San Francisco Unified School District officials are on the hook to announce a plan Tuesday on how to balance their budget – cut millions of dollars – or face drastic state intervention.
The school district’s annual $1 billion budget needs to be cut by $125 million, and the current proposed plan has will dramatically reduce funding to services and other programs based on declining student enrollment.
The proposed 2022-23 budget would slash funding for school sites by $50 million. This would lead to 360 fewer positions than the current 3,431 at school sites, according to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Other areas being cut are student services such as peer resources, multilingual pathways classes, and the JROTC program.
The California Department of Education entered the conversation a month ago, the Chronicle reported, bringing in a fiscal consultant to oversee the process of reducing the budget by 13%.
The district currently has about 49,000 students enrolled and employs 7,685 people. But enrollment has been down in recent years, in part due to the pandemic. In the last two years, the district lost 3,499 students, affecting the budget, as reported by the Chronicle.
According to the current budget plan, Tuesday’s board meeting and the following two subsequent meetings will be focused on hammering out the details of the proposal, particularly the cuts to school site funding and other services.
Balancing a budget is the least of the district's woes. After a myriad of missteps during the pandemic, parents and others in the district launched a recall campaign. Now three board members are facing recall, with a special election set to take place Feb. 15 next year.
The deadline to submit the plan for the state’s approval is Dec. 15.
Related
