Matt Wayne, the embattled superintendent of San Francisco schools, is handing in his resignation, two days after Mayor London Breed lashed out and called for a halt to the school-closure decision process, and said she'd lost confidence in the superintendent.
The writing was pretty much on the wall for Superintendent Matt Wayne last month when Breed installed a "stabilization team" of her own to look over the shoulder of the school board and Wayne himself, amid tensions over the school-closure process. School board President Lainie Motamedi, originally a Breed appointee, had resigned in late August, and then admitted weeks later her main reason for resigning was in protest over Wayne not being "up to the task" of running the district.
Then came the dreaded school-closure announcement last week, which was sure to get thousands of parents and teachers upset — and which we later learned might have been based on faulty data, or at least the school board released scores for each proposed school to close that they later had to correct.
Wayne was also dinged for sending a letter about the closures to the entire district's staff and parent households, instead of just to those at the affected schools.
Anyway, now Wayne is resigning, as Mission Local and the Chronicle are reporting.
The news comes via an emergency meeting announcement for the school board, with a meeting set for 5 pm Friday to approve a separation agreement with Wayne.
After Breed announced that she believed the board needed to immediately halt the school-closure process — something that they will need to decide on their own — Wayne responded Wednesday that he remained committed to holding community meetings and aiding the process. "In this pivotal moment, we must act with both courage and compassion, knowing that our decisions today will shape the future of our students and the communities we serve," he said in a statement.
He has not yet released any statement about his resignation.
Wayne has only been on the job for two years, following an extended search process which, itself, followed a year in which three school board members were recalled, and following a payroll-system crisis that left many teachers and staff in the district unpaid for months on end.
Wayne previously served as Assistant Superintendent for Educational Services in the district, and as Executive Director of Elementary Schools. His selection came after 64 comunity listening sessions and an online community survey.
While closing some schools seems like it will be an inevitability as enrollment numbers have been on the decline district-wide, how this process unfolded was always going to be put under a microscope, and it's clear that Wayne did not pass this particular test.
This is a developing story.
