Friday morning, United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), declared victory, coming to a tentative agreement with San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) after their four-day strike. The biggest win was on family healthcare — teachers secured 100% funding for dependents on the district plan. The union also settled for an 8.5% raise for paraeducators, down from the 14% hike UESF demanded at the strike’s onset.
“I'm very excited for everybody,” said Bonnie Bennett-Walker, a case manager and special education teacher at Mission High School. “I'm excited for the community, and that's not only our students and teachers, but all of the San Francisco Bay Area… because I feel like they’re going to be looking at us and knowing that this is really possible.”
The crowd was jubilant, if a little weary, congregating in front of Mission High School and steps away at Dolores Park. No one is under the impression that implementing UESF’s wins will be without friction. Bennett-Walker expressed that in order for SFUSD to follow through on its resolution to support special education, “They need to come into our classes.”
The district has agreed to make structural changes to special education workloads and “collaborate” on solutions with educators, though few details about what this collaboration would entail have emerged at this time. The strike has won concessions — but workers seem to know that implementation will bring about a new phase of the fight.
Bennett-Walker said that Mission High School serves a disproportionately high number of special education students — something she attributes to poverty. “Some kids are without housing, families are struggling… If you're going through that turmoil, it's difficult to learn and you're more likely to have an IEP.” An IEP, or Individualized Education Plan, is given to every child that qualifies for special education. The number of students in SFUSD with an IEP grew 15% between 2017 and 2020.
On the family healthcare front, UESF has made massive progress, but that progress is still subject to economic currents outside its control. “Even though we won a raise in the last contract, it was pretty much eaten up by the increasing premiums,” said Margaret Harris, a recently retired SFUSD social worker.
Prior to her retirement in June 2025, Harris had been with the district for 28 years. For her, and many others we spoke to on picket lines this week, problems in public education are systemic and snarled by years of past mistakes.
“It's been difficult for years, but since COVID in particular, we've just been kind of bleeding staff and families because of understaffing and so many substitutes, and then having to contract out for services where all this money has gone,” Harris said.
SFUSD frequently contracts with social work providers, either from the nonprofit sphere or public agencies like the Department of Health. But Harris stressed that contractors should supplement, not replace, district workers.
“I feel like that was always a false narrative, like, ‘Oh, well you have a mental health person from an agency, so you don't need a school social worker.’ No, we work hand and glove to bring better services for our students,” she said.
This tension between the public and private sectors and the resources they are able to extract from the city and state has been a cornerstone of this strike. In this regard, the distinction between SFUSD and the city of San Francisco — despite Mayor Lurie's efforts to differentiate them over the past few days — is faint, or nonexistent.
“We don't need another Taco Bell Cantina. We don't need more Waymo's in the streets. We don't need AI partnerships,” said Nadia Mufti, an English teacher at Mission High School. “We need to be investing in our Black communities. We need to be investing in our migrant communities. We need to invest in public transportation and public education.”
Mufti also spoke about after school programs as something the city needs to reprioritize. “We have some clubs and sports that meet after school, but for the most part, when students leave the school building, they're leaving a safe place,” she said.
At the heart of the fight were crucial classical questions around how resources are taken, and used, across San Francisco. Speaking about the economic inequality exacerbated by disinvestment in public schools, Bonnie Bennett-Walker quoted one of her students on the issue: “We can’t have everybody playing tennis across the street,” while they face housing insecurity, food insecurity, and violence. “These two worlds see each other, but they don't acknowledge each other that can't continue,” Bennett-Walker said.
UESF went on strike because they knew the money was there. Educators know that there is money to do even more, and that without spending it on public schools, community instability and wealth inequality will metastasize.
The strike follows almost a full year of negotiations and a last-ditch prevention effort by the city’s mayor, Daniel Lurie. We hear from teachers, students, and supporters from across the city.
