In October, San Francisco’s school district agreed to give teachers and staff raises to avoid a threatened strike.

With talks at a standstill, the UESF voted to authorize a strike last week, pressuring the SFUSD to reach a deal before a large chunk of the 2023-2024 school year would be lost, having to be made up later in the school year, or be staffed by temporary replacement teachers. With a strike now looming over the district, both sides soon went back to bargaining this week. At 6 A.M. on Friday, both sides finally reached an agreement, ended what would have been the first teachers strike in San Francisco since Dianne Feinstein was Mayor.

According to the new two-year agreement, certified teachers will get a $9,000 per certified teacher step with a 5% increase for next year. Other teachers are to receive a $30 per hour minimum rate or 8% increase in their first year, followed by a 5% increase in the second year. Substitute teachers, meanwhile, will get a 15% raise in the next two years, with a flat pay rate being installed in favor of the previous two-tiered pay rate. Improved working conditions, more student support, and protections for special education are also tied into the new agreement.

At the time, everyone was reportedly happy with the deal. Teachers got raises and the district avoided a strike. But here we are two months later and now it’s clear the district is headed for a huge budge deficit and will need to cut hundreds of unfilled positions in an attempt to bring things into the black. [emphasis added]

San Francisco schools are facing a massive deficit created by years of overspending as well as recent raises, leaving the district with no choice but to cut staffing by more than 900 already vacant positions, according to district officials…

Without taking drastic action to address spending, the board would face a $421 million deficit by the 2025-2026 school year, equaling more than a third of the current $1.2 billion budget…

A good chunk of the ongoing deficit is from salary and benefit increases for teachers and other staff, which will cost the district about $179 million annually once fully implemented. The district narrowly avoided labor strikes before giving the compensation increases.

Adding to the fiscal headache, the district is facing declining enrollment, losing more than 5,000 students since before the pandemic and an expected loss of several thousand more in the coming years. That means a loss of state funding based on student attendance.

So the plan is to start by cutting 927 jobs that are vacant, including 130 teachers and 101 special education aides. But those cuts will only save about $103 million a year, which isn’t enough to close the gap. To avoid layoffs, the plan is to siphon off funding set aside for things like the arts, music and libraries and to use that money to pay for all of those raises.

One reason SF’s budget is facing a deficit is because of how many administrators it has. Earlier this year the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office ran a comparison of SF to 12 other comparable cities.

The audit compared SFUSD spending with 12 large public school districts in California including Fresno, Long Beach, Sacramento, Oakland, Santa Ana, Garden Grove and San Jose…

When broken down by staff, five peer districts had a median of 138 full-time-equivalent workers assigned to central office functions for every 10,000 students. SFUSD came in “well above” the norm with 220 full-time-equivalents for every 10,000 students…

The BLA also found that SFUSD had 75% more schools than the median number in peer districts and 28% less students per school in the 2020-21 school year.

Too many schools, declining enrollment and a top heavy administration. All of that adds up to a district that struggled to avoid deficits even before handing out 15% raises. In fact, the district was in danger of being taken over by the state back in 2021 because of a much smaller $125 million deficit it was then facing.

One thing the SF school district will probably not be able to do this time around is go to the state begging for money. As we learned last week, California is facing a huge projected budged deficit of its own ($68 billion) which should severely limit the state’s ability to cover San Francisco’s problems, not only the school district but also the public transportation system which is running out of money.

The emergency may not result in layoffs and school closings immediately but that’s probably where this is heading in a couple years unless public school enrollment starts going up instead of down.