Supervisors press DCYF for clearer oversight as $26.5M Student Success Fund grant is continued

The Budget and Finance Committee on Sept. 4 paused action on a $26,519,360 grant from the City to the San Francisco Unified School District under the Student Success Fund, directing staff to return with clearer accountability language on Sept. 18. The department of Children, Youth and Their Families (DCYF) presented a grant structure that divides money into school grants, district innovation grants, technical assistance and administration; supervisors and the Budget and Legislative Analyst urged more-specific performance measures and consequences for underperformance.

"These are very precious dollars that we in the city do not have time nor energy to waste," DCYF Director Maria Sue told the committee, outlining the department’s plan to phase funding and to provide technical assistance and quarterly fiscal review of invoices. She said DCYF will require invoices and backup documentation before reimbursement and build in a 3‑plus‑2 year evaluation structure for program benchmarks.

Supervisor Hillary Ronan, one of the measure’s authors, pressed for stronger language tying grant payments to measurable outcomes and for enforcement tools to prevent the district from diverting funds to other purposes. Ronan said previous city-funded pilots required repeated intervention to ensure district compliance and warned that without meaningful oversight "we have failed [students] yet again." The BLA’s Nick Menard advised adding clearer definitions of services, populations served and metrics in the grant agreement so the city can evaluate outcomes consistently.

DCYF staff described three grant buckets: readiness and implementation grants to site-based community schools, district innovation grants to support programs that reach multiple schools (including a math-and-literacy pilot), and funds set aside for rapid response and administration. The department reported awarding grants to 53 schools this cycle and said it is contracting technical assistance providers to work with schools on benchmarks and implementation before December 2024.

The committee voted to continue the item to Sept. 18 to allow DCYF to incorporate language specifying expected benchmarks, oversight mechanisms and recourse if programs fail to meet agreed milestones. The continuation passed on a roll call with Supervisors Chan and Melgar voting aye and Vice Chair Mandelmann absent.

Committee members also asked staff to include references to SFUSD’s goals and guardrails in the grant agreement and to clarify how funds would be reallocated if schools are merged or closed as part of the district’s resource realignment process. DCYF said it plans to "follow the young people" in reallocations and to convene community-based organizations and technical-assistance providers once the district’s list of potential school closures is published.

The committee’s request for more specific accountability language was procedural: the grant as proposed would not be paid out without established reimbursement controls, but supervisors said explicit consequences for missed benchmarks and a clearer evaluation timeline should be added to the legal agreement before the Board considers final approval.