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After months of back and forth between educators and the San Francisco school district, Georgie Gibbs is ready to strike.
“But every year we have to figure out what staffing we’re going to have at our school, and every year there’s less money to staff our site, and that’s hard,” Gibbs said.
Gibbs is an elementary school teacher and a member of the United Educators of San Francisco, a union for school staff. Since March, they’ve requested higher wages, stable health insurance, and more support for special education teachers.
“At our site, we have special day classes which are self-contained, special education classrooms, and those, one of our classrooms has not had a full-time teacher for a whole entire year in three years,” Gibbs said.
In their latest offer in January, the district proposed the following three-year stabilization plan.
The district proposed a path to fully funded family health benefits, a 6 percent raise over three years, along with addressing staffing shortages for special education. The union rejected it.
- Identifying a fiscal pathway for the District to fully fund family health benefits
- 6% raise over three years (2% each year for next three years)
- Salary rate augmentations for hard-to-staff special education paraeducators
- Solutions to address special education workload with a focused pilot program
Union president Cassandra Curiel says members are casting their final round of votes for a strike.
“The district hasn’t changed their position since May of 2025. That is an untenable condition for us to be in,” Curiel said.
If both groups don’t come to an agreement, the union’s more than 6,000 members will strike for the first time in nearly 50 years.
“Being in our schools is the place we want to be, but working for San Francisco Unified can be complicated at best,” Curiel said.
Officials say the district is planning for more budget cuts in the next school year, which plays a role in negotiations.
A spokesperson for the district wrote:
“We know many of you are closely following the ongoing negotiations between our district and United Educators of San Francisco (UESF).
We are disappointed to share that we did not reach an agreement with UESF after today’s fact-finding session (part of the formal bargaining process). SFUSD remains committed to negotiating in good faith with our labor partners and to reaching an agreement that honors our educators while also balancing the need to be fiscally responsible.
Our goal is to have a stable district. We want to reach an agreement that supports our valued educators. However, we must also be able to afford the agreement long-term so that we can continue serving students now and in the future.”
Havah Kelley told CBS News Bay Area that her son, who has a learning disability, was transferred outside of the district because there aren’t enough special needs teachers.
“Especially since COVID, the high teacher turnover, the shortages, and just a myriad of other reasons, he was not getting the services that he needed,” Kelley said.
That experience makes her feel a strike is necessary, but she knows there would be real-life consequences.
“It would be ideal if we could avoid a strike. That’s a definite, and I’m not going to say otherwise,” Kelly said. “Any type of disruption, for our kids, we have almost immediate regression.”
Union members are holding their final vote to authorize a strike. If the majority votes yes, it is likely SFUSD educators will strike for the first time since 1979. The last day to vote is Jan. 28.
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CBS Bay Area
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