City Hall Digest: Board of Education Spends Slightly More Time on Student Outcomes and SF Needs to Do More To Solve Homelessness

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.

The Board of Education Spends Slightly More Time on Student Outcomes—But Still Not Enough to Fulfill Promise

Earlier this year, we tracked how the newly-formed Board of Education was spending its time, particularly focusing on how much time the Board was spending on student outcomes versus everything else. Our first analysis wasn’t promising—the Board had devoted as much time to public comment as it had on discussing how to improve student outcomes. Now that the school year is over and the Board of Education’s last meeting is complete, did they fare any better? 

Let’s take a look. 

All told, the Board of Education spent almost equal amounts of their time across the three main categories of time that our partners at Families for San Francisco track: student outcomes, board business and public comment, with “everything else” including opening and closing formalities. 

This 33 percent figure spent on student outcomes represents only a modest 3 percent increase from last time we evaluated the Board’s focus—but is still short of the 50 percent figure that the Board had promised back in September 2022. There's clearly room for improvement in controlling the amount of time spent on public comment during meetings. 

But while the Board of Education took on a few promising initiatives, namely delivering a balanced budget and commissioned an audit of the curriculum for this fall, there are still items the Board needs to improve upon. After summer break, the Board needs to focus on solving SFUSD’s staffing crisis. There are at least 17 paraeducator (teachers aides) openings, and high teacher turnover affects student wellbeing and performance. The Board also needs to implement a new math curriculum that is more outcomes-oriented, and improve both literacy and mathematics performance across the student body. These items must be addressed if SFUSD hopes to improve student performance.

San Francisco Needs All Tools it Can Use to Solve Unsheltered Homelessness

Last week, a new report from the San Francisco Controller’s Office was released that details the rates of homelessness both locally and compared to other cities in the Bay Area. The main finding of this report was that San Francisco has the third-highest rate of homelessness in the state, behind Oakland and Los Angeles, with 887 people per 100,000 being homeless. 

The city has approximately 7,754 homeless people, including 4,397 unsheltered people who live on the streets. Our homelessness problem may feel so visible because of how dense, and small, our downtown is compared to a city like Los Angeles, so unsheltered homelessness - people living on the streets - is more visibly identifiable. However, the city has no way to clear street encampments, and when it does, it's fought at every step of the way by activist groups.

Our city’s inability to solve homelessness is driven by broken systemic factors, namely an all-or-nothing ideology adopted by some of the city’s most prominent activist groups that sacrifices incremental progress in the name of ideological purity. 

Currently, San Francisco is legally forbidden to clear encampments due to an injunction stemming from a lawsuit by the activist group Coalition on Homelessness with the legal help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Filed last year, the Coalition’s lawsuit contended that the city had criminalized homelessness by clearing encampments and failing to offer shelter and other services to homeless people. The city must remedy this by creating more shelter and permanent supportive housing to offer homeless people, but it's extremely difficult to build anything in San Francisco because of high building costs and also because of resistance to building shelters by groups like the Coalition on Homelessness. This ultimately ties the city’s hands. 

Even prior to the lawsuit, the city had trouble housing people, with shelters filled to capacity. The city should have continued building shelter, and given this directive, there should be two options to people living on the streets: you don’t have to enter shelter, but you cannot stay on the street. We had started a promising system with Navigation Centers until COVID meant all shelters had to close. During COVID there was a massive push to get people into Shelter in Place (SIP) hotels so they could have their own spaces, instead of a shared space common in other shelters. However, this program resulted in tens of millions of dollars in damages, people with serious addiction problems being able to get drugs and alcohol on-demand, and no requirement for treatment. The SIP hotel program was touted as a success because it got 65 percent of the 2,567 people into a form of permanent supportive housing (including 44 percent into permanent housing and another 14 percent into subsidized permanent housing) but failed to acknowledge the program’s serious shortcomings. 

And now, with the injunction in place, the city has no ability whatsoever to get people off the streets and into shelter. Additionally, many homeless people experiencing drug addiction or mental illness are reluctant to accept help because of their illnesses. 

If real progress is to be made on solving the issue of unsheltered homelessness, the city has to be able to do more than just offer services and also has to be able to clear streets using existing laws that are centered on quality of life for residents, but rarely enforced (i.e., the ban on camping on the street) because of efforts like this lawsuit. Other options that exist in this realm include enforcing ADA accessibility laws when tents are blocking sidewalks, as well as enforcing drug use and drug dealing laws.

SFPD Scandal Puts Drug Cases At Risk in Midst of Fentanyl & Overdose Crisis

Last week, a new development broke in the story of Christina Hayes, a veteran San Francisco Police Department narcotics officer who actively impeded a criminal investigation and had an improper relationship with a confidential reliable informant (CRI). Hayes offered testimony in numerous drug cases resulting in arrests and cases being filed against alleged drug dealers. Her relationship with her informant has tainted many of these cases, as it damaged her ability to offer testimony. 

Though the story broke late last month, the impact of Hayes’ actions are just now coming to fruition: so far, 132 narcotics cases are under review due to her involvement—with 82 of these cases already dismissed due to being tainted by her involvement. 

The timing could hardly be worse. San Francisco recently stepped up efforts to close down open-air drug markets to reduce the demand for illicit drugs, but the city is fighting an uphill battle against fentanyl and drug overdose deaths. So far, there have been 406 drug overdose deaths this year, with 80 percent of those deaths caused by fentanyl. 

To end the drug crisis, San Francisco needs to use every tool in its kit, and for every piece of the operation to work together. That becomes seriously jeopardized when singular bad actors come into play and act for themselves at the expense of shared goals. These dismissed cases present a serious threat to public safety, as they force the release of the alleged dealers. In one case, an individual was charged with possessing 10 pounds of fentanyl—approximately enough to kill 2 million people. 

Supervisor Matt Dorsey described the situation as “absolutely frustrating,” and Supervisor Aaron Peskin described it as “an unforced error.” They’re right—and this situation serves to remind us that our government is only as good, effective, and just as the people that constitute it. This, in our opinion, also reinforces the need for the SFPD to not just overcome its staffing shortage, but also to bolster its ranks with quality hires. 

The city is in the midst of a fentanyl-driven drug overdose crisis, and holding big-time dealers accountable is paramount to ensuring the city is a safer place for everybody. We can’t afford lapses in individual accountability like this that detract from progress made by everyone else in law enforcement. The city has to move forward from this and attempt to recapture the work that went into creating these cases in the first place—because without this foundation of work, the supply side of the drug crisis will not be abated.