BeyondChron School Beat: The Annual School Search

Lisa Schiff pens this week's School Beat column on the daunting task of choosing a public school in SFUSD. Here's the lede from The Annual School Search

A yearly ritual is underway again. Parents with children who will be ready next year for Kindergarten, 6th or 9th grades are faced with task of finding what they hope will be the perfect school for their child. Some may associate the hunt for schools with just the private or parochial education route. However, in San Francisco, parents have the opportunity to look at and assert their preferences for public schools as well. All schools throughout the City are open for any family to apply (with limitations regarding certain programs such as special education and bilingual education). Thus there are a quite a number of options, especially at the elementary school level.

Many parents have been contacting me asking if there are resources available for parents shopping for schools. Of course I have lots of links to different web sites, sfschools posts, and blog posts that have appeared here. I am also adding useful links to our blogroll on the right side of this page. But this information is disorganized and hard to use for most parents. Parents for Public Schools has one page, Parent Resources, that is the best single resource I've been able to find. But there are more sources I would like to make available.

So I plan to write an easy to use, unified information page that I will publish on this site. If you have any information you would like to add to this resource page—links, documents, or other information—please send it to me or post it in the comments below.