School Board Approves Money for Private Consultants While Classrooms Face Cuts
San Francisco educators just came back from a strike that united teachers, staff, students, and families around the demands for better wages and benefits. The strike is over, but some of the problems behind it remain. Just weeks after the strike ended, district leaders pointed to a budget deficit and began talking about layoffs, program cuts, and school closures. Talk of austerity seems to be very selective. There’s always money for private contractors.
At an April 14, 2026 meeting, the School Board approved without discussion a contract to pay a private company named Partners in School Innovation over $200 an hour to train educators about equity in the classroom. During public comment, educators urged the board to invest in schools instead. The board moved forward with the contract anyway.
For educators, this is familiar territory. After a private contractor broke the district’s payroll system, SFUSD spent about $8.8 million on outside companies to fix it, even as workers dealt with missed or incorrect paychecks. Apparently, the lesson was that when contractors fail, the answer is more contractors.
This doesn’t only happen in San Francisco. In Oakland, a 2019 report found that their school district was spending far above the median on administrators, consultants, and contractors, while spending less on teachers and student services. Even after identifying consultants as a major cost, the response wasn’t to reinvest in schools, it was to hire another consulting firm for $415,000 to tell them where to cut next.
So how can schools avoid cutting their way through a deficit while continuing to funnel public dollars out of the schools?
Districts could invest in the people who actually make schools run. Hiring more in-house, unionized staff would build institutional knowledge, improve stability, and keep public money in public education instead of routing it through expensive intermediaries.
School boards could also tap their reserves. The district says they don’t want to use one-time funding for ongoing costs, but that logic falls apart when one-time funds are routinely used for consulting contracts.
Finally, any serious discussion about long-term budget stability has to confront the structural constraints imposed by Proposition 13, which limits property tax growth and starves public schools of revenue. Without addressing those limits, districts will continue to justify cuts and underserve our schools.
Echoing the questions of educators and parents at the April school board hearing, if there’s always money for consultants, why isn’t there enough for the classrooms?
