Our Voices Were Heard! City Windfall Spending Will Include SFUSD and Early Care Educators.
A win for families! Supervisors unanimously approved a plan to spend windfall funds to support SF public schools and early care educators in addition to homelessness and housing initiatives.
Tuesday the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a spending plan that will allocate a fair portion of windfall funds to maintaining raises for SFUSD teachers and increasing wages for our city’s early care educators. PPS-SF took an early stand in advocating that these dual priorities be addressed in any plan to spend the revenue which came from excess contributions to the city’s Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund (ERAF).
Board of Supervisors right after they voted unanimously to support spending excess ERAF funds on city priorities including funding to maintain teacher salaries and provide raises to early care educators
We are grateful for the amazing advocacy our community brought to put a spotlight on the needs of families and educators in our city and thankful to our city leaders and their staff for their responsiveness and creativity in crafting a fair plan that allows many of the city’s critical needs to be addressed.
Highlights of the approved plan
$13.5 million of the “excess ERAF” funds allocated as an investment in SFUSD teacher compensation
$10 million allocated to early care educator wages
$52 million from the City’s “rainy day one time fund” to set up a reserve to ensure that SFUSD teachers and early care educators can maintain salary increases through the 2020-2021 school year (by law a portion of the excess ERAF was contributed to this fund as a set-aside - the amount contributed was about $52 million)
Some of the excess ERAF was also set-aside by law to fund SFUSD and early education. About $9 million was allocated to SFUSD’s portion of the Public Education Enrichment Fund and about $9.5 million in PEEF and other set-asides was allocated to early care and education. In addition, about $26 million in excess ERAF was deposited into SFUSD’s own “rainy day” reserve fund.
If the legal challenges to Proposition G and Proposition C are resolved and the tax revenues collected to fund those measures are made available, these windfall fund expenditures would be payed back from the available tax revenue
Read the details here.
If you wrote a letter or otherwise reached out to your Supervisor or other city leaders, please take the time to follow up and thank them. This was an impressive collaborative effort on behalf of all of our Supervisors and a strong show of support for public education in our city! Find Supervisor contacts here and email Mayor Breed at MayorLondonBreed@sfgov.org.
Learn more about ERAF and how this windfall came to be by clicking the link.