SF families are getting a reform agenda this week — school closures, cheaper childcare, and a tax fight that could get ugly fast. Welcome to The San Francisco Daily Fix — I'm Cassidy, with Devin. Today we've got SFUSD finally putting a timeline on school consolidations, an expanded childcare program that could actually help working families, and a new report throwing gasoline on the CEO tax debate. The school closure fight alone is going to be a bloodbath — every neighborhood thinks their school should be the exception. And the CEO tax brawl is shaping up to be the defining ballot fight of the year — we'll break down who's saying what and what the numbers actually show. First up, Jill Tucker at the San Francisco Chronicle has the SFUSD timeline:
San Francisco schools will revamp its loathed student assignment lottery system and consider closures by fall 2030 under a new plan to address two of the district’s most contentious issues. Superintendent Maria Su is expected to announce the outline and timeline for these changes at the May 12 school board meeting.
Big news out of SFUSD this morning — Superintendent Maria Su is set to announce a plan to overhaul the district's notorious school lottery system and potentially close schools by fall 2030. Hat tip to Jill Tucker at the Chronicle for breaking this ahead of the May 12 board meeting. The lottery system has been a disaster for working families for decades — you apply, you spin the wheel, and your kid might end up across the city from where you live. It was designed to integrate schools, but what it actually did was drive middle-class families out of the district entirely, which made segregation worse, not better. The options on the table include changing tiebreaker rules or shifting to attendance zones — which would be a pretty dramatic philosophical reversal for a district that has resisted neighborhood schools for years. And parents on r slash sanfrancisco are already getting very specific about what this means. One post, with 19 upvotes:
Eliminating the lottery system will likely be what decides if our two children stay in SF for grade school or move out. Besides the fact that we are not willing to send our children to a low performing school, having to commute across the city for pick up and drop offs with two working parents is a ridiculously infuriating burden. (Along with cruel to the children also.) San Francisco actually has many inherently diverse communities. It’s crazy to me that they don’t embrace this by allowing…
And when those families leave, enrollment drops, schools close anyway, and the kids left behind are the ones who couldn't afford to move. The lottery didn't protect equity — it accelerated the death spiral. Another r slash sanfrancisco comment, this one at 60 upvotes, gets right to the implementation problem:
It would be a huge accomplishment to actually get a new enrollment system rolled out in less than a year.
Sixty upvotes for the person who just said — politely — that rolling out a new enrollment system in under a year would be a miracle. For SFUSD, that is a fair bar to set. And then there’s this one, 15 upvotes, asking the obvious follow-up:
So they say they’ll “fix” the assignment system but have no actual plans for how to achieve that?
And someone else is already calling it out: 'fix the system' with no actual plan is just a press release. Su gets credit for naming the problem publicly. She gets zero credit until there's a mechanism on the table. On childcare, Crystal Bailey has the numbers:
Under the mayor's expansion of the city's Family Opportunity Agenda, nearly 750 more children will have access to free or discounted care. To be eligible for free childcare, families must earn less than 150% of the city's annual median income, $230,000. Families who earn under 200% of the median income – $310,000 – will receive a 50% subsidy for childcare.
Mayor Lurie is expanding the Family Opportunity Agenda — that's his January initiative to make housing, childcare, and education more affordable — adding roughly 750 new free or discounted childcare slots, with a focus on infants and toddlers. Free care kicks in for families earning under 150% of area median income, which in San Francisco means under about $230,000. This is exactly what the city should be doing. Childcare is the hidden tax on working families — you can't hold a job if you can't afford someone to watch your kid. And with providers still shuttering post-pandemic because federal COVID relief dried up, the city stepping in isn't charity, it's basic infrastructure. The income threshold is generous by national standards — 150% of SF's median covers a pretty wide swath of the middle class here. The question is whether 750 spots is actually enough to move the needle in a city this expensive. It's not enough, but it's a start. The working-class families in the Excelsior or the Sunset aren't the ones with nannies. They need this. Now to the tax fight. Hoodline lays out what Prop D would actually do:
Under the measure’s text, Prop D would revise the city’s Top Executive Pay Tax so it kicks in when a company’s highest‑paid executive earns more than 100 times the median compensation of its workers and would focus on firms with large revenue and payroll footprints. As outlined by the San Francisco Department of Elections, the proposal would raise Top Executive Pay Tax rates across several brackets, and the Controller’s office estimates an annual revenue bump in the $250–$300 million range.
Prop D is the 'CEO tax' on the June 2 ballot — it raises the Top Executive Pay Tax on companies where the top exec makes more than a hundred times the median worker's pay. The Controller's office puts the revenue at two-fifty to three hundred million a year. SF already has a version of this tax on the books — Prop D just turns up the dial. The whole pitch is that it's surgical: hit the Salesforces and the hedge funds, leave the corner store alone. The new modeling from opponents says that's not how tax incidence actually works — costs get passed to consumers. And that's the live fight: unions say it's long-overdue redistribution, business groups are waving around the Pragmatic Policy Group numbers saying grocery prices go up. Hoodline picked this up from ABC7's original reporting on the modeling. I want to see the methodology before I trust a report commissioned by the opposition — but the underlying economic question is real. If you're a working-class San Franciscan already getting crushed by prices, 'trust us, the CEO pays' is not a sufficient answer. Links to every story we covered today are in the show notes, so if one of these stuck with you, you can dig in there.
That’s The San Francisco Daily Fix for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.