In a year of tumultuous change for San Francisco’s public schools, not even the return from summer vacation was without high drama.
Students were back on August 19, and four days later, school board president Lainie Motamedi submitted her resignation, citing health and personal reasons. It took effect within hours.
Mayor London Breed named Phil Kim as Motamedi’s replacement in the same instance as Motamedi’s public revelation.
The San Francisco Unified School District hired Kim at the beginning of this year to oversee its “resource realignment” process – district-speak for painful school closures and consolidations that will be announced next month and take effect in the fall of 2025. He is resigning from that post to take the commission seat.
“I am determined to carry on the good work of the board,” Kim said Friday at City Hall before Breed swore him in. “My primary focus as commissioner is to deliver for our students and families. The work of building a more just, equitable, and effective school system is a challenge I have been [tackling] and will continue to tackle head on.”
Kim’s appointment as commissioner was immediate, and so was criticism of Breed’s choice. The teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, said it hadn’t been consulted, and it underscored Kim’s ties to charter schools, where he worked for more than a decade before joining SFUSD.
“The absolute red line for any future collaboration is the privatization of our public schools,” the union said in a statement. (Charter schools are in fact public but do not require the same level of accountability, oversight, and state regulation.)
The union said it had previously expressed concerns to the district about hiring Kim to run the school closure process. Aside from mayoral appointments and some funding that SF provides – about a quarter of the district’s budget – SFUSD is supposed to run independently of City Hall.
“At a time where the public is saying focus on students, we see political intervention,” Frank Lara, the union’s vice president, told The Frisc. “This is a second round of mayoral appointments in a very short period.”
The mayor has the power to appoint school board commissioners to vacant seats, but no power to fire them. When SF voters recalled three commissioners in February 2022, Breed appointed Motamedi, Lisa Weissman-Ward, and Ann Hsu as their replacements. All three ran for election that fall; Motamedi and Weissman-Ward won, but Hsu lost by a hair after making statements blaming Black and brown parents for poor student performance. Hsu is running again for a board seat this fall.
Weissman-Ward rejected skepticism about Kim’s charter school background. “Everything we’ve seen from Phil has been commitment to SFUSD,” Weissman-Ward told The Frisc. “I have no reason to believe that that would change. He’s absolutely committed to public education [and] SFUSD public schools.”
Who is Phil Kim?
As Kim noted in his speech Friday, he’s no stranger to San Francisco school issues, and he has sought a larger platform for years. He ran unsuccessfully for school board in 2016, 2018, and 2022. The teachers union did not support him during those campaigns because of his defense of charter schools.
In 2018, according to his archived campaign website, Kim had the backing of state Sen. Scott Wiener, then-Assessor-Recorder Carmen Chu, San Francisco Association of Realtors director Mary Jung, United Democratic Club, the Edwin M. Lee Democratic Club, and more.
Kim joined KIPP Northern California Public Schools, a charter school system, as a teacher in 2012, and later directed its STEM programming until June 2023, according to his LinkedIn page.
In January 2024 he moved to SFUSD, reporting to Superintendent Matt Wayne as the executive director of school strategy and coherence. This position entailed overseeing the school closure and resource realignment process. He led workshops, public town halls, and helped form the district’s approach to closing schools.
Student enrollment in SFUSD’s noncharter schools is now under 49,000, a nearly 8 percent drop from the 2019-2020 school year, and projections show it falling further in the next decade. Enrollment is a key determination of state funding. Under immense pressure from state regulators, SFUSD officials say closures are necessary to distribute limited resources more effectively.
The district has pledged to put equity at the center of the process – specifically, not to group closures in lower income neighborhoods and communities of color, as happened the last time SFUSD closed schools two decades ago.
With the draft list of school closures expected on Sept. 18, the timing of the board shakeup further constrains a district undergoing changes fraught with anxiety.
A school district spokesperson referred questions about the timing of Motamedi’s resignation notice to the Mayor’s Office, which did not respond. Kim told the Bay Area Reporter that Breed called him last Friday, Aug. 16.
“We didn’t have time to wait,” Breed said after swearing in Kim. “We had to have someone who was ready to hit the ground running on day one because the conversations have to be had, the hard decisions have to be made. He’s going to rise to the occasion.”
The district spokesperson said it was too soon to comment on a replacement for Kim, but the resource alignment team will continue the work.
A charter rejection
The phrase “charter school” was absent from Friday’s ceremony. Opposition to charter schools has had important policy effects in the recent past. In June 2020, after three months of pandemic closure, the superintendent at the time asked the school board’s approval to hire a consultant to help reopen schools. The board rejected the request because the consultant had worked with charter schools in the past.
The superintendent, Vincent Matthews, called the rejection a “body blow.” Nearly a year later, the district again sought a reopening consultant, then fully reopened schools in August 2021.
While four of the school board’s seven seats are up for election in November, Kim’s seat is not. He will serve out Motamedi’s term until the following city election, likely 2026.
Only one incumbent, Matt Alexander, is running for re-election. The board is guaranteed to have at least three new faces – including Kim – after the upcoming election.
Kim, a Castro resident, serves on the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club board, and previously served on the board for the LYRIC Center for LGBTQQ+ Youth. He will make his first school board appearance on Tuesday, when the board may vote on a new vice president. Alexander will move from vice president to president.
After Kim officially became a commissioner Friday, he sidestepped a question from The Frisc about concerns with his charter school background.
“[Parents] want a safe school they can send their kids to, and [to know] that we are doing everything in our power to make sure that families know and trust that SFUSD is going to do the best possible thing for our students,” Kim said. “That is my focus, that has not changed, and it will continue to be my focus.”
The post San Francisco’s School Board Shakeup Adds To Turnover In a Critical Year appeared first on The Frisc.