Wanted: Careful Arsonist

What happens to San Francisco's closed schools?

In the last post, we looked at how the number of children in San Francisco has varied over time and the knock-on effect this had on public school enrollment. What has happened to the schools that once enabled San Francisco Public Schools to support over 90,000 students? Are there any lessons we can draw for the future?

I identified over 70 sites where schools had closed. I don’t count nursery schools or child care centers, just schools that served K-12 students¹. Nearly all the closures are after 1970 but I do include a few that closed earlier if SFUSD still has the property. Closed means the students and staff were reassigned to other schools. I don’t count as closed schools that move to a temporary location while their building is being reconstructed.

Schools have closed and opened regularly but there have been three clear waves.

The first came in 1971-75 and was precipitated by a law requiring the district to make the schools earthquake-safe. Engineers were sent to inspect the schools. Schools that were found to be high risk were closed almost overnight with the district having to scramble to accommodate the students in other schools, sometimes in double shifts. Most schools required at least some work at this time and even planned work could cause a school to shut for months or a year while the work was being completed. This was going on at the same time as the district was trying to force integration through busing and suffering a consequent collapse in enrollment. It must have been absolute chaos.

The second wave came in 1978-79, in reaction to the enrollment drop, and came under the rubric of “Educational Redesign”. This was also when SFUSD shifted away from junior highs (grades 7-9) and senior highs (grades 10-12) to the current grade pattern.

The third wave came in 2005-06 and was by far the smallest of the three.

What became of the sites where schools closed?

• Nearly half (31 of 71 or 45%) of the closed school sites still have SFUSD schools. They’ve been reincarnated. De Avila Elementary closed in 2005 but the Chinese Immersion School opened at that site a few years later. Parkside Elementary closed in the 1970s but Dianne Feinstein Elementary was constructed on the site in the 2000s. Fremont Elementary closed in the late 1970s but Willie Brown Middle School was constructed there in the 2010s. Wallenberg High was built on the site of Anza Elementary.

• Another seven (10%) are being used by charter schools. All the buildings with charter schools contain more students than they did when SFUSD schools were there. This is unsurprising. The sites were closed due to under-enrollment and charter schools that can’t attract students quickly fold.

• Five are being used as child development centers or early education schools. Yerba Buena Elementary had an attached “Nursery and School-Age Center”. When the elementary school closed, the nursery expanded and became what is today Tule Elk Park CDC. Several CDCs were formerly elementary school annexes. Annexes were separate buildings that handled students who couldn’t fit in the main school building and a number of schools had them.

• Six are being used by the district for administration or contain other district departments. It would be more than six if I counted former children’s centers instead of just K-12 schools.

• Nine are now housing. I’m counting the not-yet-opened Shirley Chisholm Village, which is being constructed on the site of Francis Scott Key Elementary Annex.

• Eleven are no longer used by the district but are not housing. The most famous of these is the 5th and Market site of the Westfield Shopping Center which SFUSD has owned since Lincoln Grammar and the Commercial School burned after the 1906 earthquake. Some former school sites were sold or leased to other City agencies such as Human Services, Parks & Rec, CCSF, or SF State. Candlestick Cove Elementary is now owned by a church.

• Two are unused. One is the recently closed Edwin and Anita Lee Newcomer Center. The other is Sir Francis Drake Elementary Annex. The main school was renamed Malcolm X Academy but its annex building was left to decay until being demolished in the 2010s. The site is marked as undeveloped land (200 Middle Point Road) in the Facilities Master Plan.

Here’s a map showing all the sites². I left out sites SFUSD owns that were not former K-12 schools. They’ll be the subject of another post.

You can mouseover to see the details of each site but here are a few of the more interesting stories.

