School Closed 2025
he image shows a banner with three yellow school buses in the background. Overlaid text reads: "School Closed," "1st day of school," and "The day when the countdown to the last day of the school begins. 2025." A yellow lightning bolt cuts diagonally across the text.
Is it a drama series or an SFUSD School Board meeting? The last hour (starting at 4:31:50) of the November 18th 2025 meeting is a spirited discussion of the “Strong Schools Resolution”. It asks the Board to give political cover to Superintendent Maria Su for kicking off the process to close schools. If approved in the December 9th meeting, it will not be just Su sticking her neck out: they will be all in it together, on the record.
The commissioners aren’t technically authorizing anything specific with the resolution. Comm. Alexander asked, repeatedly. What they are doing is agreeing to the concept that “improving student outcomes” requires changing the enrollment system AND “balancing the portfolio” of school sites. The way they’re going to improve test scores is by closing schools.
The resolution also sets up the Superintendent’s proposed plan as a package – including both major initiatives – for an up or down vote by the Board. As with the last closure process, the Board is being led down a narrowing path where their choices are increasingly limited, even as they agree to move forward with each step.
The discussion included a specific timeline: Su would present a plan by August 2026 that would be approved before the enrollment fair in October 2026. This is a similar timeline to the 2024 closures attempt, considered “botched” because it wasn’t approved. When Su would make the list of schools public – the big sticking point last time around – was not discussed and isn’t part of the resolution.
Su insisted closures are not about the budget. The 2026-27 budget that is. But there’s a “dotted line” to the budget because the savings “will be realized in later years”. It’s not about the money, but it kind of is, but now it’s really about “resources”. What are resources exactly? That’s even more undefined than a dotted line to the budget.
Su is happy to leave it up to the public’s imagination. Maybe my kids will get more resources! But resources cost money and closures are about cutting spending, so that’s not happening. Just fewer resources shared by more students at each school. The future holds nothing but deficits and declining enrollment, to hear the Superintendent tell it.
The rerun of the 2024 closures drama begs the question: who wants this? Not parents, not students, not teachers. Who is pushing another SFUSD Superintendent to take on this extremely unpopular initiative? Real estate, charter and private school industries are prime suspects. With the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) as an enforcer perhaps. Su mentioned that closures are happening in school districts across California, but there has been no evidence that any of them experienced dramatically improved student outcomes as a result.
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Links to some of our other writing and media mentions opposing school closures.