San Francisco: "Dwindling enrollment"; $42.1M for alternative special needs places

June 28, 2025, KQED TV, San Francisco: SFUSD Pays Millions for Special Ed. This Change Could Save Money — and Help Families

As the San Francisco Unified School District still has a long-term budget problem despite widespread cuts, it could look to save money by revisiting the way it handles special education — an idea that many families are hesitant to get their hopes up for but desperately want to believe.

Amid dwindling enrollment and state funding, SFUSD is still hemorrhaging cash, spending outside its means this year, and expecting to run another deficit of nearly $60 million next year without restoring cut positions and services. Superintendent Maria Su told reporters last month that one of the drivers of the district’s annual shortfalls is the ballooning cost of special education, particularly for the 12% or so of special education students who require services the district has opted to outsource.

SFUSD is federally mandated to be responsible for all students’ special education within its geographical region, or SELPA, but the district alone cannot provide all services. It has about 200 students in private school programs that enroll students with individualized learning plans (IEPs) whose needs cannot be met by their public school district.

Next year, SFUSD estimates that it will pay $42.1 million to these non-public school programs, along with other independent agencies and consultants that provide special education services. . . .

California has 265 certified NPS programs. Some, like the one Kelley’s son attends, provide smaller student-to-teacher ratios and more individualized attention than SFUSD’s general education classrooms can offer, but less extensive services than some of its internal special day classes, which Kelley said would be too restrictive.

Others, such as Edgewood Community School, are geared toward students who need significant mental health support.

The San Francisco campus serves high school students who have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, PTSD and other mental health conditions, according to program director Roberto Orozco.

“The class schedule that we create for the students is individualized to make sure that they’re able to make up for the lost credit that they may have not accrued throughout their high school careers,” he said, adding that when they come to Edgewood, “a lot of the students have been out of school for anywhere from months to sometimes years.”

Academic courses, coupled with in-house individual, group and family therapy and case management, are geared toward two tracks — one to graduate from Edgewood, and another to move to a general education classroom in SFUSD.

Orozco said that while seven students graduated from Edgewood last month, many are working toward returning to general education classrooms.

“Once progress has been made and maintained, we’re able to start having [students] go to a general education setting, where they’ll be there for about an hour,” he said. “They’ll come back, and then if it all goes well, after a month we increase the time … until finally the student is able to return to the least restrictive setting in their general education high school.”

This year though, no students were able to step down from Edgewood’s program, which isn’t a unique problem.

“When [my son] started, I was hopeful that he would go back to San Francisco for high school,” Kelley said.

She initially thought he would be out of the district for one to two years while he caught up after distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and got some targeted support. But next year will be her son’s fourth in an NPS.

“It’s really, really hard,” she told KQED.

Outside services pose a major cost

To get to his school, Kelley’s son travels three hours round-trip each day. She said that in addition to isolating them from other SFUSD families, the commute has affected her son’s attendance.

“He’s exhausted having to get up at 5:30 [or] 5:45 in the morning and not getting home until almost 5 o’clock,” she said. That’s without participating in any extracurriculars or hanging around after school with friends.

Long travel days are also a strain on the district. . .

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That price tag is getting higher, Su said, as more students require outside services.

“The reason why we’re spending so much money on special education is because we’re providing funding to serve our students outside of the district,” she said. “Imagine if we can serve these students inside the district, we can then keep these resources here.”