Maria Su is ready to talk about closing schools again in San Francisco.
No, that doesn’t mean the San Francisco Unified School District superintendent is committing to closing them. She knows the highly emotional issue is what chased out her predecessor last fall, leading to her appointment in October. But it’s time to study the issue and put it back on the agenda.
“I need to understand what the previous administration did regarding the school-closure process,” she told me in an interview Friday afternoon in her office at district headquarters. “I want to fully understand all the research they did, all the conversations they had, what worked, what didn’t work. I’ve asked the team to develop an after-action report for me. And we are going to get that soon.”
This statement, as noncommittal as it may sound, actually counts as progress for the beleaguered district’s leadership. If the six-month mark of her tenure constitutes an opportunity for evaluation, Su is earning more than a passing grade. Indeed, she not only has shown an impressive ability to learn on the job, she now has the confidence — and, I would argue, the momentum — to turn her focus to the third-rail topic that kneecapped the last superintendent, Matt Wayne: shutting down underutilized schools.
Su declined to spell out her timeline for re-addressing school closures. But it’s encouraging that she isn’t ignoring the controversial but necessary discussion in the aftermath of last fall’s botched, and then aborted, rollout. The goal then, as now, would be to address the district’s declining enrollment and underutilized school buildings. San Francisco’s schools are down by more than 4,000 students since 2012-13 and are projected to lose 4,600 more students by 2032. Last year’s failed plan took a modest bite at this shortfall by proposing to close 13 schools and shifting their students to other sites.
‘We’re not laying off teachers. And that’s huge. It’s a different type of message that the school district has not heard in a long time.’
SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su
The school-closure debacle was just one of the problems Su inherited in October, when then-Mayor London Breed, dispatched the longtime head of the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families to take over the job after the San Francisco Board of Education pushed Wayne to quit. The district’s finances were in such a mess that a state takeover was possible. Aged technology systems were so FUBAR-ed that administrators had no idea who worked where, or even which teachers were getting paid. And the failure to follow through on culling schools — a classic San Francisco fiasco of a laboriously crafted plan derailed by the loudest complainers in the room — had left the entire apparatus shaken.
Fast-forward six months, and on Tuesday night, Su will present the final budget for the current year to the board. That, in turn, begins a process that should culminate in June with an initial draft of next year’s budget that closes a $114-million deficit.
Su told me her projected budget is “on track” to bridge the gap. “It will show that we’re moving in the right direction, that this board is willing to make the hard decisions to reduce the budget, to fall in line with our fiscal stabilization plan.”
She has already disclosed about $100 million in cost savings through the early retirement of 352 personnel, including hundreds of teachers. The district’s administrative ranks will be cut by 205 administrative positions, through a combination of layoffs, eliminations of vacant positions, and retirements.
Notably, she is cutting her own leadership team, including her chief of staff, though she is also planning to hire two deputy superintendents, for business services (likely from outside SFUSD) and education (probably from inside). She said the identification of the final $14 million in cuts is waiting for all job eliminations to be recorded “so that we can then get a final accounting of everything.”
Because this is SFUSD, getting a final accounting of anything is an accomplishment in itself. The district’s payroll system is being completely replaced, a process Su believes should be completed by July. “For the first time ever,” she said, the school district knows exactly who is assigned to every job at every school. This has been a major bureaucratic sticking point for years, rendering SFUSD an unruly collection of fiefdoms accountable to no one, particularly within the famously bloated central office.
Su credits one of the outside experts Breed brought in to help last year, Carl Cohn, a retired superintendent from Long Beach and San Diego, who encouraged her to lean on early-retirement inducements to trim the budget. She implied this hadn’t been on the table before she got there.
Looking forward, I asked Su where the district stands on updating its school-assignment policies, with the goal of making it easier for children to be placed in schools near their homes. The Board of Education recently punted on implementing that policy next year, citing “district circumstances.” This is more third-rail stuff, as administrators face the difficulty of achieving all the board’s goals of proximity, diversity, and predictability. “We have tried really, really hard to give every family their top five choices” of schools, Su said. But she acknowledged that hitting all three goals for each student is tough.
There is an admirable steeliness to Su. She is proud, and undoubtedly relieved, that the budget-balancing project won’t require firing teachers—or tangling with their union. “I would dare say that our teachers appreciate the fact that we’re trying to protect their jobs,” she told me. “Not trying. We are. We are protecting their jobs. We’re not laying off teachers. And that’s huge. It’s a different type of message that the school district has not heard in a long time.”
On Friday, as she sat in front of a window in a grey SFUSD hoodie, City Hall resplendent in the blue-skied background, she told me that her many conversations with parents in the last half-year have helped her understand what they want. Their list includes an easier enrollment process and better communications — Su calls it “customer service” — from district personnel. More than anything, Su said, parents tell her they “want to feel like they made the right decision in keeping [their children] here.”
It’s worth pausing to consider that Su is not a career educator, nor someone who was groomed for her position, rising up, patronage-style, through the institution she now runs. Like San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, Su has broken the mold at SFUSD, which favors lifelong administrators who move from one non-classroom management job, to another. She holds a doctorate in psychology, and while her 15-year run at City Hall saw her running an agency that deals with the needs of children, she comes from outside the education cabal.
Not being steeped in the status quo is an opportunity for any new leader. So far, Maria Su seems to be embracing hers.