Layoffs loom days after SF school district agrees to $183 million deal to end teachers’ strike

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — For the first time in more than a week, nearly 50,000 students in San Francisco are back in the classroom. The four-day teachers’ strike ended Friday, which was welcome news for parents.

There were smiles and hugs from teachers and students who returned to school Wednesday after the citywide teachers’ strike that ended in a $183 million deal with the school district.

Monday and Tuesday of this week were previously scheduled holidays.

Joyful reunions were seen on Wednesday morning at Visitacion Valley Elementary School.

“We’re so excited to be back and welcome all our students,” said Principal Sarah Seaton.

Campuses across the San Francisco Unified School District were now able to welcome back all students.

“We’re a community school, and this last week, we really came together as a community school,” Seaton said. “We had a lot of our community partners come together and support our families.”

Superintendent Maria Su greeted many students Wednesday morning and later highlighted that SFUSD will have to tap into emergency reserves and pull out $111 million to fund the deal. That’s on top of a projected $100 million budget deficit in next school year.

“We knew that, not only are we going to support and honor our educators, we also needed to stay true on the path for fiscal solvency,” Su said.

The caveat is that the deal is for two years only.

MORE: San Francisco schools to be closed Friday as teachers’ strike continues

“These are very difficult conversations that we are going to have to have. We know the district has been operating at a structural deficit for years, so we already knew we were going to have to look towards making additional cuts next year,” said SFUSD spokesperson Laura Dudnick.

The strike came to an end early Friday morning after an overnight bargaining session. The deal includes fully funded health care for educators and wage improvements. It also means new sanctuary policies and protections from AI.

United Educators of San Francisco said it’s the deal they fought for on Friday.

SFUSD said it’s dipping into part of its reserve to make the deal happen.
Superintendent Maria Su said cuts like school closures have never been off the table, even prior to the new tentative agreement.

She said any potential layoffs are required to be announced by March 15, though the district plans to do so sooner.

MORE: San Francisco teachers’ strike forcing parents to juggle work, child care: ‘Feeling very derailed’

“In terms of funding for this particular tentative agreement, we do believe that we have the resources. I was able to be fiscally responsible when we made those agreements with our partners,” Su said.

Right now, the agreement between the union and the school district is still tentative. Su said that there are several steps that have to happen before that agreement is finalized.

“The unions will take a couple of weeks to ratify, and hopefully they will approve the package. Once that is approved, we get notified, we then put together, essentially, a financial document. It’s called the AB1200, and this document, essentially, will show to the state how we will pay for the agreement,” Su said. “Once we put that document together, we will bring that to the board of education for either the first or second meeting in March, and I hope that the board will adopt that and approve that, and then we then put the tentative agreement into action.”

As for the days of instruction lost during the strike, Su said the district will be determining when those will be made up with the California Department of Education.

“We are committed to making sure that we meet our legal obligation of providing 180 days of instructions, so what we need to do now is figure with our labor partners with the board of education and our partners at the board of education how we are able to do that,” Dudnick said.

The four-day strike also highlights a funding issue affecting schools around the state.

In San Francisco, the district’s yearly budget is $1.2 billion. Seventy percent of those funds come from California.

Su and other superintendents across the state sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, urging him to intervene and change the formula.

“This would mean moving from that calculation of how many days students come to school to the total enrollment numbers, which is how many students we enroll. The reason for this is that if we can expect to receive a certain amount of funding based on our enrollment, it will be more predictable and stable for how we can budget our resources,” Dudnick said.

SFUSD parent Laura Kennedy fought along many others to prevent her son’s school from closing last year during the cuts and now those cuts are looming again.

“I’m really hopeful that we add to the conversation growing our revenue base, growing enrollment for the district, looking for other funding models, or funding sources, and perhaps doing away with the ADA model for schools across California, not just in San Francisco,” Kennedy said.

We contacted United Educators of San Francisco and are waiting to hear back.

The school district is mandated by the state to notify educators of any potential layoffs and cuts by March 15.

“We need to make sure that everyone knows that if there is a layoff, that they are informed. Honestly, the budget doesn’t end until June. So, there’s many, many more months left for us to develop this budget, to look at all the different resources that the state will be bringing down and sending to us,” Su said.