Change Happens Here: Reflecting on Our 2026 Back to School Gala
Thursday night, more than 250 guests filled the room for the San Francisco Education Fund's 2026 Back to School Gala, and by the end of the evening, we had something wonderful to celebrate together: we hit our fundraising goal of $600K.
That number is a fundraising milestone, and also what makes next year’s work possible.
What This Community's Support Funds
Every dollar raised goes directly toward the programs we spent the evening celebrating: high-impact tutoring, corporate and community volunteers, and grants for educators. This year alone, those programs have delivered real, measurable change:
- 2x literacy growth: Tutored students grew their STAR Reading scores twice as fast as the district average.
- 9-point drop in chronic absenteeism: Across schools funded through our Educator Impact Grants, chronic absenteeism decreased by 9 percentage points.
- 8.5-point rise in student belonging: Educator Impact Grants at our Priority Schools directly boosted students' sense of belonging by 8.5 percentage points.
Nearly 800 corporate and community volunteers also gave more than 50,000 hours of their time in San Francisco schools this past year. And thanks to a generous gift from Pamela A. Lee and family, we launched a new category of Educator Impact Grants for Newcomers, a group our data shows makes up a significant share of the students who graduate SFUSD without yet knowing how to read.
We know the need is bigger than any single night can meet. We shared with the room Thursday that with $6M, we could provide high-impact tutoring support for every elementary school student in SFUSD who needs it so they enter middle school as readers. Thursday night doesn't close that gap on its own, but it moves us meaningfully closer, and it tells us this community is ready to keep showing up for it.
Celebrating the 2026 Glady Thacher Award Winner: Mission High School
Every year, the Glady Thacher Award recognizes a school community that goes above and beyond in partnership with the SF Ed Fund. This year's nominees, Marshall Elementary School, Mission High School, and the SFUSD Research, Planning & Assessment Team, each represented a different kind of extraordinary partnership, from both school’s work building belonging and student voice, to the district research team's quiet, essential support behind the scenes.
We were thrilled to present this year's award to Mission High School. A second-year nominee, Mission exemplified this year what it means to meet students where they are. The school received eight Educator Impact Grants this year, three of them targeted at improving attendance through subgroup tracking, home visits, and student celebrations, work strong enough to help inspire the SF Ed Fund's push for expanded, dedicated attendance funding through Crankstart. A separate grant brought Learn Up to Mission's campus, an intensive literacy intervention for students with dyslexia and other reading-related IEPs; students in the program received four hours of weekly reading instruction and grew an average of four grade levels in a single semester, alongside a real shift in how they see themselves as readers.
Mission's partnership with us didn't stop at academics. The school has embraced career exploration through Circle the Schools, including two Deloitte MADE events and a student visit to Canva, and staff are now exploring how to bring our high-impact tutoring model, until now built for elementary schoolers, to Mission's own high schoolers who are still building foundational literacy skills. It's exactly the kind of cross-program thinking we celebrated on stage Thursday night: two parts of our work meeting in the middle to reach kids who need it most.
Thank You
Thank you to our generous sponsors, donors, city leaders, corporate and community volunteers and partners, our educators, and our students for an evening of celebration. Special thanks to our five student performers, young poets from Marshall Elementary School!
Change truly does happen when our community comes together!
