The weeks and really months of organizing and demanding and mobilizing that culminated in a protest at the Board Of Education meeting on May 13 to make sure Eliot Duchon, the advisor appointed by the California Department of Education (CDE), did what was right for the schools our students deserve. The CDE has now approved a total of 233 teaching positions! SFUSD has enough approved positions to immediately rehire 200 teachers that were serving on 2024-2025 temporary contracts to work during the 2025-2026 school year. We are one step closer to fully-staffed classrooms. UESF has and will continue to work to ensure that educators on temporary contracts are able to be back in the classroom. UESF educators sent countless emails, participated in meetings, held protests at the Board of Education (see the powerful speech by our VP of Paraeducators, Teanna Tillery here) and most recently publicly shamed the unelected and inexperienced advisor Elliot Duchon (see the video of UESF’s action shaming the state advisor for looking to harm our school communities here). The hard work paid off!
Now, we fully expect district management to focus on fully staffing schools for the 2025-2026 school year. And our campaign for fully staffed schools, stability, improved educator pay and dignified working and learning conditions continues!
Members have rightly felt disrespected and dehumanized during this budget process. District management implemented a “budget stabilization plan,” that will negatively affect our school communities and our students have lost dynamic and robust school programs. The cuts, which are the result of decades of mismanagement, affected vital programs at a time when the federal administration is intensifying attacks on public education. We will not forget what we all experienced to get to this point. We will continue to be relentless in recovering high quality multilingual programs, counseling and wellness support, outdoor education, academic intervention and small group instruction, staffing to lower classroom size, as well as much needed attendance monitoring supports. The UESF bargaining team, the biggest yet, has passed and will defend 20 proposals that prioritize improved working conditions in special education, health benefits and improved pay while also fighting for safety, shelter and housing for our students, sanctuary, early education and paraeducator rights and more! We are pursuing a proposal to end all layoffs when vacancies exist, which would have negated the most recent staffing instability.
There is huge potential to work with our families across our beautiful city to invest in the schools our students deserve. While the struggle to survive this budget season could have divided us, we made critical connections with parent leaders across our schools, in all neighborhoods, which will serve as the foundation for fighting and winning the school our students deserve. As we are ending this school year, this is welcomed news and we should all celebrate. Know that your union, thanks to your commitment and leadership, is forever organized and ready.
