Four Seats Up for Grabs to Serve on School Board for the Incredibly Chaotic SFUSD

The SF Unified School District is such a mess that most school board candidates declined to run for re-election. These are the people running for the four seats that are up for a vote on Election Day.

The Tuesday, November 5 election will determine the direction of the San Francisco Unified School District in many consequential ways. For one, San Franciscans will vote on whether to grant SFUSD a $790 million bond measure, the largest in the city’ history, as the district struggles with a massive deficit. And there are also four seats on the SF school board up for grabs on the ballot. This is a particularly difficult decision because only one member is running for reelection, as the three other sitting board members decided to cut bait and not run again.

So four of the seven school board seats will be filled by Tuesday’s vote. Eleven candidates are running, and the top four vote-getters will win those seats. And they’ll have to deal with huge decisions on whether to close schools after Superintendent Matt Wayne’s sudden resignation left the school closing process in limbo, how to replace the new interim superintendent, and how to address a possible state takeover of the district’s finances after years of fiscal mismanagement.

If you thought the 2022 school board recall would stabilize the district, lordy, it has not. Yet another political school board controversy bubbled up in June when the teacher’s union gave its endorsement of four candidates. The union endorsed Matt Alexander — the only sitting member running for reelection — and moderate candidates Jaime Huling, Parag Gupta and John Jersin, who had teamed up to form a “slate.” That endorsement is quite coveted, and many voters would simply look to that endorsement and vote for those four candidates.



https://sfist.com/2024/11/01/four-seats-up-for-grabs-to-serve-on-board-of-education-for-the-incredibly-chaotic-sfusd/