San Francisco Educators Win Major Victory After Strike

Educators in San Francisco have ended a historic strike after securing a tentative agreement with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) that meets all of the union’s key demands.

The walkout is the first major educator strike in the city in decades and the first conducted jointly by certified and classified workers. Educators shut down schools across the district and mobilized thousands of workers, families, and businesses. Hundreds of picket lines were seen throughout the city. Before the strike, contract negotiations had stalled for nearly a year, as district officials attempted to push austerity measures that would further shift healthcare costs onto workers, maintain poverty wages for support staff, and fail to address the worsening staffing and support crisis.

This victory “will have lasting impacts on our students, communities, and our city,” announced the UESF bargaining team on the morning of February 13.

“This was won in direct contradiction to the attempts of the ruling class of San Francisco to divide us amongst ourselves and to pit those students against us and those families against us,” said UESF Vice President of Substitutes Nathalie Hrizi to On Strike! newspaper.

“And instead, we’re together, and we’re united, and we pushed through that to win what are actually very, very basic demands.

The last teachers’ strike in San Francisco took place in 1979. Hrizi emphasized that the struggle this past week marked a historic escalation. It was not a teachers-only strike, but a unified walkout of certified and classified educators. Coupled with demands that directly addressed community concerns, the coalition represented by the walkout strengthened the union’s bargaining power, deepening connections across school sites and neighborhoods.

This solidarity blunted divide-and-conquer tactics and led to the union’s victory at the bargaining table.

What are the key gains of the historic UESF strike?

Fully funded employee and family healthcare

Guaranteed family coverage was a key issue of this battle. The union noted that San Francisco educators receive some of the lowest employer healthcare contributions in the Bay Area, pushing many out of the profession altogether. 

Families were often paying 1,500-2,000 USD in monthly premiums. The new contract eliminates these costs, meaning that this provision alone represents a de facto yearly raise of 18,000-24,000 USD for educators with children.

UESF sees family healthcare coverage as a life-changing material gain that also addresses retention.

Equitable classified and certificated raises

Pay raises stand at 5% for certified employees and 8.5% for paraeducators over two years (4% in the first year, 4.5% in the second).

Classified staff, many of whom work second jobs or struggle to live in the Bay Area, had been among the lowest paid workers in the region. The differentiated raises directly address the union’s demand to narrow this inequity, reducing the wage gap between lower-paid classified staff and certified educators while still delivering major increases for all members.

Support for special education

Special education paraeducators will receive an additional 5% salary increase on top of the base 8.5% raise given to all classified staff.

They will also see major workplace improvements. Caseloads for Resource Specialist Program (RSP) teachers will be reduced, and they will see improvements in compliance periods and complexity indicators that determine support needs.

Overage pay, the additional compensation provided when workloads exceed contract thresholds, will also increase.

These gains are particularly significant amid severe staffing shortages and burnout in special education departments district-wide.

Emergency housing and sanctuary

Community demands were central to the strike.

The historic contract includes sanctuary language that provides a layer of legally binding protection for immigrant students and families vulnerable to ICE operations, a critical safeguard amid escalating militarized federal enforcement.

It also preserves the emergency housing “Stay Over Program”, which provides families of students experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness with a safe, temporary place to stay, often utilizing school gyms. UESF had long emphasized the urgency of protecting the program, pointing to the Bay Area’s rapidly growing unhoused student population, and the district’s attempts to cut services.

Educators vow to continue the struggle

The San Francisco educators’ strike is the precursor to a broader fight for the future of public education. Major districts across the state are facing identical structural issues. Educators in Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Diego are set to take a stand in the coming weeks as well.

“We don’t go back. You don’t get this sense of power and your ability to actually control your future and your working conditions and then just roll back into the cave, right?” Nathalie Hrizi said.

“We’re gonna keep going, and we are part of a campaign that is statewide, that has the intention of increasing funding to public education.”

By uniting certified and classified educators, integrating workplace and community demands, and building visible support from parents, students, and businesses, the strike has set a new benchmark for education struggles, and labor struggles more broadly, in San Francisco and beyond.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch