“Mr. Stephen! Mr. Stephen! Mr. Stephen!”

A 15-year-old boy with severe autism rocked in his chair, calling loudly and repeatedly for his teacher, Stephen Torres Esquer, for help listing his favorite things. He’d scratched out a few answers in lettering that looked like a preschooler’s, but couldn’t think of any more.

Torres Esquer crouched down and told the boy, whose birthday was that day, to think of the theme of his classroom birthday party scheduled for later that afternoon. Oh yes, the boy remembered. He loves garbage trucks. He added them to the list.

“It’s a garbage-truck-themed party!” said Torres Esquer, the party planner.

Torres Esquer is a special education teacher for teenagers with moderate to severe disabilities at Lowell High School, surely one of the toughest jobs in San Francisco. Though City Hall officials have probably never heard of him, teachers like Torres Esquer are at the center of a political squabble over how to spend the city’s surprise $185 million windfall.

Should all of it go to homeless services, as the mayor wants? Or should some go to teacher raises? Both are worthy causes, but Torres Esquer’s day-to-day life in hyper-expensive San Francisco demonstrates why teachers should be at the top of the list.

The money came from an obscure account called the Education Revenue Augmentation Fund — that first word signals teachers deserve a cut. California law requires that public schools receive baseline funding from the state. In the 1990s, the state ordered counties to share that responsibility and put property taxes in the fund to be directed to schools. “Augmentation” implies extra money, but there was nothing extra about it — the total amount going to schools stayed the same.

Any extra money goes back to the county. For the first time, that happened — soaring property tax revenue gave San Francisco a surprise $415 million. There are required set-asides for buses, libraries, tree maintenance and specific education expenses, such as rainy-day reserves, sports, libraries and arts, but nothing tagged for teacher raises.

After the set-asides, $185 million is left.

Mayor London Breed said in a statement that while she supports better wages for teachers, it’s imperative the city spend that money on homeless and mental health services and affordable housing.

“We have been and will continue to engage with the board members about how to allocate this funding so that we have a plan that works for the people of San Francisco,” Breed said.

Breed, who opposed November’s Prop. C to raise $300 million annually from the city’s biggest businesses for homeless services, said that despite her concerns over the measure, the voters have spoken. But they spoke in June too, when they approved a parcel tax to boost the notoriously low salaries of San Francisco’s public schoolteachers.

The school district has started doling out those raises, but now both measures, and a third to raise money for child care, are held up in court over whether they required a two-thirds voter approval rate and not just a simple majority. So the raises could be rescinded. The superintendent, some supervisors and PTAs want $60 million of windfall money to cover the raises.

Myong Leigh, the district’s deputy superintendent, acknowledged it was a little risky to start paying the raises before the district had its tax money in hand. But considering the annual crunch to fill all of its classrooms because teachers leave for better-paying districts or less-expensive cities, there wasn’t much choice.

“Everybody had a sense of urgency about improving our compensation for teachers as quickly as we could,” Leigh said. “We have had a very serious recruitment and retention challenge, and we knew this would make a big difference.”

So some of the windfall money should be used to help backfill raises for hardworking teachers like Torres Esquer.

He arrives at Lowell around 7:45 a.m. and stays until anywhere from 5 to 8 p.m. He has a main caseload of 10 students with major intellectual disabilities and works with other special education students throughout the day.

Like the 15-year-old boy with Down syndrome who drops in regularly to sidle up to Torres Esquer and talk about the weather. He loves checking the forecast, so Torres Esquer turned him into Lowell’s weatherman, recording weekly segments with him in front of a whiteboard decorated with suns and clouds.

Much of Torres Esquer’s work centers on giving these kids real-world, practical help. He has them memorize their parents’ phone numbers, takes them grocery shopping and on Muni rides, cooks meals with them, and takes some to city festivals to speak about what it’s like to live with a disability.

“I work all hours of the day and night, but at the end of the day, it’s worth it for me because I love what I do,” he said.

He may love his job, but not his mediocre salary. He has a master’s degree in special education, a teaching credential to work with students with moderate to severe disabilities, and a certificate in working with deaf and blind students, all from San Francisco State. He was recently named California Educator of the Year. He also writes children’s books about kids with disabilities.

But despite all this, his quality of life hasn’t changed much since he was a student working at Chipotle at Daly City’s Westlake Shopping Center.

“I worked there for three years, and my life has not changed very much since then,” he said. “Except I work harder.”

Over the past few years, teacher salaries in San Francisco, which were shameful, have improved. There’s a more generous contract in place, and the parcel tax has put an additional $4,000 to $6,000 in each teacher’s pocket. It’s gotten a little easier to recruit new teachers. But factoring in the city’s insane cost of living, the salaries are nothing to brag about and absolutely cannot go back down.

With a bonus for working in a hard-to-fill position, Torres Esquer makes about $68,000. With the new parcel tax money, that has jumped to about $72,000.

He could make $11,000 more in Palo Alto Unified and a whopping $30,000 more in the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District. Or he could go somewhere like Stockton, his hometown, make about $13,000 less, but afford far more because that city is so much cheaper.

His San Francisco salary is enough to pay $1,500 for a tiny room, without a closet, in a flat shared with three roommates in the Richmond District. He doesn’t have a car. He doesn’t travel. He occasionally eats in restaurants, but never anything fancy. He has monthly student loan payments and sends whatever he can to his three nieces in Stockton whose parents are struggling.

“I rarely spend any money because I don’t have any money to spend,” he said.

It might be a fine life for a man in his 20s. But he’s 30 now and has no hope of living on his own, much less buying a house. He’s single but could never dream of supporting a family in the city.

“The more time I spend in San Francisco, the more I feel like I’m wasting money and also wasting opportunity,” he said, adding he’ll probably move back to Stockton in the next year or two. “There’s not a lot of hope for a future here for someone like me.”

He said Stockton isn’t “the most exciting city in the world,” but it offers a better future.

“I could buy a house. I could have a savings account. I could start college funds for my nieces,” he said. “There’s a lot I could do there that would not be possible here.”

That’s one more San Francisco teacher with an eye on getting out of the city. One who just so happens to be a Spanish-speaking man who adores teaching special education students — a unicorn in the public schools.

The city needs to do whatever it can to keep teachers like Torres Esquer. And there just so happens to be $185 million in free money sitting there to help it do that.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf