’s what I think the idea here is, to say we actually in San Francisco have the capacity to do those things.”
To benefit from the fund, individual schools would apply for grants of up to $1 million from the city’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. Each school that gets money from the fund would have to hire a coordinator to oversee program implementation.
The annual amount provided to the fund would ramp up to $70 million over a three-year period. Money would come from excess dollars San Francisco receives because of the Educational Revenue Augmentation Funds, a state program that sends a cut of property taxes to local public school systems. Once counties meet minimum funding requirements, any additional ERAF funds are sent back to local governments.
San Francisco’s general fund would backfill the new schools fund if ERAF funds aren’t sufficient in any given year, Ronen said. The ballot measure also has provisions allowing the annual school funding to be reduced from $70 million to as low as $25 million in the event of a recession, as long as the city government is projecting a deficit of at least $200 million.
Ronen previously wanted to ask billionaires to invest in city schools to help turn them around after the pandemic, but she said that idea was stymied for now by new local restrictions on behested payments —
when public officials solicit donations from third parties.
She also said she heard that some of the wealthiest San Franciscans had been reluctant to support SFUSD “because of all the drama.”
“We’re going to get the district back to a place where it is again considered one of the best districts in the state,” Ronen said. “Then hopefully billionaires will be comfortable funding the district directly.”