SF Public Schools Teach 'How to Go Broke on a Measly $3 Million a Day'

A California oversight panel took control of the San Francisco Unified school district's budget earlier this year, and what they found will either shock you, enrage you, or cause you to shrug like a bored Parisian and say, "Well, San Francisco." Whatever your reaction, you know things are bad when a California state-level oversight panel is an improvement over whatever the locals had been up to.

Called a "fiscal health risk analysis," San Francisco Unified was required to work with the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) by state law because the district had "been designated a lack of going concern by the state superintendent of public instruction."

"Lack of going concern" is a fancy way of saying "going broke."

It can't be easy going broke on a $1.1 billion K-12 education budget in "the most childless city in the country," but education officials sure made it look that way.

Here's a summary of FCMAT's findings, courtesy of The 74 Million's Chad Aldeman. FMCAT found that San Francisco Unified:

• Paid for employee positions using one-time federal relief funds and will need to lay them off or find other revenues or savings;
• Has not adjusted student enrollment projections to account for continued declines;
• Does not track monthly attendance data and, as a result, overstates average daily attendance in projecting future revenues; and
• Has an understaffed budget office, inadequate control over its payroll system, and problems tracking employee overtime costs. 

What it all adds up to is that SFU spent $1.3 billion of its $1.1 billion budget. "Lack of going concern," indeed.

I was going to do the math so you'd know how much San Francisco spends per pupil but there were two obstacles in my way.

The first is that San Francisco Unified doesn't quite know how many students they're supposed to be teaching and, by my reckoning, $1,300,000,000 divided by ??? equals ??????. And though we both might find that momentarily amusing, it isn't exactly enlightening. Or at least not in the way San Francisco Unified would like it to be.

The second is that there's a dirty little secret behind all of those dollars-per-pupil numbers you see school districts spout, and I don't care how good your local district might be. The fact of the matter is that the number of dollars that actually reach the classroom — supplies, books, chairs, etc., even the teacher's salary — hasn't changed much over the years. Almost every extra dollar goes to extra administration. You could take an axe to at least two levels of administration, return billions to the taxpayers, and you'd end up with better schools with less red tape and a lot less leftism. 

The mirror view of what's going on at San Francisco Unified can be seen in Florida.

Florida's public schools are also in trouble but only because Gov. Ron DeSantis's support for school choice has been such a success that parents are pulling their kids out in record numbers, and enrolling them in private schools or charter schools, and even homeschooling.

Give parents an option and they'll choose well more often than not. Or keep their kids trapped in public schools and wonder, as they do in San Francisco, where all the money went.

Recommended: Yale Group Welcomes You to the Global Intifada