City Hall Digest: Why Is SFUSD Cutting 900 Staff Positions?

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.

Budget Cuts Coming for SFUSD

Last week, San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Superintendent Matt Wayne announced that the district will likely need to cut a total of 900 vacant positions, eliminating almost a tenth of the 10,000 staff positions in the 47,000-student district. Why is SFUSD cutting staff now? By the 2025-26 fiscal year, SFUSD will face a $298 million budget deficit—roughly a quarter of the district’s current $1.28 billion annual budget.

This deficit is a result of years of chronic overspending by SFUSD, and it’s threatening the stability of the district and the quality of education students receive. Part of this equation is the fact that SFUSD avoided the threat of labor strikes from the teacher’s union earlier this year by increasing salary and benefits for teachers and other staff, which will cost a total of $179 million annually when fully implemented. Teachers need to be paid fairly, but this increase in compensation means the district will have to make cuts elsewhere to balance the budget.

For now, budget cuts appear to be limited to eliminating the 900 vacant positions Superintendent Wayne announced last week (vacant positions are roles that are funded in the budget, but aren’t currently filled). This is a painful, but necessary, decision—but the position cuts will not be enough to close SFUSD’s budget gap.

This is why SFUSD has raised the possibility of consolidating schools. SFUSD has a lot of small, under-enrolled schools that require an inordinate amount of funding. Many SFUSD schools have fewer than 200 children enrolled in them—the smallest school has just 11 students in two classrooms, but costs almost $1 million per year to operate. Merging these small schools will cut down on administrative costs for the district, and stabilize SFUSD’s budget situation.

TogetherSF Action has been tracking the situation at SFUSD closely, and we’re committed to providing San Franciscans with all the facts they need to sure San Francisco’s students get the education they deserve. SFUSD’s budget situation is a developing story—we’ll make sure to keep you updated as it progresses.

San Francisco Needs to Show It’s Serious About Contracting Reform

A 2019 law that streamlines contracts for homeless projects by the Department of Public Works (DPW) and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) is set to expire in May 2024 unless the Board of Supervisors takes action. HSH asked for a five-year extension at the December 6 Budget and Finance Committee, but Supervisors didn’t approve the department’s proposal. While the Board of Supervisors expressed interest in a shorter extension than HSH’s five year proposal, we have enough data from the four years this law has been in effect to know thatthe Board of Supervisors should not renew this policy.

At first glance, this law appears to be relatively benign. It allows HSH to enter into contracts with nonprofits that work with unhoused people without a competitive bidding process. Advocates argue that this is critical to speed up the often painfully slow bidding process in San Francisco, delivering services to the homeless population more quickly. 

But delivering services faster doesn’t always mean they’re delivered more efficiently. HSH’s budget ballooned to $713.3 million this year, three times larger than the department’s first year of operation in 2016. This expanded budget has allowed HSH to be somewhat frivolous with their money—the department has given contracts to numerous nonprofits with questionable financial practices, like the United Council of Human Services and Baker Places. Some of these nonprofits are no longer operational—some nonprofit leaders have been referred to the FBI for investigation.

WIth a potential $1 billion dollar budget deficit on the horizon, city departments can’t afford to be careless with tax revenue. HSH needs to be accountable for the money they’re spending to deliver services to unhoused people—San Francisco can’t let the department continue to give contracts to nonprofits that are failing to deliver the services they promise.

Instead, we hope the Board of Supervisors uses this as an opportunity to propose a more outcomes-oriented contracting system. This is a chance for Supervisors to show voters that they really care about good governance, contracting, and fiscal responsibility. San Francisco needs to develop a contracting system that rewards nonprofits for results—without an unaccountable fast lane. That’s both good budgetary and good civic policy.

New Law Has Unintended Consequences For First-Time Candidates With Chinese Names

Update: Shortly after publication, the Department of Election reversed course, and has since made it easier for Asian American candidates to use their Chinese names.

At the request of District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan, the Department of Elections recently began enforcing a state law that requires political candidates to prove the legitimacy of their Chinese names to be included on San Francisco ballots. Starting this year, candidates must prove they were born with the Chinese name they intend to use on the ballot, or have been using their Chinese name for at least two years. In theory, this policy is meant to prevent cultural appropriation—in reality, it’s causing frustration among Chinese-American candidates, especially those running for office for the first time.

Political candidates often use Chinese names to court the approximately 30,000 San Francisco voters who receive Chinese-language election materials, even when the candidate has no direct connection to Chinese culture. This new policy is meant to restrict this kind of appropriation, but for many Chinese-American first-time candidates, proving they have an authentic Chinese name is proving to be a difficult and time-consuming process. Many first-time candidates may not have used their Chinese names in public before, or may not have documents with their Chinese name if they were born in America.

As Chinese-American candidates like Jade Tu, Laurance Lee, and others speak up about the difficulty they’re having meeting the documentation requirements, it highlights the unintended consequences of this policy. What appears to be a good faith effort to protect the Chinese-American community is actively discriminating against some genuine representatives of that community. It’s potentially limiting the political voices and representation of Chinese-Americans in San Francisco politics.

Clearly, the enforcement of this state law is not working as intended. The Department of Elections should reevaluate this rule and find a way to maintain its core intent of preventing cultural appropriation, while also safeguarding the rights of Chinese American candidates. We need a more flexible and inclusive way to determine if candidates genuinely use Chinese names, without unfairly excluding new candidates from the political process. 

This policy is actively limiting fair political representation, under the guise of reducing cultural appropriation. It’s not fair or democratic to add this kind of requirement for first-time candidates, and the Department of Elections needs to correct this mistake.