Incumbent Phil Kim’s extensive experience and level-headedness will serve him and the San Francisco district well.

In many cities, school board elections are the kind of down-ballot race voters don’t even think about until Election Day.

Here in San Francisco, we have no such luxury.

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San Francisco Unified School District teachers recently went on strike for the first time in 50 years, keeping kids out of classrooms for five days. Though an agreement was finally reached, it failed to account for the fragile financial state of the district and layoffs now appear inevitable. And that’s just a taste of the turmoil to come.

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There are persistent staffing challenges, payroll issues and the fraught decision to close or merge schools due to underutilization. San Francisco has the highest percentage of students in California enrolled in private school, a trend that continues to head in the wrong direction. Decreased enrollment in the school district has led to ongoing revenue loss, deepening the deficit and leading to operational instability.

Given all this, San Francisco needs school board members who can center fiscal responsibility and the needs of students while delivering calm and competence amid the chaos.

The Chronicle editorial board has begun rolling out its endorsements for California’s June primary election. In the weeks to come, we will publish our assessments of all the state races, including the governor’s race, plus local races and ballot measures. To read more about how the editorial board makes its election endorsements, go here.Plus: Look out for the Chronicle’s Voter Guide to publish in early May, as ballots get mailed out across the Bay Area.

Three candidates are running for a lone seat in the June primary. While all are caring and committed to students, only one stands out as being prepared for the moment: Phil Kim.

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Kim, who is seeking election after his appointment to the board by Mayor London Breed in 2024, has the care, intellectual rigor and attention to detail that the position demands. A former educator who has spent 12 years in kindergarten through12th-grade education, he was unanimously elected board president in 2025. Prior to joining the school board, he served as executive director of school strategy and coherence in the Office of the Superintendent. The San Francisco school district is a huge bureaucracy, and Kim is the only candidate who comes close to understanding it at a granular level. In an endorsement interview, he noted that the district didn’t even have a clear org chart or list of partner community organizations when he came on board. Kim’s commitment to the minutiae is laudable, but he’s also willing to make necessary decisions on larger issues, even when those decisions might be unpopular. Unlike his opponents, Kim has extensive experience in science, technology, engineering and mathematics instruction and supports the reintroduction of eighth grade algebra, though he acknowledges mistakes in the rollout of the curriculum.

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“We have failed if we continue to operate the way we did with algebra,” he said in our endorsement interview. But, “I believe an expanded math model is good for kids and would hope that every parent hears that.” On enrollment, one of the district’s biggest challenges, he acknowledged the frustration that comes with the system’s unpredictability.

“There’s this perception that some schools are better than others and that’s a messaging/branding issue we have as a district,” he said. “We named enrollment as a priority. Now staff and the superintendent need to take it forward.”

On the issue of school closures, Kim said that it would be “irresponsible to take school closures off the table … The reality is that the district has 14,000 empty seats, and we can’t ignore that we are paying for seats that remain open.” 

Kim believes moving forward requires a facilities master plan to determine what makes the most sense not just for revenue generation but for what will be the best for students. 

“As fiduciaries of the district we have to think not just about today but tomorrow,” he said. 

That’s not the kind of thing we heard from Kim’s opponents. Neither meaningfully acknowledged the seriousness of the financial quandary the district finds itself nor the attendant compromises that must be navigated.

Virginia Cheung, mother of a district fourth-grader, is a consultant for the early child care center Kai Ming Head Start. Her passionate belief in the importance of early childhood education was evident in our interview. But she provided no specifics on how she might reconcile the district’s financial realities with her hopes for expanded early intervention programs.

We appreciate Cheung’s commitment to this all-important stage of childhood development, but her focus means she is less well-versed in the myriad other challenges facing the district — from budget shortfalls to enrollment challenges that arise from middle school onward. She ran for the school board in 2024 and lost but the teachers union, with whom her beliefs closely align, has endorsed her this time around.

Brandee Marckmann, a district parent, former educator and progressive activist, is the co-founder of the SF Education Alliance, a group advocating for inclusive community alternatives to stop what they see as a school privatization movement. Marckmann told us she doesn’t support school closures because those facilities would need to be turned over to charter schools. But no such mandate exists in state or local law.  

Marckmann would like to see the district create more sustainable community schools that provide wraparound services to students — a laudable long-term goal. But she could cite no way to sustainability fund such a broad vision. Marckmann’s biggest fiscal concern was with the expense of the district’s decision to reintroduce algebra to the curriculum, a move she doesn’t support. This despite over 80% of San Francisco voters backing Proposition G in 2024, which urged the district to offer Algebra 1 to students by the eighth grade.

The editorial positions of The Chronicle, including election recommendations, represent the consensus of the editorial board, consisting of the publisher, the editorial page editor and staff members of the opinion pages. Its judgments are made independent of the news operation, which covers the news without consideration of our editorial positions.

The decision for voters in this school board election should not be a difficult one.

Kim’s extensive experience and level-headedness will serve him and the district well. His nuanced attention to detail and his willingness to make the hard decisions — of which there will be many to come — make him the best suited for the position.

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