High School of Commerce

When we speak of schools moving, we usually mean that the students and staff at a school move to a different building. In one famous case, the school building itself actually moved. The Commercial School was built on Grove St in 1911. No sooner was it opened than the city decided they wanted that land for the new Civic Center complex. Rather than demolishing the new building, it was decided in 1913 to move it a few blocks to what became 170 Fell St. The move took eight months (see here for photos). In 1926, two additions were built: the Nourse Auditorium (275 Hayes St) and the High School of Commerce building (135 Van Ness). Enrollment reached a peak of 2,753³ in 1936 but the opening of Lincoln High would draw students away and, by 1951, it had fallen to only 1,675⁴. Its location, far from the residential parts of the city, was inconvenient for most students. The decision was taken to close the school the following year. The idea from the beginning was to move the district’s administration, then housed in the Civic Auditorium, into the buildings.

The school’s Athletic Field is now the home of Davies Symphony Hall. The Nourse Auditorium was left to deteriorate, apart from being used as a courtroom for a 1985 asbestos trial, until renovated in 2013 by City Arts and Lectures. The school buildings were used for primarily for school district administration, although part of 170 Fell St was used by the Rent Board, until the 1989 earthquake after which the whole building was declared seismically unsafe. Homeless activists occupied the building for a time in 2001 to campaign for the city to buy it and construct affordable housing on the site.

In the late 1990s, the district bought its current headquarters building at 555 Franklin, moved most of the admin staff there, and declared its intention to move the School of the Arts into the old Commerce school buildings⁵. Three separate bond propositions raised money for that purpose but, as the price tag spiraled, no progress had been made and the plans seems to have been shelved. The 2024 school bond proposition made no mention of the School of the Arts.

The old Commerce buildings still sit there, one boarded up and the other underused, a tribute to San Francisco’s paralysis. It’s too expensive to remodel them and impossible to demolish them because they’ve been declared landmarks⁶. They’ll probably sit there until an earthquake flattens them.

Polytechnic High

Polytechnic High was on Frederick St, just south of Kezar Stadium. Famous alumni include Luis Alvarez (Nobel Prize winner, best known now for the theory that a giant meteor was responsible for the death of the dinosaurs), George Seifert (Super Bowl winning 49ers coach), and Rube Goldberg. For many years, it was Lowell’s biggest rival, the annual Thanksgiving Day football match between the two drawing as many as 50,000 fans. In the 1960s, Lowell moved to its current location near Lake Merced and the demographics of Poly were changing. By 1965, 39% of the students were Black, the highest figure in the district, and enrollment was dropping.

In 1971, engineers discovered that six schools (Argonne, Fairmount, Grant, Monroe, and Webster elementary schools and the main building at Poly) might collapse in the event of an earthquake. The schools were closed almost overnight⁷ while remedial work was carried out and the students transferred temporarily to other schools. Grant, in Pacific Heights, never reopened, and became a weed-strewn lot for years until being sold for redevelopment in 1998. The other four were rebuilt and reopened. Poly closed in 1971 and a new smaller capacity school with the same name and a student-directed curriculum (i.e. you chose what you learned) opened on the same site⁸ . The students at that smaller school then transferred to McAteer High when that opened in Diamond Heights in 1973. Mission High students relocated to Poly for three years until 1977 while their building was undergoing reconstruction. It must have been a tight fit because Mission had 2,648⁹ students at the time (compared to Poly’s capacity of 1,930).

After Mission reopened, the Poly site was left unused while the city bickered over its future. The district kindly left the water and electricity turned on so squatters were a regular problem. UCSF was interested in building student housing, but neighbors didn’t want the Medical School to expand any further. In 1985, the city agreed to pay $2.5 million to lease the site for 75 years with a view to building 160 units of affordable housing. The city also gave the district a 75-year rent-free lease on surplus city property at Seventh Ave and Lawton St¹⁰. The original idea was that Wallenberg (which had only just opened) would move to this location but the district refused to commit to putting a school there. The final housing project had to get voter approval, twice, and was trimmed to 114 units because the boys and girls gymnasiums were left standing. The school was eventually demolished in December 1987. The gymnasiums are still owned by SFUSD. One is leased to AcroSports, the other to the Circus Center. And, of course, the land at Seventh and Lawton is still vacant and still owned by SFUSD.

Although Poly closed in 1973, its alumni association had a newsletter which, a few years ago, ran a couple of stories on the history of the school. The first part, dealing with the school’s halcyon days, contains mildly interesting reminiscences, but the second part, focusing on the years leading up to the closure, will make you promise never to complain about your kid’s school ever again. It makes for entertaining reading even if it is a little exaggerated.

