Parents and union leaders press board on teacher hires, emergency appointments and social‑worker interns

A coalition of public speakers at the Sept. 10 meeting raised questions about recent hiring patterns, emergency teacher appointments and the district’s student‑assignment “weight‑pull” process.

Susan Solomon, vice president of the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), told the board she tallied hiring across agenda items and raised three related concerns: the number of probationary appointments (she cited "219 new teachers" in items the district listed), the use of emergency appointments (she identified roughly 26 emergency hires on the agenda) and the presence of 44 interns. Solomon said many of the trainee/social‑worker placements list site supervision by SFUSD social workers and wellness coordinators “at no cost to the district,” and she asked the board to consider how that additional supervisory work would be accommodated or compensated to make internship supervision successful.

Solomon also questioned the annual layoff/recall pattern and described the practice of laying off roughly 200 teachers while rehiring most of them the next year as inefficient when the district is also hiring additional staff. She asked the board to be mindful of staff workload and the public consequences of these staffing decisions.

Another public commenter, Bill Ford, described the weight‑pull system's local impact: he said his son had one offered choice (Visitation Valley) that would require more than an hour each way to reach, urged families to attend the Sept. 24 board meeting to press for changes and suggested at minimum the district provide a school bus to improve access to that campus.

District staff did not provide immediate operational responses to all of Solomon’s data points on emergency appointments and intern counts during the public comment period; the transcript records Solomon’s concerns but does not record a detailed administrative rebuttal or adjustment at the Sept. 10 meeting.