San Francisco parents have long navigated one of the country’s most complicated public school enrollment systems. But eight years after promising a fix, the San Francisco Unified School District has yet to make meaningful changes.

At Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting, school board members pressed Superintendent Maria Su for a timeline. But it became clear that no one could say with confidence when — or how — a replacement system would arrive. A plan that was supposed to have been created and reviewed by the summer was nowhere to be found, pushing off any improvements by years and befuddling board members.

The uncertainty has real consequences: Under the district’s reorganization plan, a new enrollment system must be implemented before any schools are closed. The proposed closures that nearly tore the district apart in 2024 have been pushed toward the end of the decade.

The overhaul effort dates to November 2018, when the Board of Education passed a resolution (opens in new tab) calling for a new community-based student assignment system to replace a district-wide choice lottery.

Instead of being automatically assigned to a school based on where the student lives, families tour and rank any of the more than 100 elementary, middle, and high schools around the city. Where they gain admission is based on a complex mix of strategy, tiebreakers, and luck.

The board found that the system had not reversed patterns of racial isolation. By 2018, SFUSD’s data showed that more schools were segregated by income, race, and academic performance than before the lottery began. What followed was years of community engagement: 11 meetings of a dedicated ad hoc committee, 12 community workshops, policy simulations with Stanford researchers, and case studies from other districts.

In December 2020, the board voted 6-1 to adopt Board Policy 5101.2 (opens in new tab), establishing a framework for assigning students based on geographic zones, with diversity, predictability, and proximity as its three guiding goals. Zones would be drawn to mirror the city’s demographic makeup, so every school would reflect San Francisco’s full range of students.

The district spent the next several years simulating zones, gathering feedback, and refining the policy. The new system was supposed to take effect for families applying for the 2026-27 school year, according to the district’s website (opens in new tab). That didn’t happen. Under a new timeline unveiled this month, the redesigned policy won’t be addressed until 2027-28 and wouldn’t take effect until 2028-29. School closures or mergers would follow no earlier than 2029-30.

Board members on Tuesday were frustrated but cordial. “The board passed the enrollment redesign in 2020, so it’s six years later,” said Commissioner Matt Alexander. “This is kicking the can essentially six years from when it was originally envisioned,” added Commissioner Jaime Huling. One commissioner noted that the community had been expecting a plan by September 2026 so it could be implemented the following fall.

When board President Phil Kim asked why the existing policy, 5101.2, couldn’t be implemented as written, SFUSD’s head of governance, Hong Mei Pang, said simulations had exposed that the policy cannot guarantee that students living within a zone would be assigned to a school there.

After further questioning, Su suggested she could share a more detailed timeline at a future meeting. The new, very rough timeline would mean approval of an enrollment policy in the winter of 2028-29, after families have already entered into the old lottery system.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone. 

“I don’t really have clarity on exactly what’s happening in these next four meetings,” Kim said. “I don’t actually know.”

Su has argued that school closures may be less urgent than feared, pointing to the new Mission Bay Elementary (opens in new tab), which opens this fall, and a planned Mandarin immersion program as evidence that SFUSD can win back families. The district has reached only 65% of children living in San Francisco, she noted. “I just feel that we are on the trajectory to expand and to increase, and I want us to continue to hold on to that momentum.”

She warned against moving too fast on closures: “I do not want to be in a place where I caused so much chaos, so much pain in our school community, for — within a couple of years — having to reopen those schools because we’ve changed our enrollment policy.” And she acknowledged the scale of the challenge: “I am not naive to the fact that we still need to find and fill 14,000 seats.”

The board was skeptical. Mission Bay will eventually hold over 400 students but opens this fall with only pre-K, TK, and kindergarten and won’t reach the full capacity of elementary grades until 2032. The Mandarin immersion school, targeted for 2027-28, has no confirmed enrollment figure and no finalized admissions process. Neither comes close to addressing a district projected to lose an additional 4,600 students by 2032, according to FLO Analytics (opens in new tab) — on top of the nearly 6,000 lost since 2019-20.

“It’s success that is going to attract people,” board member Supryia Ray said. “I don’t think folks are going to magically appear.” Making matters worse, the district lifted enrollment caps at certain schools starting next year, meaning popular ones will draw even more students and resources away from lower-demand options.

The enrollment delay is the latest strain on the relationship between Su and the board. Members say they learned about the revised timeline the same way the public did: by reading the Chronicle. Similar breakdowns have played out recently — the district canceled the newcomer program at Mission Education Center (opens in new tab) and closed the Academy campus (opens in new tab) without board votes. The pattern echoes that of 2024, when the district publicly released a school closure list without sign-off from the Board, contributing to the resignation of Su’s predecessor, Matt Wayne.

Su’s contract expires at the end of 2027-28 — meaning closures, if they happen on schedule, could fall to whoever succeeds her.

In the year and a half since Su took the job, the two initiatives she was most explicitly charged with delivering — a new enrollment system and a consolidation plan — have produced no implemented policy. At Tuesday’s meeting, the word “amazing” was used 24 times. “Conversation” came up 51. For a district that has been having this particular conversation since 2018, it’s getting harder to find the amazing part.