SFUSD Pushes Back Enrollment Overhaul
PLUS: Three More Charter Measures
What You Need To Know
Here’s what happened around the city for the week of May 17, 2026:
- SFUSD Pushes Back Enrollment Overhaul
- Three More Charter Measures
- Weak Case Against PermitSF
- FBI Probes Breed Appointment
Election Countdown
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SFUSD Pushes Back Enrollment Overhaul
Published May 21, 2026
The Facts
SFUSD is pushing back its enrollment overhaul: Superintendent Maria Su says a new student assignment proposal will not reach the Board of Education until April 2027 and would not take effect until 2028-29.
For the 2026-27 school year, families will stay in the current citywide-choice system rather than the zone-based elementary model the board approved at the end of 2020. Under that revised schedule, school closures or mergers now move to 2029-30 at the earliest, and commissioners told Ezra Wallach at The Standard they still lacked clarity on the next steps.
The Context
SFUSD has been trying to replace its current assignment system for years. In Board Policy 5101.2, the district said the existing districtwide-choice model had not reversed racial isolation and was too hard for families to navigate, and it set three goals for a new system: diversity, predictability, and proximity.
The stakes are bigger than enrollment paperwork. SFUSD’s forecasting consultant projected a 4,600-student decline over the decade ending in 2032-33, on top of losses the district had already absorbed after the pandemic. That is why assignment reform and school consolidation became linked. We argued in February that SFUSD could not postpone both decisions forever.
The GrowSF Take
Families need a school assignment system that is simpler, more predictable, and easier to plan around than today’s citywide-choice process. And it shouldn’t take ten years for the district to implement what should be a simple change.
Three More Charter Measures
Published May 21, 2026
The Facts
Keep your eyes out for three more charter amendments on the November ballot, according to Patrick Hoge at the Examiner. A Housing Trust Fund expansion would leverage rising property values into more annual funding for subsidized housing, growing the fund from $52 million to $125 million, and allowing revenues to be bonded. A public-bank framework would create a municipal financial corporation as a precursor to a city bank. And a commissions overhaul would move some bodies from the City Charter to the Administrative Code and eliminate others - the outcome of a year of work by the commission streamlining task force.
The Context
The current Housing Trust Fund was created by voters in 2012, ramps up to $50.8 million by FY 2024-25, and expires in 2043. On commissions, voters already approved Prop. E in 2024, which created the streamlining task force and set up a 2026 path for charter changes.
The GrowSF Take
A bondable tax-increment financing system for subsidizing low-income housing is a smart idea that is simpler than it seems. In short: rather than taxing the creation of new housing (with “inclusionary zoning”), the system instead relies on broader prosperity and captures a small percentage of rising property values across the city (that’s the “tax increment” part). Those revenues are fairly predictable (global pandemics notwithstanding) and can be bonded to let the city access a larger lump sum and pay it off over time with inflated dollars. This unlocks immediate development funding while removing the tax disincentive on new home building.
We’re also glad to see the commission streamlining progressing - we’ve been big fans of the process and of the recommended outcomes.
The public-bank idea is a tougher sell, though. The bank has been pitched as serving the very clients that are most risky for banks to serve, which all but guarantees taxpayers will be left holding the bag. We think the oversight that independent banks bring is more of a feature than a bug, and a public bank is a solution in search of a problem.
Weak Case Against PermitSF
Published May 20, 2026
The Facts
A former city planner alleges that Mayor Lurie’s signature PermitSF initiative reduces work for City Hall staff and used the OpenGov team to produce a research report that City Hall staff should have been asked to do.
In other words, this is not the “whistleblower” complaint he pitches to the press, but the complaints of an employee unhappy with a new system.
You can read his complaints here and judge for yourself, but here are some excerpts:
OpenGov is specifically designed in a manner that will preclude City staff from performing roles they have held for years. [...] Under the Commission’s PSC Policy, the existence of a civil service class capable of performing the work means contracting out requires a compelling justification.
My second whistleblower complaint to the Controller’s Office concerned the use of OpenGov staff, through the contract, to research and author a white paper on San Francisco’s permitting process [...] Using contract personnel to perform this work is [...] a further displacement of civil service responsibilities
The Context
San Francisco launched PermitSF because its permit process still runs across 30 software systems. City staff told the commission that the pilot had already handled 1,500+ permits and cut Fire wait times 56%. Local 21’s formal objection makes a similar labor argument, saying the city is outsourcing work that internal staff could do.
The GrowSF Take
The existing permit tracking system, Accela, has fallen far short of its promises since it was selected in 2011. The system is expensive, slow, and complex. When GrowSF co-founder Steven Bacio was part of Google.org and embedded in the Planning Department to study its deficiencies, his team found that planners ended up using it as a time-tracking system rather than a project tracking system, and much of the work was done in offline spreadsheets and printed stacks of paper. The research project was unable to answer the question of “how many homes have been approved” because the data simply didn’t exist in any useful form. At the time, public dashboards and reports were compiled by hand, not via a simple query on the Accela system.
The Accela system needs to go. It’s a failure that has kept SF permitting unnecessarily complex, slow, opaque, and prone to failure. The new system may not be perfect yet, but we’re only a year in, and Accela has had over 15 years to get its act together.
FBI Probes Breed Appointment
Published May 20, 2026
The Facts
Federal investigators have contacted at least two people about allegations that former Mayor London Breed appointed Stephen Sherrill to the Board of Supervisors in hopes of improving her chances of future employment with Michael Bloomberg, according to Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez and Han Li at The Standard. Breed denied the claims.
The Context
The obvious national parallel is former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted after trying to trade Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat for personal or political benefit. San Franciscans have seen other corruption scandals from the Breed era too: former Public Works director Mohammed Nuru admitted to a long bribery scheme tied to city business, and a city audit found the Human Rights Commission under former executive director Sheryl Davis misused over $4 million in public funds.
Breed appointed Sherrill on Dec. 18, 2024 to replace Catherine Stefani after Stefani won a State Assembly seat. Sherrill is currently up for re-election at the June 2 primary election. GrowSF has endorsed Sherrill.
The GrowSF Take
This story is about decisions London Breed made. Breed’s choices are her own, and if she broke the law then that’s on her shoulders.
Sherrill should be evaluated on his own record, not on Breed’s. Stephen Sherrill has shown himself to be a highly competent, transparent, and effective Supervisor.
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