'We're Pricing Out Our Own Kids': SF Officials Sound the Alarm as School Costs Hit London and Toronto Levels

The numbers are stark. San Francisco Unified School District is now spending roughly $28,400 per pupil annually — a figure that puts it in the same bracket as London's state-funded academies and Toronto's public school boards, according to a comparative analysis released last month by the nonprofit EdBudget West. For a district that has been closing schools and cutting programs since 2023, the paradox has started to enrage parents, educators, and city hall in equal measure.

The timing matters. With Mayor Daniel Lurie's administration under pressure to reverse population decline — San Francisco shed roughly 56,000 residents between 2020 and 2024 — the cost of schooling has become a live political issue again. Families with young children have been among the fastest to leave, and school enrollment at SFUSD dropped below 49,000 students in the 2025-26 school year, its lowest point in decades. Every departure shrinks the district's average daily attendance funding from Sacramento, creating a feedback loop that officials say is becoming very difficult to break.

Board of Education Commissioner Lainie Motamedi told a standing-room audience at the Mission High School auditorium on Dolores Street last Tuesday that the district cannot keep absorbing fixed costs — facilities maintenance, special education mandates, pension obligations — across a shrinking student base. "The cost structure was built for 60,000 kids," she said. "We have 49,000." That gap, she argued, is what is driving per-pupil spending skyward even as classroom resources feel thinner than ever.

What the Experts Are Saying

Policy analysts at the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst's office flagged the London and Toronto comparisons in a March 2026 report that received little public attention at the time. The report noted that Toronto's Toronto District School Board spends the equivalent of approximately $26,800 USD per pupil, while inner-London boroughs average around $27,100 USD once facilities and transport costs are included. San Francisco's figure now exceeds both — yet test scores in literacy and math remain below pre-pandemic baselines at more than 60 percent of SFUSD elementary schools.

Tomás Aragón, who advises the Lurie administration on social determinants of health, has pointed to the school cost crisis as a housing-adjacent problem. Families in the Sunset District and the Excelsior are making decisions about whether to stay in San Francisco partly on the basis of what private school tuition or tutoring supplements will cost them if they judge the public option inadequate. Private elementary school tuition at several Pacific Heights institutions now runs between $42,000 and $48,000 per year — numbers that would not look out of place in Manhattan or central London.

EdBudget West researcher Priya Nair, who authored the comparative study, said the structural issue is that San Francisco carries some of the highest teacher housing subsidy costs of any district in North America. The district's Teacher Next Door program, which offers forgivable loans of up to $40,000 to educators who buy within city limits, is expensive to administer and reaches fewer than 80 teachers per year. "You're subsidizing retention at the margins while the underlying cost of living continues to accelerate faster than any subsidy can track," Nair said at a June forum hosted by SPUR at its Mission Street office.

What Comes Next

SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su is expected to present a structural deficit reduction plan to the full Board of Education by September 9, ahead of the state's October budget reconciliation deadline. Options on the table include consolidating up to six additional elementary school sites — a politically explosive proposal after the backlash to the 2023 round of closures — and renegotiating facilities contracts that currently account for about 11 percent of the operating budget.

Community organizers at Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, based on 18th Street in the Mission, have been circulating a counter-proposal that would redirect a portion of the city's hotel tax receipts — which surged during the 2026 World Cup matches held at Levi's Stadium — toward a stabilization fund for neighborhood schools. Whether that idea gets traction at City Hall depends heavily on how Lurie's budget team weighs education against competing demands from homelessness services and housing production. The school board vote on any consolidation plan is tentatively scheduled for November.