On paper, San Francisco's public schools barely suspend anyone. According to families, researchers and now the district itself, that doesn't mean students aren't being removed from class. It means many removals never get written down.
The San Francisco Standard reported Wednesday on what advocates call "silent suspensions": students sent home early, kept in a hallway or the front office, or pulled out of class with no record. San Francisco Unified School District officials told the Standard the practice is illegal and that they can't say how widespread it is.
What the new report found
The nonprofit Coleman Advocates released a report this fall arguing the scale is large. At one unnamed school with about 300 students, the group counted 3,639 office referrals in a single year, which it estimates added up to roughly 1,800 hours of lost class time, the Standard reported. Coverage of the report in El Observador said Black and Latino students make up 39% of enrollment but 68% of suspensions.
The report also says the district hasn't given the Board of Education a public update on its discipline policy in more than five years, even though the policy calls for twice-yearly reports. Malik Washington, writing in the Davis Vanguard, first drew attention to the missing data.
How it got here
California started banning "willful defiance" suspensions for the youngest grades in 2014, and SFUSD extended that ban to every grade the same year under its Safe and Supportive Schools resolution, which promised restorative alternatives and public discipline data. The district's official suspension rate has since stayed well below the state's, the Standard found, but in 2025-26 about 8% of Black students were suspended, compared with 2% of students overall.
Researchers the Standard interviewed described the informal removals less as rogue behavior than as a staffing problem. Lily Steyer, who studied an SFUSD early-education program while at Stanford, said every teacher her team interviewed knew of at least one informal removal practice, and that the district had two behavior coaches for its 36 preschool sites.
What the district says
Tony Payne, who took over SFUSD's Student and Family Services division in January, told the Standard that "informal discipline is not acceptable" and that a student sent home for discipline must be formally suspended. New guidance issued in July tells schools to document every intervention and to bring support staff into classrooms instead of pulling students out.
The district doesn't yet have a districtwide system to track removals, Payne said, and schools keep their own records for now. SFUSD told the Standard it plans to release referral and removal records next month in response to a public records request.