The School Closure Candidate List

Some quick thoughts

The district announced yesterday eleven schools that are candidates for closure or merger. My primary thought is that it’s a fairly modest list.

SFUSD enrolled 23,258 TK-5 students last year. Its “program capacity¹” was 31,368 meaning that only 74.1% of the capacity was filled. Its goal is to have its schools be 90%-95% full².

The closures and mergers would reduce the TK-5 capacity by 3,036 seats³. Nevertheless, the district would still have capacity for 2,450 seats that, by its own calculation, it doesn’t need. And the 500+ seat Mission Bay elementary is yet to open and is not included in these figures.

The individual schools identified for possible closure contain no surprises. They were all among the candidates I identified here. More noteworthy are those that escaped being on the list and where they are. The district really grasped the nettle in the northeast. Three of the eight schools in that area (Spring Valley, Parker, and Yick Wo) are candidates for closure. One school in the Richmond (Sutro) and one in Bayview (Malcolm X) was about what could be expected in those areas. Elsewhere the district was less ambitious. Just one in North Central (SF Public Montessori), one in Central (Milk), and none in Mission made the list. There’s lots of spare capacity in the Mission but it’s spread around all the schools. None is more than 85% full and the two emptiest (Sanchez and Revere) are in-line to receive students from Milk and SF Community. In the south of the city, there will still be plenty of spare capacity left even if SF Community, El Dorado, and Malcolm X all close.

Here’s an imperfect chart.

Language Programs

The district lost its nerve when it came to language programs. In the presentations to the District Advisory Committee, the district pointed out the drain on resources caused by offering both general education and language programs in the same school⁴. I took that to mean that they wanted to rejigger which programs were offered at which schools with the goal of creating more pure language program schools like Dolores Huerta and Alice Fong Yu. Their proposal contains no such language program changes.

Facilities Condition

The district had said that it would try to send students from closed schools to ones that were in better physical condition but it was not able to do so. Yick Wo’s students will be going from one in pristine condition (FCI 0.04) to Sherman (FCI a below average 0.30). El Dorado’s FCI of 0.01 is the best in the city but at least Visitacion Valley (FCI 0.08) is also in very good condition. The students from Milk (FCI 0.02) are being assigned to Sanchez (0.16). The students from SF Public Montessori (FCI 0.24) are being assigned to Parks (0.49, worst among elementary schools).

My complaint is not that El Dorado, Milk, and Yick Wo are candidates for closure despite being in excellent physical condition. It is that schools which were obvious candidates for closure to anyone paying attention somehow got to the head of the list for facilities work while other more deserving schools are still waiting in line. That’s an enormous waste of taxpayer money.

Claire Lilienthal

There was a rumor that Lilienthal would lose its middle school and consolidate into one building instead of being spread across two campuses. That rumor was evidently untrue.

Middle Schools

This statement astonished me.

“Middle schools are not being considered for closure right now because the facilities are at 90% capacity.”

It beggars belief. Here’s the summary from my middle school analysis.

9,948 students represents only 66% of 15,134. Okay, now at the time I produced that chart I didn’t have access to the SFUSD’s “Program Capacity” numbers but I did have capacity estimates that Facilities produced based on the number of classrooms in each school and I did have the actual historical enrollment record. I wasn’t just making numbers up.

After I wrote that report, I received different SFUSD capacity estimates via someone else’s public records request. These “program capacity” numbers were markedly lower than my capacity estimates. In total, they were over 3,000 students lower. Some of the differences are difficult to understand given the historical enrollment record.

• Hoover was given a program capacity of 990. It enrolled 1,303 in 2005.

• Presidio was given a program capacity of 990. It enrolled 1,219 students in 2007.

• AP Giannini was given a program capacity of 1,200. It enrolled 1,324 in 2007.

• Marina was given a program capacity of 720. It enrolled 1,068 in 2005.

• Aptos was given a program capacity of 990. It enrolled 1,085 students in 2013.

• Visitacion Valley was given a program capacity of 450. It enrolled 562 in 2014.

I could understand the differences between my capacity estimates and the “program capacity” for elementary schools because the introduction of transitional kindergarten in each school has the potential to lower the practical capacity of an elementary school. There’s no such change on the horizon for middle schools.

But even if we assume the “program capacity” numbers are golden, we still can’t justify the 90% claim. The middle school program capacities⁵ sum to 11,760. The current enrollment of 9,948 is only 84.6% of that. It doesn’t even round to 90%.

One last thing here. SF Community is supposed to merge with Paul Revere. Paul Revere’s middle school has a program capacity of 198. Revere currently has 164 middle school students and SF Community has another 93. Either the program capacity numbers are bogus or things are going to be very crowded at Revere.

High Schools

The program capacity numbers are definitely bogus for high schools. Lowell was given a program capacity of 2,000 but it has never had fewer than 2,506. Burton was given a program capacity of 1,000 but it had 1,904 back in 2003. You get the idea.

According to my capacity estimates, moving Jordan and Academy to O’Connell and Wallenberg will shift the high schools from 65% of capacity to 69% of capacity. But since Academy’s campus will still be used by SOTA, the operational savings will be limited.

Conclusion

I don’t know if the delay in announcing the list was to give time for the board members to review the list unofficially so that what was proposed has the votes to get passed next month. The proposal, if implemented in its entirety, would reduce elementary school capacity by just over 3,000 and high school capacity by about 1,500 (Jordan’s campus is really big). It’s a decent start. Enrollment has declined by about 4,000 since before the pandemic so it’s the same magnitude as that decline. But it’s not solving the problem for a generation. The district had a goal of getting to 90% building utilization. It won’t even get to 80%. There would still be a lot of inefficiency that drains money in a time of budget crisis. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have to revisit this issue in a few years.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the proposal gets watered down before it gets implemented or there’s just no board majority for school closures at all

1. “Program Capacity” was defined by SFUSD to be 44, 66, 88, or 110 kids in each grade plus a smaller number of transitional kindergarten seats. For some schools, the program capacity was less than the the school had historically enrolled, or could enroll given the number of classrooms it has. The planned introduction of transitional kindergarten spots in each school may account for much of this “disappeared capacity.” A K-5 school with 88 students in each grade (i.e. 4 kindergarten classes) might not have any unused classrooms. If it needs to accommodate even one transitional kindergarten class, its K-5 capacity might drop to 66 students per grade.

2. Future enrollment is unpredictable. Having some spare capacity enables a district to accommodate growth without having to build a new school. It also allows some under-enrollment in less popular schools.

3. The 3,036 includes 297 from San Francisco Community School, which is its TK-5 program capacity. Its middle school capacity of 264 is not included.

4. Schools with both language and general education programs have to employ more teachers to teach the same number of students than schools that exclusively have language programs or general education programs.

5. Including the middle school portion of K-8 schools