San Francisco: "We must have fewer schools"

San Francisco is borrowing a page from the Campbell County playbook!

In a video released on Saturday, the superintendent of the San Francisco school system declared, "We must have fewer schools."

Civilized countries are building more and better schools. But in America, schools are being shuttered. It appears as if San Francisco will be a particularly egregious offender. For many years, San Francisco was one of America's great cities. Now it's experiencing the same decline suffered by Cincinnati 40 years ago. At least Cincinnati survived that - though not unscathed. There's no guarantee San Francisco will even last another 40 years.

Make no mistake, San Francisco schools have seen a steep drop in enrollment in the past few years. But most of that was the schools' doing. After schools first closed over COVID, the city's schools could have returned to completely normal operation before the end of the school year. Yet the district chose to wait over a year before reopening at all, and didn't go back to normal business for months after. It was so bad that the city took the unique step of suing the school district. The only positive in this story is that the city sued. At least that's better than what occurred in other communities, where city or county officials let schools' incompetence at the time go unanswered. But this shows just how bad San Francisco schools got. Indeed, school systems that did not resume normal operation by mid-2020 should be required to forfeit public funds they got in the ensuing months or years of bad conditions, but that's another matter altogether.

We spent our entire youths being harangued about how important school was. What message does it send when school districts close schools?