How SFUSD can fix its school assignment lottery
By Rebecca Kee | San Francisco Chronicle | October 13, 2026
As a former San Francisco public school teacher, I figured I’d be an expert at navigating the school assignment lottery for my son in 2016. So it was humbling to find myself white-knuckling it for months along with everyone else, deciphering school data and strategizing with strangers in an online lottery support group.
The parents I encountered there dreamed of language programs and agonized over feared commutes, but fueling the experience was a sense of unpredictability that cost us all some sleep.
Ten years later, very little has changed. But on Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Education will set the direction for a new system that will determine which elementary school every child in the city can attend. It won’t take effect until fall 2028, but parents who will be the first to use the new assignment system need to pay attention now.
In September, the advocacy group SF Parents Coalition, where I am the executive director, surveyed 300 parents across the city about what they want most from the new system, and 3 in 4 said placement in a school close to home was a top priority. More than half also indicated they’d take a guaranteed nearby school even if it meant fewer overall options to choose from. Their comments, however, told a fuller story: Parents want to know there’s a seat for their kid down the street.
And we weren’t the only ones hearing this. The San Francisco Unified School District heard from more than 2,700 families through its own engagement process. Across both efforts, parents have been clear that they want a guaranteed school close to home, but they don’t want to be locked into it if it doesn’t work for their family. They want predictability and meaningful choice.
Parents want to be able to look elsewhere if a school near home doesn’t work for their family. And there are plenty of ordinary reasons it might not: The school near your job makes more sense than the one near your house, grandma does pickup, and she lives across town or you need a certain start time or aftercare or a language program or a school that knows what to do with your particular kid.
This year, only 28% of incoming kindergartners listed their attendance-area school first. Barely half listed it at all.
Last week, the board narrowed the field of options for overhauling the assignment system to two choices. On Tuesday, it will decide which approach the district should develop. Both would guarantee families a nearby school. But only the Neighborhood + All Schools plan would let families apply to other schools with available seats.
San Francisco’s neighborhoods were shaped by redlining, displacement and decades of housing policy designed to keep people out. If we assign kids almost entirely by address, that segregation will define our classrooms. The families with the most to lose by being locked into their neighborhood are the Black and Latino families who have relied on being able to choose a school in another part of the city. Families with money always have another option: They move, or they opt for private schools. Take away choices from the affluent and more of them will go that route at a moment when the district needs every family it can keep.
Skeptics correctly point out that the placement lottery failed to integrate our schools. But the lottery offered choice with no guarantee, and it rewarded the families with the most time to tour schools and work out how to rank them. A guaranteed seat changes that. Choice becomes a door any family can walk through, not a contest every family has to enter. None of this is an argument against neighborhood schools. I taught at Paul Revere Elementary, where most of my students walked a short distance to school. Most San Francisco families want that for their children. My own family learned how good an overlooked school can be. We didn’t “win the lottery” in 2016. We were assigned Daniel Webster Elementary, a relatively unpopular school low on our list, and cold-called a few families with students there who convinced us to join. We found a phenomenal community and great academics.
More families will pick their neighborhood school as the district invests in the schools families have historically passed over. That investment is long overdue, and it matters more than any enrollment rule. But the rules have to work for the schools we have right now, not the ones we hope to have in 10 years.
Choosing a direction is where the work starts. The details still have to be written: how open seats are filled, who gets priority for them and how kids get there. The survey by the SF Parents Coalition drew disproportionately from the west side and central neighborhoods. Before those details are set, the district should actively seek out Black and Latino families, families new to the district and families who have relied on the current preference that gives children from neighborhoods with the lowest test scores a better shot at schools elsewhere.
Enrollment rules can only do so much in a city with neighborhoods that are so segregated. Mayor Daniel Lurie and the Board of Supervisors control zoning, the follow-through on affordable, family-sized housing and Muni, which is how a lot of kids get to a school across town. If City Hall does its part, a neighborhood school can also be an integrated one. But the Board of Education’s part comes first. It can give every family a guaranteed seat near home and still leave the door open. I hope it does. If it doesn’t, we will have written our housing map into our school assignments, and the kids who have waited longest for a fair shot will wait longer.
Rebecca Kee is executive director of the S.F. Parents Coalition, a San Francisco school district mom and a former second-grade teacher.