Superintendent Maria Su opened the San Francisco Unified School District's new year with a balanced budget and a rebuilt leadership team — and, once again, no timeline for the two hardest decisions on her desk: which schools to close and how to overhaul student assignment.

Last spring, Su pushed both of those decisions more than two years down the road — past the end of her own contract — in a rollout the board learned about before it could weigh in. At Tuesday's first board meeting of the 2026-27 year, commissioners pressed her for something firmer and largely came up empty. The exchange lays bare the central tension of Su's second year: a district that has clawed its way back to fiscal stability but still can't say when it will make the structural choices that stability was supposed to enable.

Maria Su has the parts of the job she can control running smoothly. The parts she has postponed are the ones her board won't stop asking about.

At the San Francisco Unified School District board's first meeting of the new school year on Tuesday, Su presented a reorganized cabinet and a budget that no longer threatens a state takeover. What she did not present was a date. Asked by Commissioner Parag Gupta whether she had used the summer to firm up a timeline for closing under-enrolled schools, Su declined, suggesting the decisions would emerge through an "organic process" once a new enrollment system shows which neighborhoods most need their schools, according to the SF Standard, which reported the meeting.

That system is due before the board by April, under a two-year governance calendar the board approved Tuesday. But closures — the politically radioactive half of the equation — have no such deadline, and that is what set several commissioners on edge.

"I just don't want a repeat of what happened," Gupta said, "and to be having that conversation maybe at the end of these two years. To me, that would be frankly unacceptable and dereliction of my duty as a board member." Commissioner Supryia Ray went further: "Our greater trap is to continue to do functionally nothing and continue to let people down when they expect us to be making a decision."

The "repeat" Gupta referenced was last spring's misfire, when Su's plan to delay both the student-assignment overhaul and the closure plan became public before the board had discussed it — a communications stumble widely read as the first real rift between the superintendent and her governing body since she took the post in fall 2024. Board President Phil Kim was among those left frustrated when Su's team couldn't flesh out the delayed timeline in subsequent meetings.

Not everyone wanted to move faster. Commissioners Alida Fisher and Lisa Weissman-Ward warned that a compressed schedule could shortchange community input. "I want to approach this with a little bit of humility," Fisher said. "I'm not sure that we have done sufficient community engagement, frankly, to understand whether or not we know what the public wants in order to give direction at this point." That split — between commissioners who fear delay and those who fear a rushed, poorly-consulted decision — is the box Su now has to reason her way out of.

The backdrop makes the stakes concrete. The district plans to close schools at the same time it is opening them: SFUSD celebrated a ribbon-cutting at the new Mission Bay School on Aug. 6, according to the district's own announcement. And the fiscal recovery Su is touting is real — the district says it reached "positive budget status for the first time in several years" when the board adopted a three-year balanced budget in June, and Su credited operations chief Chris Mount-Benites with shrinking a roughly $133 million deficit to about $1 million. Financial stability was always the premise for making hard structural calls; the money is now the least of Su's problems.

On the personnel side, Su leaned on her strongest new hire. John Davis, approved unanimously in May as the district's first permanent deputy superintendent of educational services since mid-2025, told the board he had replaced two vacant assistant-superintendent roles with executive directors so no single supervisor oversees as many as 22 schools — a caseload he called out of step with research pointing to 12 to 15. Su also introduced a new HR chief, James Harrell, and a new head of staff, Hong Mei Pang, while several senior posts — general counsel, communications director, director of school planning — remain unfilled or interim.

None of that answers Gupta's question. The enrollment vote is scheduled for April; the closures it is supposed to inform are not scheduled at all. Su has bought herself two years and a functioning team. Her board just told her that isn't the same as a plan.