Last fall, Dr. Maria Su was approaching her 16th year as the executive director of the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, a city agency that has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars for kids, parents, and young adults since the early 1990s.
While Su had little, if any, experience in K-12 leadership, the responsibilities she had and the connections she made during her time at the department gave her legitimacy when Mayor London Breed in October 2024 made her superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District.
Su recollects that, at that time, the district was “bleeding on the emergency floor” after Superintendent Matt Wayne had abruptly resigned following the chaotically canceled rollout of a school-closure plan.
“My goal at that time was really just to stop the bleeding,” Su said in a panel conversation at Manny’s Café last month.
In the year since, she said, the district’s most pressing issues, including its controversial curricula and an archaic payroll system, have been solved — or at least greatly ameliorated.
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Su’s performance has been good enough to garner the support of a new mayor, Daniel Lurie, who wants to see her continue in the post beyond her current contract, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the district. The SF Parents Coalition, the district’s largest parent organization, said last month that Su has “higher favorability” than either of her two predecessors.
But, as Su’s contract (opens in new tab) is set to expire at the end of this school year in June, her confidence that the district is better off now than it was before she took the helm is being questioned by the teacher’s union. So are her qualifications as an educational leader. The president of the United Educators of San Francisco, Cassondra Curiel, told The Standard over the weekend that keeping Su on as superintendent would be irresponsible.
“This person is not an educator. They have never run a school or worked in one,” Curiel said. “The board would be making a huge mistake in not seeking an actual superintendent candidate for the next school year.”
Curiel said two things can be true at the same time: that the union is grateful to Su for stepping in to help the district during a time of great urgency, and that its members don’t consider her an effective manager.
Among their grievances, Curiel said, are that the new payroll system has arguably worse problems than its predecessor; that substitute teachers and paraeducators are not getting appropriate terms of employment; and that the budget is not on a clear path towards stabilization, despite Su promoting it as such.
Because of the rushed nature of her appointment, Su is on the city’s payroll, with the school district loaning money to pay her salary. That contract seems unlikely to be extended by the city. This means that the only path forward for the district is to make Su an official SFUSD employee, or to find a new superintendent come summertime — a process that can take a whole school year.
Curiel said the union has been speaking with board members behind the scenes for months to convince them to begin searching for a superintendent sooner rather than later.
Over the last few years, SFUSD’s unions have proven effective in having their most fervent demands granted by the district. In October 2023, the district granted credentialed teachers (opens in new tab) a $9,000 raise for that school year, and a subsequent 5% pay bump for the next. Last week, the administrator’s union won a $7,500 pay bump and a 2% raise for the next three years.
And it’s not like Su hasn’t gone out of her way to curry favor from the union during her tenure. Over the summer, the superintendent made an about-face on her promise to prominent local figures, including Lurie, that the district’s homegrown ethnic studies curriculum, which had become a two-semester graduation requirement starting in the 2024-25 school year, would be suspended for the 2025-26 school year so that it could be vetted for politically charged content.
In the meantime, Su has lacked the job security to pursue some of her most important and ambitious goals for the district, such as the expansion of mental health and special education offerings, along with the opening of a second Mandarin immersion school as soon as 2027. Not to mention school closures.
“Families, everywhere I go, want more diversity in options and programs,” she said at Manny’s. “It’s about reorganizing.”
Time will tell just what, in full, is about to be reorganized.
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