Michael Fine didn’t sugarcoat it. State takeovers are bad news. So why is the San Francisco Board of Education (SFBoE) playing chicken with our kids’ educations?
Mr. Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), was brutally honest (start at 2:08:14). “There is nothing good about that process. Nothing good,” he told us in October. He assured us it takes “a minimum of 10 years” to recover from State intervention. He even threatened to “come knock on your home's door on Sunday morning, if I have to. If you're starting to get close and say ‘wake up because we got work to do.’”
Mr. Fine and FCMAT are committed to rescuing the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) from itself, because its job is to keep SFUSD from “getting anywhere close to that trigger— that the legislature will be forced to act.”
If Mr. Fine was blunt, Elliot Duchon, our state-appointed fiscal expert, was damn-near savage.
He panned the Matt Alexander/ Mark Sanchez Commissioner proposal. He was clear: if the SFBoE adopts the vague Alexander/Sanchez proposal, he would advise the State to take over.
Why doesn’t this Board share FCMAT’s and Mr. Duchon’s passion? That commitment? That sense of protective desperation for our public school students?
The 12/14/2021 Meeting Agenda
You can imagine my surprise to see the agenda for tomorrow’s critical SFBoE meeting. It includes more discussion of the same tired proposal by Alexander and Sanchez as at the last meeting. And in support of that vague think-piece, UESF will throw a rally.
I wrote about the Alexander proposal last week, and since then there is no more meat on those bones. You can trust that I scrutinized every slide with breathless hope.
Here’s the bottom line. I don’t want cuts to the classrooms either. Our teachers and site staff are the most important part of our kids’ educations.
But we didn’t get here overnight. For years we’ve been deficit spending. There is no control, and the SFBoE simply isn’t taking the concern seriously.
The Choice
The choice tomorrow is plain. On one hand, we can adopt the bitter pill proposed by Staff and remain independent. That plan was developed from months of deep study of all the spending in the District. It accounts for worst case scenarios. It factors in the very real possibility that Governor Gavin Newsom’s January budget will provide some much-needed additional funding and allows for Staff to revisit cuts when that happens. And it commits to continue examining Central Office spend—exactly what Commissioners Alexander and Sanchez asked for.
On the other hand, we can adopt the “magical thinking” Alexander/Sanchez proposal that we’ve been assured will result in a “nothing good” State takeover. A proposal devoid of details. A proposal that demands the admirable but unrealistic “no cuts to school.” A proposal that gets SFUSD out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The right choice is clear. Will the SFBoE Commissioners have the courage to do it?