Mayor London Breed cannot stop the San Francisco school closures, but she just lent her muscle and bully pulpit to the cause, suddenly declaring “It is time to immediately stop this school closure process.”

It’s hard to imagine the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) having a more chaotic and clusterfucked school closure process than the one they’ve undertaken (or tried to undertake) over the last seven months. The district has said they would be closing a handful of SF schools amidst declining enrollment and exploding deficits, but then SFUSD puzzlingly delayed the school closure announcement, originally set to come in September, an extra month.

They finally released the proposed list of 11 schools slated for closure a week ago today, but the Chronicle dropped a bombshell Friday afternoon that the district had miscalculated the scores used to create that closure list.    

And mind you, this comes when the district is under the threat of a state takeover because of its precarious finances, and it saw an attempt to oust Superintendent Matt Wayne over a $20-$30 million clerical error. While Wayne survived that, Mayor Breed hand-picked a “stabilization team” last month to look over his shoulder.  

So the closure process has been a train wreck, but Breed just threw gasoline on the burning train. The Chronicle reports that Breed is now calling to halt the school closure process outright, as she announced in an unexpected Tuesday afternoon tweet.

“Over the last week since the school closures/merger list was released, I've spoken to parents, educators and staff, and so many in our City who care deeply about our public schools,” Breed said on Twitter/X. “What I've heard over and over is confusion and concern around the proposed school closures/merger list and how it has been communicated and managed.”

“This cannot continue. Whatever this current proposed school closure process was meant to accomplish, or could have accomplished, is lost,” she added. “This has become a distraction from the very real work that must be done to balance the budget in the next two months to prevent a state takeover. It is time to immediately stop this school closure process.”

Many of the responses to Breed’s statement have been along the lines of the “I didn’t think leopards would eat my face” joke. After all, Breed supported the 2021 school board recall, and appointed nearly half the new board whose tenure coincides with this mess (and who hired Matt Wayne). But Breed’s call for a halt to the closures is likely to please many affected parents, and the teacher’s union has already expressed support for Breed’s statement.  

And while Breed did not directly call for the firing or resignation of Superintendent Wayne, she threw him under the bus hard.

“I have lost confidence in the Superintendent's ability to manage the current process and do not believe this current plan will lead to an outcome that will benefit students and the School District in the long-term,” her statement said.

Of course, Mayor Breed has no direct role or say in the school closure process. That’s between the SFUSD bureaucracy and the SF Board of Education, and that process is expected to last through at least December. But this announcement clearly meddles in that process in a huge and unpredictable way.

And Breed just threw a live grenade at all of the school board candidates in the November 5 election, where a majority of four of the seven seats are up for grabs. Those candidates will now be forced into definite “close schools” or “don’t close schools” camps.

Was this a blatantly political move, just three weeks to the day before Election Day for Breed’s reelection bid? Honestly, anything any of the five major mayoral candidates do in the next three weeks can fairly be assessed as a blatantly political move.

Candidate Aaron Peskin had already announced his opposition to the closures, but Breed has more access to the levers of power than Peskin, and the bully pulpit of the mayor's office. And Breed just made herself the most prominent anti-school closure candidate, which will likely rattle the mayor’s race, the school board race, and ultimately the SF school closure process — if there even ends up being one.

Related: SFUSD Proposed School Closure List Is Out: 11 Elementary, K-8 and High Schools May Close or Merge [SFist]

Image: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 13: San Francisco Mayor London Breed looks on during a press conference at San Francisco Police headquarters on April 13, 2023 in San Francisco, California. San Francisco police arrested 38 year-old tech tech entrepreneur Nima Momeni at his home in Emeryville, California in connection with the stabbing murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee. Momeni was taken into custody without incident.