Study Session 1 Recap

School Reorganization is about a problem families already feel. Where students live and where school seats are do not line up. Some neighborhoods do not have enough seats for the children who live there. Others have empty seats. About 40 out of every 100 elementary seats are in citywide or language programs, which are not tied to any neighborhood.

The goal is that the school and the program your child needs are within reach of where you live. We call that access. Access depends on where programs are located, not only on the assignment rules, which is why this work covers both.

This session was about naming that problem clearly and looking honestly at what the district learned from its earlier work on school zones.

Families want good schools first. In community workshops in the Bayview in 2020, families told us that if every school were high quality, the assignment rules would matter far less. The Board came back to this point repeatedly. Assignment policies are not substitutes for strong schools. 

Access is not evenly distributed today. In some western neighborhoods, most families list their local school first. In parts of the east and southeast, very few do. One commissioner named it plainly: in some neighborhoods, applying elsewhere is a preference, and in others it is a way out of a school that has not been given what it needs. The Board's direction was that access to programs, particularly language pathways and K-8 schools, is something every family is owed.

Two policies are on the books. BP 5101, adopted in 2011, is the citywide choice system running today. BP 5101.2, adopted in 2020, created zones but was never put in place. Staff reviewed several years of zone map work and found that the district's goals compete with one another, that diversity is hard to change through assignment rules alone, and that even large zones could not guarantee every child a seat close to home without also moving programs.

Four possible directions were introduced. 

• Large zones
• Small zones
• Neighborhood school with full Options
• Neighborhood with limited Options

Everyone would require changes to where language and citywide programs are located. Staff said none of them work as things stand today.

• A clear definition of what strong schools must have to inform what policy we choose. Commissioners said this should include staffing, safety, belonging, after-school programs, and enough classes per grade for teachers to work together.
• A plan to reach families the district does often hear from, including families who left SFUSD and families who never applied.
• More detail on who leaves the district and why, broken out by race, income, and school type.
• Clarity on special education access. If the district moves toward neighborhood schools, students receiving special education services cannot be the only ones still traveling across the city.
• What families already told us in past years, brought back rather than asked again from scratch.

No policy option was chosen, boundary maps were drawn and no specific programs have been discussed or evaluated. Nothing changes for families applying this year or next year.

Study Session 2, September 1, 2026. Staff will show what each of the four directions would require, and where the tradeoffs fall. The Board will discuss which priorities matter most.