This story aired in the February 23, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Earlier this month, San Francisco teachers went on strike for the first time in almost 50 years. The contract they won could come at a price: Superintendent Dr. Maria Su said that future school closures are on the table.
One small alternative district high school — The Academy — already received this news in the fall. The district said it would relocate students to Wallenberg High School and called the decision a “standalone” one.
In the months that followed, students organized walkouts and spoke out at school board meetings, pleading with district leaders to reconsider.
At the first school board meeting after the closure announcement, one by one, Academy students stepped to the podium. They spoke about their frustration: “I feel ignored”; their fears: “in reality this is an opportunity to lose friends, my support system in school, my good grades, and also lose myself”; and their loss: “what we are feeling is grief.”
This story is about more than a big reaction to the closing of a small school. It’s about how the district’s decision to close this school is making room for another’s expansion and resurfacing a decades-old tension.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: I’m standing a few steps from Portola Drive looking out over Glen Canyon through the eucalyptus trees.
Sounds of coyote calls and guitar song.
REPORTER: Coyote calls and guitar chords float up from the high school campus below. That’s because this is the home to Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (better known as SOTA), SFUSD's selective arts school.
But the students I’m here to meet today don’t go to SOTA. Instead, I’m headed for the basement, to visit The Academy, a small alternative high school that takes up the bottom floor of this campus.
The two schools have shared the campus for almost twenty years. One is a hub for student-artists. The other one? Well, one parent told me lovingly it’s a school of misfits.
Sounds of signing in and greeting.
REPORTER: I meet senior Blue Mach-Zeiter and sophomore Finnegan Kelly at the wellness center. The space is cozy. Lots of fairy lights.
FINNEGAN KELLY: We don't use the big light. BLUE: We're very anti-big light.
REPORTER: The room is full of books with posters on the wall, and two comfy chairs. The Academy’s social worker holds therapy sessions here.
BLUE: I'm currently sitting in the chair that my therapist was sitting in like two days ago during our therapy session.
REPORTER: This is Blue. They say having teachers and staff who easily accommodated their disability helped them see themself in a new way. Blue has cerebral palsy.
Through The Academy's afternoon programming, they interned at a local elementary school. Now they want to be a teacher. It’s one of the reasons they’ve loved this school.
The room we’re sitting in has lots of little gadgets for students to play with. As we talk, Finnegan rakes the sand of a mini Japanese rock garden.
Sounds of sand raking.
REPORTER: Finnegan and Blue tell me they share a brain. They met through the school's Q Group for queer students, and they've been inseparable ever since. They say they often hang out at the wellness center long after classes have ended for the day.
FINNEGAN: Something that I realized about my identity is that I love people, that’s my biggest thing.
REPORTER: This is Finnegan. He's into fashion, especially shoes, which today are platform pink sneakers. His nails are sparkly.
FINNEGAN: And I'm passionate about making sure everybody's happy and not miserable because I was miserable for a long time.
REPORTER: Finnegan is trans and says he got bullied before he came to The Academy.
FINNEGAN: I'm very attached to the school. The school helped me survive.
REPORTER: He’s a sophomore, and has two more years of high school left. So hearing the news that The Academy was closing hit him really hard.
That morning in October, it felt like any other day for most Academy students. But then the principal called them into the community room. That’s where they were told their school would be closing. Teachers say it was a very emotional day with kids crying in the hallways. Here’s Finnegan:
FINNEGAN: I was extremely emotional. I was angry. I like walked out and I was, I couldn't, I couldn't handle it anymore.
BLUE: I'd waited for Finn to go into the wellness center because I was, I knew that he was upset and I was trying to essentially maintain as much rationality as I could to give him the space to like feel his emotions.
And I just broke down in the hallway. And immediately three people reached out and hugged me and the security guard came over and walked me into the wellness center. It made it so much better and also so much worse because it was like, this is exactly what we're losing.
REPORTER: For Blue, finding out that The Academy was closing was like a bad dream repeating. Their middle school also shut down around the pandemic.
BLUE: There's no amount of money that can justify ripping apart communities the way that people are doing to Academy right now. No matter what I'm doing for the rest of my life, I'm gonna do whatever I can to make sure that that happens to as few people as possible.
REPORTER: So Blue and Finnegan are speaking out at school board meetings.
They’ve been joined by friends like Atticus Perez-Waters and his mom, Melissa Waters. I meet them at Melissa’s office.
Sounds of greeting.
REPORTER: This isn’t a typical workplace. It’s covered in art from Burning Man, like this piece — a large snaking sculpture emerging from an organ.
