San Francisco public schools are welcoming students to another academic year on Wednesday, with an estimated 25 percent of its vacant positions still unfilled. The district is actively trying to fill those positions.
Superintendent Matt Wayne said in a television interview this week that the district is “still hiring as we start the new year,” stating that across 115 schools in the San Francisco Unified District, there are some 100 vacancies.
At this time last year, the district faced the task of hiring for fewer vacancies; 20 percent of its vacancies were unfilled.
San Francisco Unified, ranked sixth largest in the state by the California Department of Education, oversees more than 50,000 students, making it the largest school district in the Bay Area.
The department’s data, analyzed by Mission Local, shows an average of 19 students for every educator at an SFUSD school. In the Mission, the seven public schools’ teacher-to-student ratios are fairly average, falling in range with the aggregate — with the exception of Marshall Elementary and Moscone Elementary. Moscone has a ratio of 23 students to a teacher, with Marshall at 25.
Wayne attributed the vacancies to a need for stronger promotion of “competitive benefits and programs” on the district’s part. Nevertheless, he said, San Francisco Unified is a great place to work.
The district’s educators, however, have different perspectives on why there are gaps in staffing, asserting that the issues stem from SFUSD’s much-documented inability to sufficiently support educators, financially and personally.
District employees last year suffered through the disastrous rollout of EmpowerSF, a costly and underperforming payroll system that missed payments, underpaid workers and failed to send funds to health insurance or retirement accounts. As recently as last month, the district missed a scheduled July pay date for some of its lowest-paid employees, including custodians, clerks and lunch servers.
Even when they’re paid in full and on time, many say it’s not enough to entice applicants and retain workers.
“SFUSD has not paid wages to measure what is needed to keep educators in the city, at the schools they want to serve,” said Nathalie Hrizi, an educator and vice president of substitutes at United Educators San Francisco.
Hrizi believes that “the pathways to becoming an educator have been underfunded, undersupported, and have, in many ways, disappeared.”
She also added that special-education teachers, who have additional responsibilities related to their services, are not being supported as they should be by the district.
This sentiment was echoed by Chris Clauss, Washington High School’s department head of special education and a biology teacher.
Clauss, who is also an active member of the teacher’s union, said that the special-education teacher shortage across the district has unfolded in such a way that those remaining have to take on more so-called IEP cases.
IEPs, Individualized Education Programs, are legal documents for students in special education that are divided amongst teachers, to make sure students get the accommodations they need. With more vacancies, Clauss explained, “people’s caseloads are going up with cases that aren’t those of their own students.”
She said that, at times, her job feels like a “balancing act,” one in which she must pivot to cover classrooms instead of doing prep for her own students — “more meetings, more paperwork, less time to prepare for the class you are supposed to be teaching.”
Hrizi, along with colleagues at the teacher’s union, conducted a survey across 3,300 members regarding room for improvement on the district’s part.
The primary conclusion? More money.
“Wages. Compensation,” Hrizi said. “We live in an expensive city. We have paraeducators [teaching assistants] who walk away with $28,000 a year and no retirement savings — in San Francisco.”
“The educators that are deciding to stay with the district do so because they’re committed, not because their benefits are sufficient.”
Greg McGarry, who has taught in the district for the past six years, addressed the educator shortage with a number of explanations.
“The shortage is not distributed evenly. However, it is directly due to the underpayment, undercompensation, mismanagement of district payment and retention.”
McGarry noted in his time working for the district that administrators and academic coaches, many of whose jobs are to “literally teach teachers,” are forced into long-term substitute roles, due to vacancies.
He compares it to emergency room care.
“It’s a triage. It’s like you’re pulling a brain surgeon out of brain surgery to tape up someone’s ankle. What you see is highly qualified teachers leaving a district, and new teachers burn out quickly because they don’t have any guidance.”
Clauss said this observation resonates with her own experiences.
As a recently selected department chair, she said that she hasn’t received the training required to fulfill the necessary roles outlined in her job description. “The people that are supposed to train me are being reassigned to other vacancies.”
Clauss, who could only speak for a few minutes as she hurriedly prepared her tasks for the first day of school, estimated that she would be up until midnight to get ready for the big day.
“People are getting fed up. And you’re seeing it — because people are leaving.”
UESF is in over the heads. Why aren’t we striking?
The graph is interesting. Some context:
In SFUSD the teacher/student limit is 1:22 for K through 3.
In 4th it changes to 1:33. Some schools in the chart are k-5, some are k-8, some are HS. BVHM for example has a low ratio which could be unexpected since it has more classes that could be larger (It’s a k-8). But the data includes FT teachers, which I assume includes specials like music/pe/art teachers or support staff. Smaller schools are more likely to have PT or floating teachers for some specials. So does BVHM have a really low ratio because most core classes are actually small and it is fully staffed or do the FT specials teachers that come with a large school and a middle school make this an apples to oranges comparison, or both?
Given the superintendent’s comments about right-sizing classrooms in the district we should expect that some of these schools on the left-half of the graph will move toward the middle in the coming years. That change wouldn’t neccesarily be related to staffing levels. And it will say nothing about the quality of education depending on how it is done.
So in terms of the teacher shortage what does this mean? I’m not really sure. We can thank our lucky stars that our underpaid educators are at least still better compensated overall than independent/private school staff, but a literature teacher filling in for a math teacher isn’t good even if the ratio stays low. A late or incorrect paycheck is just unacceptable.
As an SFUSD parent, my takeaway is that I’m grateful for a public education system where this data is available freely to analyze and scrutinize, unlike the “hear no evil, see no evil” opacity of a private system. And I’m grateful for engaged local press that undertakes the effort to present us that data along with excellent reporting.
Thank you, Cam!