Denman / Lowell Annex / Alta Vista / Louise M. Lombard / Opportunity II / Alamo Park

The striking building on Hayes St on the south side of Alamo Square is one of the handsomest schools in the city and the one with the most names. It was opened in 1911 as Denman Grammar School (see photo below). This was already the third building to carry the Denman name. The first was on Bush and Stockton and the second on Bush and Taylor. The current Denman school, near Balboa Park, opened in 1940.

It still says Denman School on the front but this photo is from when it was Lowell High School Annex

This Denman school closed in 1928, when the district when the district wanted to use it as an Annex to Lowell High School. After about a decade, it became home to Alta Vista School (see this photo), which served students with cognitive disabilities.

Alta Vista’s principal¹¹, Louise M. Lombard, retired in 1940. The San Francisco Public Schools Bulletin lauded her work and described it as “educating subnormal children to be useful and self-sustaining members of society”. Ms. Lombard wasn’t having it. In the same issue, she is quoted as saying: “They used to call students who didn’t display the usual keenness for study ‘subnormal’ and ‘retarded’ but I consider them merely as ‘slow-learning’”. Although the Board of Education valued her work so highly that they later renamed the school after her, they didn’t listen to what she said. I found references to several variations of the school’s name including the Louise M. Lombard School for retarded, the Louise M. Lombard School for the Trainable Mentally Retarded, and the Louise M. Lombard School for the Handicapped. When the trend to mainstream these students took off, the school downsized to the old Frederic Burk elementary building (since sold to SF State) and took on its last name: Louise M. Lombard Special Education.

Meanwhile, the building on Hayes St, became home to Opportunity II Senior High, a new school for students who weren’t learning in a conventional academic setting. It was an unconventional place. The person elected by students and faculty to run the place as “teacher-coordinator” had been charged with inciting to riot at a school board meeting (the charges were later dismissed) and would go on to be tried for shoplifting from Macy’s (she was acquitted). A different teacher was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to possess and sell two pounds of pure cocaine. This all happened in one 12-month period in 1974-75. Later, the teacher-coordinator (now principal) would go on to welcome controversial guest speakers such as Angela Davis and Jim Jones. At one point, a third of students were members of the People’s Temple because Rev. Jones was apparently a fan of the way the principal ran the school. The Alamo Square Neighborhood Association took the Board of Education to court to get them to move Opportunity II out of the neighborhood. Instead, the board renamed the school Alamo Park Continuation High (but retained the principal). It was later renamed again to Ida B Wells High, its current name.

Continuation High / Marshall Annex / Unity Junior High / Phoenix High

1950 Mission St is the only property that served as an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. It started off as Continuation High School which closed around 1960 because “it had lost its original aim of serving youngsters who were forced to work, and instead had become a dumping ground for unruly and difficult students¹².” After a lick of paint, it became an annex to Marshall Elementary, serving that school’s grades 3-6. In 1971, the same earthquake concerns that had led to the closing of Poly and five elementary schools caused this building to close. After it reopened, it housed students from Hawthorne School (now named Cesar Chavez) for a year while that school was undergoing earthquake safety reconstruction. Then it became Unity Junior High, an experimental school that closed not long after a 1978 incident in which a student was fatally shot while in the lavatory¹³. It was apparently an accident.

The property then sat vacant for a while. It was described as abandoned in 1991¹⁴. In 1997¹⁵, it became the County Community School's Phoenix High campus but this didn’t stop a 2000 squabble over whether to build market rate housing, with one-third reserved for teachers at low market rates, or pure low-income housing on the site. Meanwhile, Phoenix High was not thriving. According to a 2003-04 Civil Grand Jury report, it was known by the local police as Heroin High. Eventually, as part of a 2013 land swap with the city, the district gave up this property and the site of the former Potrero Terrace Nursery school and received in return a parking lot near SFUSD's HQ that the district had been leasing from the city and $4.5mm in cash. The city built affordable housing on the two properties it took over.

