Hell for California parents as a major school district plans mass closures without telling the board
San Francisco public school officials’ new plan to close schools was hidden even from an angry school board, according to a new report.
The San Francisco Unified School District plans to close an unknown number of schools by 2030 to address the nearly 14,000 empty seats in the rapidly shrinking district, according to a memo sent to parents last month.
Like other urban areas in California and across the country, Bay City has seen a decline in public school enrollment that reflects declining birth rates and other demographic changes blamed on rising prices, migrant shifts and more.
Superintendent Maria Su is expected to announce the structure and timing of school closures tomorrow at a district school board meeting, but board members told a local publication to see a newspaper covering the issue before doing so.
Su broke the news of the impending closure in a San Francisco Chronicle story published nearly two weeks ago by longtime education reporter Jill Tucker.
“We are ready for this,” Su told the paper about his plan to close schools. “And it’s about time. We’ve been trying to do this for years.”
The article says that Su has spent the past 18 months preparing the district to close, but it doesn’t say why he went public with the plan recently, or why he took the news out of the paper before sharing it with the board.
Board members considered the decision to release the timeline to the public before the board a “slap in the face,” and wondered if it was intentional, the San Francisco Standard reported.
Many districts in California and across the country have moved to close schools in recent years as student shortages and budget shortfalls threaten school operations. School closures are often unpopular and lead to protests and even hunger strikes.
But the growing number of empty seats has made the shutdown an inevitable challenge facing major California cities including San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles.
It’s not easy. A 2024 plan to close charter schools in San Francisco backfired when a major backlash forced the district to put plans on hold, leading to the resignation of Superintendent Matt Wayne.
Su told the Chronicle this time that it will be different.
“We spent 18 months trying to stabilize the region and we are thankful that we have done it,” he said.
The 120-school district of San Francisco has already unleashed a lot of hell on the city’s parents this year when school teachers closed the district’s schools for four consecutive days in the district’s first strike in a century.
“The reality of declining enrollment is happening across the country and across the country,” Su told the newspaper. “San Francisco is not immune to it.”