Sounds of discussion of the sculpture.
REPORTER: Melissa works for Burning Man but we’re here to talk about her role as an Academy parent.
ATTICUS: Oh, my name is Atticus. Pronouns he/him. I go to The Academy.
REPORTER: Her son Atticus is a senior and an artist. He recently began experimenting with digital art.
ATTICUS: I'm trying to switch up my art style 'cause I've been having like a clean art style, but like, I'm trying to make it more like grimy. I want griminess. I want it to feel like you, uh, licked the grout of a bathroom tile in a gas station.
REPORTER: He’s been outspoken about the closure.
ATTICUS: I've been to a couple protests. I've been to two walkouts.
REPORTER: And he went to that October 14th board meeting. He wore a brown sweatshirt and a mask, his long curly hair reaching the podium.
ATTICUS (BOARD MEETING TAPE): I know the district is unaware of how much we love our campus. I know that they seem to think that they are rescuing us from a “so-called lifeless basement,” but that just isn't true. Academy loves our campus and we've worked hard to fill it with life.
MELISSA: I was really, really proud of them and impressed with their intelligence and how well spoken they were.
REPORTER: Melissa is grateful for what The Academy has given Atticus.
MELISSA: We felt like it was a hidden gem.
REPORTER: He agrees.
ATTICUS: A lot of my friends have really liked the small school because it feels a lot more one-on-one with the teachers.
REPORTER: The Academy has just under 100 students and a 1:9 teacher/student ratio. The district says that’s about a third of the high school average. Students and teachers say it's this small size that makes the school so special. And the district says that’s why it’s closing.
The school is designed to be small, just not this small.
I spoke with over a dozen teachers, students and parents. They say the last few years have been an emotional rollercoaster.
Take teacher Geoff Kent: he says, After the Covid pandemic, the district changed how students were assigned to attend The Academy. Then, it implied that the school would close unless it redesigned its afternoon programming, which it did.
GEOFF: And as part of their sort of support for that plan, they said, well, we're gonna, we're gonna cap the number of students right, that come here to give you a chance, right? So that you can, these programs that you've redesigned can be successful.
REPORTER: The district has celebrated the school’s new model — which includes community college classes and internships — calling it “overwhelmingly positive.”
GEOFF: But then because they capped the number of students, they said, oh, well now we're overfunding you, so we have to get rid of some of your teachers.
REPORTER: Then, in 2024, the district announced that the school would close anyway.
GEOFF: That announcement was made really chaotically.
REPORTER: Some students decided to leave at that point. Even though the decision was later reversed under the new superintendent.
GEOFF: And that doesn't even get to the WASC thing.
REPORTER: That WASC thing is the accreditation process schools need to operate and Geoff says the district told the school it couldn't complete it.
And then this fall, the district told The Academy it had to close for real this time. Part of the reason?
GEOFF: They want more students to benefit from the programs that we have created here.
REPORTER: The district wrote in an email to KALW that this decision would allow for SFUSD to expand access to the valuable opportunities The Academy offers while offering current Academy students more AP classes and electives. They didn’t provide details about how this would happen.
To Academy teachers and students I spoke with, it’s felt like death by a thousand cuts.
GEOFF: There is ongoing trauma that comes from year after year being told, you know, your school is gonna go away. Your school doesn't matter.
REPORTER: And as for the low enrollment, teachers say it's hard to encourage students to opt-in to a school whose existence seems so precarious.
I asked the district what efforts it had made to increase enrollment at The Academy. A representative there said she would check but never responded to follow-ups.
Atticus says when Academy and district admins broke the news they told freshmen, sophomores, and juniors that they could transfer to Wallenberg — a school three miles away.
ATTICUS: And then they showed us a bunch of reasons and then they showed us an AI generated image of our mascots together. And I thought that was funny and I thought it was kind of stupid.
REPORTER: An Academy wolf and a Wallenberg bulldog.
ATTICUS: And then the superintendent came to our school to, uh, for us to ask questions to her. And I'm saying like, “ask questions” in finger quotes because uh we did get to ask them, but she just didn't answer them. She just kind of acknowledged that we asked them and then moved on.
REPORTER: Atticus had a question for the Superintendent, Dr. Maria Su.
ATTICUS: I asked questions about if it was going to, if the campus was going to SOTA.
REPORTER: People at The Academy told me they think part of the reason their school is closing is so that SOTA can expand. That’s the art school that shares The Academy's campus.
Here’s teacher, Geoff Kent again:
GEOFF: I think that's fairly obvious at this point.
MELISSA: The difference between the two campuses is pretty dramatic.
