A San Francisco Board of Supervisors committee gave its seal of approval this week to legislation that would protect teachers, school employees, child caregivers, and their families from evictions during the academic year.
CBS 5 reports that while families with kids under 18 are already protected from owner move-in evictions, the new legislation, introduced by Supervisor Campos last month, seeks to extend the same assurances to educators, shielding them from no-fault evictions, Ellis Act evictions excluded.
Lita Blan, head of the San Francisco teachers union, calls affordability for housing in San Francisco a major issue for educators. "Among young teachers it's their number one concern," she said last summer. "I hear it all the time. I can't stay in the district if I can't find a place to live."
For Belann Giaretto, a director at Pacific Primary School in the Western Addition, the situation is dire. As she told CBS, “This teacher crisis has been the worst crisis I’ve ever seen... What’s ahead is really terrifying if we don’t have teachers.”
The Chronicle had previously invoked the example of Allison Leshefsky, a PE teacher at Bernal Heights' Paul Revere Elementary School. Leshefsky was evicted last year during during the academic year, leaving her in a precarious situation. As she put it, “Teaching is a very thankless profession, and to have to not deal with that during the school year would have made a huge difference not only in my personal life but in the education of the kids I serve... All students deserve teachers who are secure in their homes.”
Still, Campos himself feels that the measure, which must now seek full Board of Supervisors approval next month, is modest in its scope. “[What] this proposal does," he said, "is it tries to stop the bleeding.”