Focus Area 2 - Reorganize the Central Office

Resource Alignment Initiative goal: Restructure Districtwide services to serve students and sites more effectively and efficiently.

In 2022, SFUSD adopted ambitious five-year goals for student outcomes. The District also adopted guardrails, such as serving the whole child, that represent our values and guide our strategies for how to meet our goals. As part of the Resource Alignment Initiative, the District is aligning resources to support our efforts to meet these goals. For this focus area of the Resource Alignment Initiative, the District is reorganizing the Central Office to serve students and sites more effectively and efficiently.  

To reduce Central Office expenditures, the District began actively cutting costs to the Central Office in 2024 to minimize the impact of future school site budget cuts and the need for school co-locations, mergers, or closures. 

SFUSD has eliminated 177 positions (including vacancies) from the Central Office for $21.7 million in savings. Fifty-two of these positions are District administrators. District leadership will pursue additional reductions to align SFUSD’s Central Office expenditures with other CA districts (accounting for less than 20% of total general fund expenditures).

SFUSD’s Central Office By The Numbers:

• 48,000 Students are supported by:
  • 8,643 District Employees
  • 956* Central Office Employees
  • 12 Central Office Buildings
  • 5 Divisions
  • 24 Departments

*This number represents certificated and classified Central Office, the Department of Technology, and 20% of Facilities and Student Nutrition Services employees, many of whom work at school sites.

As part of the Resource Alignment Initiative, the District is considering the following objectives as part of its focus on restructuring the Central Office:

1. Align Central Office staff and services to our Vision, Values, Goals, and Guardrails (VVGGs)

The Central Office is going through the following process to be aligned with our VVGGs:

• Identifying key strategies to achieve interim goals and guardrails metrics
• Allocating staff and funding to those strategies
• Strategically pausing or abandoning strategies
• Ensuring there is programmatic support for key SFUSD commitments

2. Improvement of Central Office operations with a focus on effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness

• Effective Systems: Refining our systems and processes to ensure our limited resources are supporting student needs
• Efficient Operations: Eliminating redundancies, streamlining processes, standardizing, and abandoning practices that hinder the ability of the Central Office to address needs at school sites efficiently
• Responsive Staff: Reduce the amount of time it takes to respond to school site by breaking silos, increasing collaboration and communication between Central Staff and school sites

3. Reduce Central Office expenditures to ensure District resources are supporting students and our schools

• Shift away from creating systems and programs from scratch (EMPowerSF, curricula) and toward tailoring industry-leading solutions for our schools, teachers, and students.
• Support improving instruction rather than creating curricula by supporting the VVGGs
• Focus on building capacity and providing support
• Abandon what is not working and keeping what has proven to be successful
• Bring Central Office expenditures in line with other CA districts and account for less than 20% of total general fund expenditures

For more information on the Central Office reorganization, please see the Central Office slides presented to the District Advisory Committee in March 2024.