Phil Kim had been on San Francisco’s school board barely two months in October 2024 when the district — reeling from a fiscal crisis and a COVID enrollment collapse — named a dozen schools to close or consolidate by the start of the 2025-26 school year.

The list sparked fury from parents, teachers, and students, leading to the abandonment of the closure plan. Within days, San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Matt Wayne resigned over the controversy and was replaced by Maria Su. Kim was elected board president unanimously by his fellow commissioners in January 2025 and again at the start of this year.

With a June 2 special election approaching, Kim and two other candidates are asking voters to decide who should hold that seat. San Francisco Unified has significant problems — third-grade reading proficiency has slid to 47% against a target of 70%, roughly 35% of city families have fled to private schools, and 14,000 seats sit empty across district campuses.

The school board is charged with holding the superintendent accountable for turning that around — setting the vision, demanding results, and making the calls that staff and administrators either can’t or won’t make.

The election, Kim’s first as an incumbent, comes after 18 months he describes as “an exercise in stabilizing,” which included closing a $100 million budget deficit, settling the district’s first teachers strike in nearly 50 years, and passing the first social studies curriculum update in more than two decades.

What he hasn’t done, by his own admission, is fix what put the district in crisis to begin with. Su, whose contract was extended this fall, has yet to deliver clear proposals on either a school closure plan or a fix to the district’s enrollment system, the two priorities she was hired to address. According to timelines provided to the board, neither is expected before the end of the decade.

“Unless we address the fact that we have 14,000 empty seats across our district, we’re going to continue to struggle,” Kim told The Standard last week. “The longer we kick the can down the road, the harder it is going to be.”

Among his other policy priorities are keeping the district on a fiscally sustainable path and advocating for changes in the way that the state funds the city’s schools.

Kim’s endorsements include Mayor Daniel Lurie, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the majority of the Board of Supervisors. He also has the support of the influential SF Parent Coalition, which noted in a newsletter this week that Kim is the only candidate with a K-12 teaching credential.

Another candidate for the seat is Brandee Marckmann, who has a son in an SFUSD middle school and is cofounder of the San Francisco Education Alliance, which bills itself as a coalition of progressive activists organizing against an agenda that includes the privatization of public schools.

When The Standard met with Marckmann at Cafe La Flore in the Sunset, she was quick to argue that the district’s problems are mainly operational. She says educators routinely receive late or inaccurate paychecks and contends that almost everything else — from outcomes to attendance — is downstream of that problem. She also disagreed with the district’s decision to roll out new reading and math curricula over the last two school years.

“It just doesn’t make any fiscal sense to take on two big expenditures — a brand-new literacy curriculum and a brand-new math curriculum — when the district is in debt,” said Marckmann, whose supporters (opens in new tab) include progressive politicians Dean Preston, Jackie Fielder, and Aaron Peskin. “You’re just not going to get results if you’re not fiscally sound.”

Marckmann wants to restore the board’s standing committees, which were halted in June 2022 as part of a post-recall governance overhaul. Previously, the board had four standing committees, overseeing rules and policy, curriculum, budget, and personnel. The commissioners used the public monthly meetings to press district administrators on operational questions like whether payroll was functioning. Marckmann calls it “almost unheard of” for an urban district with a billion-dollar budget to run without that kind of regular public scrutiny.

Also in the race is Virginia Cheung and the mother of a fourth grader at the district’s Cantonese-immersion school. Cheung is chief advancement officer at Open Door Legal, a nonprofit working to make legal aid universally available as a tool against poverty and homelessness. During her eight-year tenure at Wu Yee Children’s Services, she helped scale the nonprofit from $20 million to $80 million in annual revenue and organized for Baby Prop. C (opens in new tab), the 2018 measure that created a commercial rent tax to fund childcare.

Cheung is backed by the powerful United Educators of San Francisco teachers union and the San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters. Her pitch is a “cradle to career” vision rooted in early intervention. “If we don’t establish stability as early as possible, it gets harder to catch up by third grade, let alone eighth,” she said.

When The Standard met with Cheung at the Southeast Community Center in the Bayview, she noted it is the kind of community space the city needs — and which SFUSD can help create more of. The 40,000-square-foot LEED space is fit with a coffee shop, free WiFi, and an amphitheater. It is also home to one of Wu Yee’s childcare centers.

Cheung wants to see strong technical training as part of stronger career pathways for students not bound for four-year college, and wants to expand the district’s language-immersion programs, which she sees as one of the few assets actively pulling families back from private school.

Sitting at Dolores Park Cafe last week, fog drifting behind him and a bagel in front of him, Kim admitted he was nervous about the election. After all, he noted, he lost his two previous campaigns — the 2016 and 2018 school board elections — before being appointed by Mayor London Breed in August 2024.

He said the move from district staff to commissioner has been the hardest professional transition of his life — one he’s only beginning to grasp. “As staff, you see a problem, and you can literally fix it,” he said. “As a board member, you just don’t have that ability.”

Kim grew up poor and closeted in suburban Detroit, the son of South Korean immigrants who worked constantly and were rarely emotionally available when they were home. Now he ticks off what he has that he “couldn’t have imagined” as a child: an engagement to a man he loves, the pursuit of a doctorate in education, and a seat at the head of a district with 50,000 students.

“You need to find a way or make one, which is something I think I have tried to do my entire life,” Kim said. “We’re not just addressing the challenges of today — we’re really building a school system that lasts.”

Where Kim sees school closures as a necessary evil best done quickly to set the district on the right path, his opponents diverge. Marckmann opposes any closures, arguing that they don’t save money and depress enrollment by making the district seem unstable. Cheung said she is not categorically opposed but wants a plan “to mitigate and reduce harm.”