SF Unified School District Superintendent Matt Wayne pulled through an attempt to remove him from the job Sunday, but going forward, he’ll have some sort of “School Stabilization Team” meddling in his very fraught decision-making.
It seemed almost like a coup d’etat attempt on Friday when former SF Board of Education president Lainie Motamedi declared that she quit her post in late August because of SF Unified School District superintendent Matt Wayne, rather than the "health and personal circumstances" she cited at the time.
And this controversy quickly went from 0 to 60, in the public eye at least, as the school board then called an unusual emergency closed-door Sunday meeting to discuss whether to fire Wayne, not only because of the well-known grievances about the delayed school closure announcement and the state oversight of the beleaguered district’s spending, but also newer revelations of a $20 million budgeting error that’s left special ed classrooms without teachers, and district job offers being rescinded over the budget mess.
The school board had their vote Sunday, which was preceded by about an hour of contentious public comment. And the Chronicle reports the board voted to keep Wayne on the job, but with some sort of new $8.5 million “School Stabilization Team” looking over his shoulder going forward.
“It’s clear the parents and school staff want stability,” current school board president Matt Alexander told the Chronicle after the vote. “The board is going to rigorously monitor progress, and I think the support from the city will be real and significant.”
The so-called School Stabilization Team is handpicked by Mayor London Breed, inserting herself into this mess just six weeks before Election Day. Per a release from Breed’s office, the team consists of Breed loyalists Phil Ginsburg (Rec and Parks general manager) and Maria Su (Department of Children Youth and their Families executive director). It also includes former Long Beach Unified School District superintendent Dr. Carl Cohn, and several other lesser-known logistics people from departments like the Office of the Treasurer & Tax Collector and the Department of Human Resources.
Despite declining enrollment, teachers say they still have a lot of overcrowded classrooms, which makes the school closure matter much more complicated.
"We have class sizes that are huge, there are 37, 38 students per period. Some of my colleagues, over half of those students, have special learning needs that we can't meet with that many students," George Washington High School teacher Sarita Lavin told KTVU. "We are also having issues with major caseloads in special ed."
For now, Wayne and the school board that almost just ousted him are presenting a united front.
“Our public schools should be places where we harness the power of education to unlock each and every student’s potential,” Wayne and board president Alexander said in a joint statement Sunday. “We recognize that the last few months have been filled with uncertainty and doubt. There have been instances when SFUSD has fallen short and this is not acceptable.”
But ominously, when Alexander spoke to the Chronicle on his own, he said of superintendent Wayne: “It’s imperative that our leaders deliver results. We will be revisiting his evaluation in December."
The school closure announcement will be the next shoe to drop, and it will fall on Wayne and the board to sell the logic behind their closure decisions. As district parent and local reporter Joe Eskenazi writes on Mission Local today, the survey that was sent out to parents to prepare for the closure plan was opaque at best, and utterly confusing at worst — "Parents were instructed to imagine they had 12 coins, and made to disseminate them in baskets marked 'equity,' 'access' and 'excellence.' Separate and apart from pitting things everyone should want against each other, it is markedly unclear how such data about anodyne concepts could be satisfactorily distilled into a formula to close brick-and-mortar schools," Eskenazi writes.
On top of that, he explains, "the parents who’d take the time to fill out an online-only, voluntary survey skewed disproportionately white, educated, and financially stable," which adds to the problem of what the district can even do with the data it got from the survey.
Stay tuned for some royal fights when this closure list finally gets made public.
Image: San Francisco Unified School District via Facebook
