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We hope you’re enjoying your summer and that the juggling act of summer camp scheduling hasn’t been too overwhelming. We’ve been busy planning for the upcoming school year, and we wanted to touch base with you about the district’s budget status and how our parent advocacy and your leadership can help.
For over two years, the SF Parent Coalition has been advocating for SFUSD to fix its budget and fully resource our schools, ensuring excellent public education for every student. Fortunately, we have many well-resourced schools and classrooms at SFUSD. Unfortunately, resources are inequitably distributed across our district and SFUSD is still far from achieving the ultimate goal: balancing the budget and tying each dollar to student success.
Even drastic measures like school closures will not eliminate the deficit. The CA Department of Education warned that “no stone can be left unturned” as this process unfolds, but is the district doing enough to communicate transparently or to support kids and families as it is making these cuts? We don’t think so.
That’s why we’re stepping it up and launching an official parent-led budget campaign.
Our parent-led budget work since 2021 has already had significant impacts:
- We’ve developed and elevated parent leaders to become budget experts and hold SFUSD accountable to fixing the budget. (Did you know that School Board President, Lainie Motamedi, used to serve as our Budget Committee Co-Chair before being appointed to the school board?!)
- We’ve sent your parent input on the budget directly to the superintendent and the school board. Our fall 2023 Budget Survey had nearly 800 participants from a majority of schools across SFUSD.
- We’ve researched and disseminated clear and accessible information to help families understand the budget challenges. Parent leaders like you help us gather and disseminate crucial information to our broader network.
As we formalize this parent-led campaign to fix SFUSD’s budget and support our students, we will be learning, gathering ideas, and proposing parent-led solutions, like the Opportunity Ticket, a solution we’ve been brainstorming for a year now together with many of you.
The Opportunity Ticket
If SFUSD is going to close schools, they must follow best practices that will minimize negative impacts to our most vulnerable students. We know that over 50% of our students are economically disadvantaged. The Opportunity Ticket* gives low-income families at closing schools first choices at any school in the district. This solution minimizes negative impacts to our most vulnerable students within SFUSD, by ensuring that their families can enroll in a new school that will support them to meet their full educational potential. In 2019, Oakland passed a policy that San Francisco should look to as an example. The OUSD policy allows their Enrollment Center to prioritize school assignment to families who have children attending closing or merging schools or who live in the attendance area of closing or merging schools and would’ve sent their children to those schools. (*The Oakland REACH advocated for the Opportunity Ticket before it was passed in 2019. Learn more here.)
Based on parent-led research and community conversations this past year, we know families want to see the Opportunity Ticket enacted at SFUSD.
As we formalize our budget campaign, WHAT ELSE do you want to see from SFUSD?
- What should our parent-led budget campaign set out to achieve?
- What does success look like to families in how the district closes its budget gap this year?
- What would success look like for our campaign by the end of 2024-25?
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