Juan Crespi Home School

Juan Crespi Home School opened at the junction of 24th and Quintara in the Sunset in 1951. It was one of four “home” schools (so-called because kids went home for lunch) that opened around the same time to accommodate the baby boom. Crespi closed in the early 1960s but it was used for a few years subsequently as an annex to Lincoln High which sits across the street. Why mention a school that has no historical significance, was only open for a decade, and has been closed for over sixty years? Well, SFUSD still owns the land and the building. It now houses School Health Programs.

Conclusion

I was surprised at the amount of churn there has been among schools. I was expecting to find that fewer schools had closed but that a higher percentage of the closed school sites had been sold off. Instead, the district practices reincarnation. A closed school sits vacant for a while and then a new school is born out of the ashes of the old one.

There are positive aspects to this reincarnation. We can think of it as a form of competition. Someone gets an idea for a new school and tries it out. If it fills a niche, it thrives. That’s the classic argument made by charter school proponents but it doesn’t apply just to charter schools. Alice Fong Yu and the Chinese Immersion School at De Avila are more successful than Columbus Elementary or the original De Avila. New Traditions is thriving where Andrew Jackson didn’t.

There are negative aspects to it too. If you open a new school on a site that closed because of under-enrollment, the new school may fail for the same reason. If it succeeds, it’ll only be by drawing students away from other schools which will then be under-enrolled themselves.

The Careful Arsonist

The only way to solve under-enrollment is to remove the temptation to reopen closed sites, whether by charter schools or the district itself. The best way of doing that would be to have an alternate use lined up at the time of the closing. That’s impractical given the city’s glacial decision-making speed. What we need is a way to commit to leaving a school unoccupied while that process plays out. Enter the careful arsonist of the title. If each closed school were burned to the ground, the debate over the site’s future use could proceed at its own pace. We could be sure that no-one would suggest building a new school on the site.

We may as well take this fantasy to its logical conclusion. Choosing whether to close schools and which schools to close is enormously contentious. I imagine the board and the superintendent would be very grateful if they could shortcut the process by just whispering the name of a school to the arsonist. The arsonist would go to work in early June, after the end of the school year. The board and superintendent could publicly bemoan the tragic loss of a school building, quickly reassign the staff and students to other schools, and then get on with the job of figuring out what to do with the now vacant lot. Again, nobody would seriously consider rebuilding the school.

1. So you won’t find reference to, for example, Bret Harte Child Development Center which closed and is now occupied by KIPP Bayview Elementary

2. Two areas stymied me. I was unable to determine what became of a couple of Hunters Point schools. I have their addresses but those addresses no longer exist because the area has been so redeveloped. I was also unable to determine the origin of Moscone Elementary. It seems to appear out of thin air within a couple of years of his death without any news story about a school being dedicated or renamed after him. In contrast, there are a bajillion stories about the convention center.

3. San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 1952.

4. San Francisco Chronicle: June 13, 1951

5. I’m glossing over some of the fun details. The State Bar of California, the owner of 555 Franklin, was dragging its heels over the sale so the district went out and bought an entire building, 333 Grant Ave, for $7.7 million purely to put pressure on the Bar to close the sale by demonstrating that the district had options and wasn’t a desperate buyer. The district did talk about turning 333 Grant into a Commerce school(!) but in the end just resold the building.

6. There’s no official website listing all the landmarks, probably because there’s so many of them, but here’s a good third-party site.

7. San Francisco Chronicle, May 11, 1971

8. San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 1971. The new Poly was not a comprehensive high school but “a small, specialized school where some 300 students could determine their own curriculum after militant black students demanded the right ‘to determine our own educational destiny’”

9. San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 1972

10. San Francisco Chronicle, June 13, 1985.

11. Weirdly, a 1963 issue of the San Francisco Public Schools Bulletin noted the death of a Mary Carmichael and said she had served as the principal of Louise Lombard for 26 years until 1950. One of those issues is wrong.

12. San Francisco Chronicle, March 8, 1962

13. San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 1978.

14. San Francisco Chronicle, May 30, 1991.

15. San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 2002.