Will SF Public School Closures Save Money? Not Much. And Not Quickly

This article was originally reported and published by Mission Local, an independent news site based in San Francisco’s Mission District.

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At the beginning of “Fiddler on the Roof,” when Tevye is introducing the audience to the denizens of Anatevka, a student asks the rabbi if there’s a proper blessing for the czar.

“A blessing for the czar?” asks the bemused rabbi. “May God bless and keep the czar … far away from us!” 

It’s a throwaway line. On the other hand, it’s the one I think about the most. Every morning at drop-off when I watch all the kids run through the gate of their public school, it hits me: 

May God bless and keep the San Francisco Unified School District central office … far away from us!

Well, Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht — Man Plans and God Laughs. Like every SFUSD parent, I was recently asked to fill out a survey on the pending closures/mergers of schools. This is not far away from us: On the draft agenda for the July 16 Board of Education meeting one could find a proposed $1.75 million contract for the massive infrastructure consulting firm AECOM to handle “Resource Alignment logistics management.”

Well that’s some amazing language there. “Resource alignment logistics” means what you think it means: The district is proposing to bring in an infrastructure specialist to oversee closures and consolidations. It’s all a bit on the nose, isn’t it? The financially strapped school district, which has been instructed in no uncertain terms to stop throwing money at high-priced contractors, was proposing that it bring in a high-priced contractor to oversee the liquidation and consolidation of its own assets. 

Nobody is laughing now.

This item was summarily yanked off the July 16 agenda. But it, or some version of it, will be back. School closures and mergers are coming — whether you like it or not, to borrow a phrase from Gavin Newsom. These are not good times for the district: It’s hemorrhaging students, it must now amend for years of spending beyond its means, and further fiscal missteps could trigger a state takeover. No one should want this: The state will make cuts with the brutality of a Civil War battlefield medic.

Staving off a state takeover is paramount. It’s not everything, it’s the only thing. There is no other hand. 

The district is in a difficult place, and that calls for difficult measures. Everyone gets that. But parents — and everyone else — might be surprised to learn that the district does not expect to save much money via school closures. And while the district has pressing and immediate financial concerns — and is budgeting accordingly — school closures won’t save money in the short-term. 

As that $1.75 million proposed contract indicates, it may cost money in the short-term.

With the possible exception of the military and law enforcement, nobody indulges in the use of acronyms like a public school district. So let’s talk about the DAC meeting regarding RAI.

Or the District Advisory Council discussing the Resource Alignment Initiative — you know, closures and mergers. 

During the May 6 meeting of this body, the district’s enrollment director purportedly said that school closures “would not save a lot of money, but are about making the most of the district’s resources.” When asked, minutes later, what the specific cost savings of closing schools would be for the district, the purported answer was “not much.” 

We have to use the “purported” here because, while this meeting was recorded, the first 30 to 45 minutes were, inexplicably, not included on that recording. But we have spoken to half a dozen attendees or participants at the meeting who attest that this indeed happened. 

The San Francisco Unified School District isn’t shouting from the rooftops that school closures won’t save much money and won’t save money quickly. But, when asked, it admits — eventually — that this is the case. 

“The primary goal of closing, merging or co-locating schools is to use the district’s limited resources to create strong and supportive learning environments for every student and educator,” writes a district spokesperson. “The Resource Alignment Initiative allows us to organize our investments better. It’s about making structural changes to the system that allow us to use our resources more wisely so that we alleviate this strain across the system.”

Fine, but my direct questions were “How much money does the district anticipate it will save via school closures/mergers/resource alignment? Will the district save money?” 

So I asked the district if it’d be accurate to say the following: 

The monetary savings are not projected to be significant, especially in the short-term, and this is not the driving motivation for this move; 

There is presently no estimate or goal of how much monetary savings will be derived from closures/mergers/consolidation.

I was told that, yes, these are both accurate.

You’re not going to believe this, but the district is saying that the primary goal of the Resource Alignment Initiative is resource alignment.

This argument is not without merit. The district has lost thousands of students, and many of its schools are underenrolled. At the same time, around a sixth of the school’s classrooms at the beginning of the recently concluded academic year were staffed by substitute teachers or teachers yanked out of special assignment. 

The district, in short, doesn’t have enough butter for its bread. The posited solution is to have less bread. Like the SFUSD representative said on May 6, this is about making the most of the district’s resources.

The case the district is making is that these consolidations will actually be more equitable and more economic. The real budget killer for SFUSD are underenrolled classrooms — which require just as many teachers (or substitute teachers) as fully enrolled classrooms. Also, the state of California has stressed a need to consolidate, and if the district doesn’t do it the state will break out the bonesaw and start doing amputations. So there’s that. 

These are not terrible arguments, but public school families, who suffered through remote learning and are now faced with the grim prospect of having their children’s school experience further traumatized by a closure, can only take so much. For parents confronted with the district’s cloying and esoteric survey about “resource alignment,” it’s jarring to learn that this sacrifice that they are being asked to potentially make for the greater good isn’t a cost-saving move necessitated by the district’s dire finances. 

Frankly, it feels like a bait-and-switch.  

The surveys, maddeningly, asked parents to imagine that they had 12 coins, and could divide them into buckets marked “equity,” “access” and “excellence.” 

God help me, I was reminded of a story my mother used to tell about her student instructor days at Pershing Junior High in Brooklyn when a teacher began a lesson by saying “Suppose we go to a Persian bazaar to buy a chicken…” 

An oversized student in the back row stood up, slowly ambled to the front of the room and said, in a calm voice, “I ain’t going to no motherfucking bazaar and I ain’t buying no motherfucking chicken.”

You know what? Me neither. It is maddeningly unclear how this coins-in-buckets crap will be translated into what schools to spare or cut — and why are we pitting excellence, access and equity against each other? In any event, most every parent was left to ponder how to navigate this nonsensical format to impart the simple message of don’t close my kids’ school.

So, the district’s arguments about cutting and merging schools are not baseless. But parents are in no mood to hear them, especially after this muddled messaging. Hastily undertaking this critical process via a method that comes off as both inane and opaque — and doing it during the depths of the summer — comes off as insulting. And, sadly, there are more problems here. 

The district is working on a long overdue zone-based enrollment plan to replace the excruciating school roulette system that has plagued the existence of public school families for all too long. That’s for the best: But does it make sense to make decisions on what schools to cut before the enactment of a system that might totally shake up which schools children are assigned to? 

No, it does not. But it does add stress and misery to the lives of public school families. This may indeed be a sacrifice some children and families make to greater serve the needs of the district writ large. But, rest assured, the pushback will be intense. And, following that intense pushback, no one is mandated to take one for the team: As ever, families with options will take them and families with money will spend it. If conditions worsen, parents with the ability to pull their children from public school will do so — further shrinking the district’s dwindling enrollment, reducing payments from the state and leaving the burden, once more, on the least advantaged families and children.  

Well, that’s hardly equitable. And, in San Francisco, the demographics work out how you’d think they’d work out: About 38 percent of city residents are white, but only 13.7 percent of public school children are.   

It’s always better to have options. It’s always better to have money. And if you can’t keep the czar far away from from us — you better keep us far away from the czar.