It was a supervisor-on-superintendent pile-on Tuesday afternoon, as the SF supervisors unloaded on embattled SFUSD superintendent Matt Wayne over a $20 million hole in the special ed budget, which was revealed to be nearly $30 million.
The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) was already in absolutely dismal shape before a late September attempt to ouster superintendent Matt Wayne. Wayne was able to survive that near-firing experience, but he now has a Mayor Breed-appointed “stabilization team” looking over his shoulder. The SF Board of Supervisors hoped to do their own meddling on Tuesday afternoon, calling a public hearing “to examine the unaccounted for $20,000,000 in the San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) budget for Special Education.”
Though Supervisor Ahsha Safai said that unaccounted-for $20 million was actually closer to $30 million. “That’s why I felt compelled to call this hearing, and examine what’s going on,” Safai said.
So we heard from school board member Matt Alexander, a former district principal himself, and Maria Su, who’s a member of Breed’s so-called stabilization team. But the pointed questions were reserved for Superintendent Wayne, who perhaps did himself few favors with his administrative-speak that was not terribly plain-spoken, particularly when asked why tens of millions of dollars were unaccounted for.
“The reality is that we, or I’m going to say I as the leader of the district, let a budget office drive an educational decision when it needed to be driven by the education office,” Wayne told the board. “We need to balance the budget. But then we see how this played out, it actually just became a directive to reduce the budget in this way. That did not allow for the kind of planning that’s necessary to make adjustments to ensure that the services are being provided.”
He further explained this with PowerPoint slides how he feels this has been pretty much resolved. But the school closure issue is highly unresolved, and Supervisor Aaron Peskin pushed Wayne for answers on exactly when we would learn which schools were closing, an announcement that has already been delayed once.
Wayne, in the only real news he made Tuesday, said the closures would be announced “before October 18.”
The supervisors would have grilled Wayne longer, but Wayne had to leave at 5 pm for a Board of Education meeting, and only got skewered by five supervisors before having to leave.
Image: SFGovTV