REPORTER: Melissa, Atticus’s mom.
MELISSA: Statistically, SOTA compared to The Academy is 36.5% white students, which is the highest rate of white students at any SFUSD campus or school and The Academy is 14%, which is about normal for SFUSD.
REPORTER: She’s right. The Academy also has twice as many students on free and reduced lunch. Several people I spoke with say there’s been tension between the schools for a long time.
The shared campus doesn't mean everything is shared. Academy students and teachers say they don't have access to SOTA’s arts facilities, despite sharing their sports license with SOTA students.
One teacher told me they’d heard The Academy referred to as “Diet SOTA.”
REPORTER: Atticus tells me when he asked the superintendent if The Academy’s space would go to SOTA, he didn’t get an answer. But about a month later, SOTA teachers did.
At a staff meeting, Assistant Superintendent of High Schools, Davina Goldwasser presented a slide deck titled “Ruth Asawa SOTA Growth Plan.” It stated that once The Academy leaves, the “unused space” could attract charters and community groups — to avoid this, SOTA should act quickly to absorb the space.
In other words, Atticus’s question was the right one.
SOTA is a highly sought-after school. This year, 716 students applied for 200 spots, according to the district’s presentation. But like The Academy. SOTA is also under-enrolled.
The district has not responded to my questions about whether The Academy’s campus will go to SOTA or about SOTA’s enrollment.
But at her presentation to SOTA teachers, Goldwasser said that despite hundreds of applications and auditions, the ninth grade class only has 84% of its total allotted enrollment.
She said the district would need SOTA to grow by 82 additional students next year.
Some SOTA teachers had concerns about how they’d recruit all these new students — during and after the meeting, they typed them into a Google doc that was shared with the district. They were worried about how they’d maintain the school’s high standards.
Someone, presumably a district representative, replied that this was an understandable concern but, “At the same time we are prioritizing student/family interest and preserving the whole campus for RA SOTA rather than requests from outside organizations to use the space.”
Others asked: would this mean that SOTA could hire more teachers? Offer more arts departments? Revitalize classrooms?
A district representative typed “Yes” in the little box next to each of these questions.
What has Academy staff bothered is those 82 students the district wants SOTA to add? That’s just under the number of students currently at The Academy.
They feel like SOTA is getting preferential treatment — under-enrolled like them, but allowed the chance to expand with support from the district. Whereas their school would be closing down. Geoff Kent again:
GEOFF: I think basically they wanted to everybody to just leave quietly is the feeling we got for several years.
REPORTER: One student said they had already seen contractors measuring their classrooms, which they assume is for SOTA’s expansion. That student’s parent told me the school still has a heartbeat and the district’s doing this?
The community is upset about the decision, but they also take issue with the way it was made. Board member Matt Alexander agrees.
He said in a phone interview that there was not meaningful consultation with the community, which he says is a violation of a key board guardrail.
And in fact, there wasn’t even a school board vote to close the school. Matt Alexander says this is because the board president, Phil Kim, chose not to agendize a vote.
So I asked him why not.
PHIL: I would say that comms should double check this, but that action the superintendent needs to bring to the board for us to be able to vote on.
REPORTER: So I asked the district a few times why there was no vote, but representatives there did not answer this question. They did say the decision came from the superintendent’s office.
That decision impacts everyone in The Academy community, but it impacts them differently. 10th grader Finnegan – who found safety and comfort here – has to decide where to go for his last two years of high school.
Finnegan’s mom told me he’s planning on going to another alternative school, Independence. Students there spend only five to fifteen hours a week on campus. She’s a little worried about Finnegan losing his community, and about how much he’ll have to study on his own.
Blue, a senior, is in a different situation. They’re graduating. But they’re still thinking about what they’re leaving behind.
Blue says when they heard that the school was closing, the first thing they thought of was a tree down in this garden.
FINNEGAN: We're going to the main farm part of the farm.
REPORTER: I walk with Finnegan and Blue down to the garden, which sits below the schools, alongside the soccer field. This is the story that these students remember being told:
BLUE: There was a student here a long time ago, long, uh, before I was here, who passed away tragically. And so they planted a tree. That was one of the first things that went through my mind randomly as they were telling me about the school closure…I was like who’s going to take care of…the tree
REPORTER: And who’s going to take care of The Academy? Its graduates, its students, its teachers? Who will be left to remember it?
In San Francisco, I’m Julia Haney, for Crosscurrents.
BACKANNOUNCE: SFUSD has said The Academy’s current freshman, sophomores and juniors can choose to attend Wallenberg or they’ll be given preferential choice to go elsewhere.
