Some damning new documents have been unearthed that show the spectacular mess that is the SF Unified School District bureaucracy, and how the school closures would have sent many kids to even worse schools than they'd previously attended.
The now-abandoned plan to close 11 SF schools due to underenrollment was so poorly handled that it forced Superintendent Matt Wayne out of a job. Now the SF Unified School District (SFUSD) has a new superintendent and four new members elected to the school board. So, does this mean SFUSD will still be closing schools?
KQED asked the new board members if they would still close schools in a piece published just after November’s election, when we still did not know the election results. Now we know the winners.
Of the four new board members, new member Jaime Huling did not indicate her stance, though KQED reported “she has been a vocal opponent of former Superintendent Matt Wayne’s proposal and the board’s handling of it.” Meanwhile, other new members Parag Gupta and Supryia Ray (as seen below) were definitely supporting the closures. And reelected incumbent Matt Alexander was part of the previous closure process, so it's fair to assume he’s on Team Closure.
The closure process was highly problematic. Yet we still face fiscal and staffing crises, so kicking the can down the road risks the quality of our kids’ education. I'm committed to a long-term solution to ensure full staffing and support families impacted by any future closures.
— Supryia Ray (@RayforBOE) October 24, 2024
But regardless of how they feel, Mission Local has a stunning report today on newly obtained SFUSD documents that show the closure process may be doomed no matter what. The documents detail SFUSD’s astonishing inability to even track its most basic spending, and how the previous closure process would have transferred many students to schools that were lower-performing than the schools which the district proposed closing.
Mission Local obtained an audit by a Stanford professor analyzing 345 hypothetical school closure scenarios, and found that under the plan the district chose, “88 percent of the simulated scenarios performed better on matters of equity than the current plan.” Meaning the district made choices that data indicated was among their worst options. Yet they still proceeded with a plan that would have closed certain schools that were performing well, and transferred kids to lower-performing schools than their closed school.
The site also obtained a pretty shocking “Confidential: for Internal Discussion Only” analysis from then-City Controller Ben Rosenfield that exposed the extremely sorry state of SFUSD record-keeping that was used to make these closure decisions.
“The district has significant gaps in access to data and reporting needed to manage key parts of its finances and operations,” Rosenfield’s audit says. “These are long-standing, internally recognized, and largely the result of a patchwork of antiquated and disconnected finance, payroll, and human resources systems.”
“Basic and accurate information on even basic management activities (such as the count and status of hiring processes that are underway or spending versus the adopted budget) require manual data analysis,” the report continues. “Basic information that is available with a single ‘click’ in any comparable organization takes hours or days to produce, each time it is needed.
That’s probably a part of why, as Mission Local also notes, that there is a mind-blowing $148.8 million gap between the district’s projected spending and its actual spending. While the gap is mostly in the district’s favor, it also strongly indicates that the previous school closure decisions may have been made on the basis of wildly inaccurate information.
Image: Google Street View
