Our schools provide in-kind services to the city
San Francisco voters want to help our underfunded public schools. In 2004, they voted overwhelmingly to pass Prop. H, which allocated city money and other support to supplement the schools’ state funding.
But now city officials seem to be trying to give schools and students as little as they can get away with. Supervisors and other officials are pushing for providing as much of the voter-mandated support as possible via “in-kind services” — and stretching to extremes the definition of an in-kind service provided to schools. One city bean-counter, speaking at a December hearing, coldly defined sidewalk repair as an in-kind service to schools.
That’s not what the voters had in mind.
Sadly, supervisors seem to see limiting the Prop. H support as an opportunity to punish the school district for doing things they don’t like, such as closing schools and eliminating the popular JROTC program. They forget that when they punish “the schools,” in reality they’re wreaking vengeance on the children.
And there’s another key point. Our schools actually provide massive in-kind services to the city. If we want to play that game, it goes both ways.
In one school board discussion about using next year’s Prop. H funds, two needs on the table were increased translation services for immigrant parents and enhanced violence-prevention programs.
Yet translation services for immigrant adults and violence prevention are social and policing functions that should be the city’s responsibility, not the schools’, and shouldn’t come out of Prop. H money at all.
Here are a few of the many more in-kind services the schools gift to the city and the community, at the kids’ expense.
-- Diversity and desegregation efforts: The schools are expected to bear the burden of remedying societal racial and economic injustices, on a vast scale (with federal and state funding — but the onus is still on the schools).
-- School cafeterias: The feds fund school meals for low-income students, but the money falls far short of covering the cost of running cafeterias, especially with San Francisco’s high labor costs. Ideally, food sales to non-low-income students would balance the meal program budget. But actually, the school district subsidizes it. Yet feeding hungry low-income children is a community responsibility, not an educational expense.
-- Health care: This is not an educational expenditure. All health care provided at schools should rightfully be provided by the city; none should come from school budgets. With school nurses now a rarity, teachers and school secretaries routinely administer medication and treatment that should be provided by public health (and by health-care professionals, at that) and constitutes an in-kind service to the city.
City funding provides a Wellness Center at my son’s high school, which is great, but that’s not an in-kind service to the schools. That’s the city meeting a community need that is its rightful responsibility.
-- Gang prevention: My daughter’s middle school, like many schools, expends considerable resources and human effort on anti-gang strategies. That’s a social-service and policing function, not an education function — another in-kind service provided to the city.
There are many other societal problems for which the burden falls upon our schools — needs that go far beyond the sphere of education and are rightfully community responsibilities.
The supervisors need to understand that. And they need to recognize that it’s wrong to short the students by counting supposed in-kind services as Prop. H support – and to use that strategy to punish “the schools” (that is, the kids) for school board decisions. That’s not what the voters wanted.
Caroline Grannan is a San Francisco public school parent, volunteer and advocate who has children at Aptos Middle School and School of the Arts.
A Board of Supervisors’ committee discussion about Prop. H can be viewed here. Click on BOS Budget and Finance Committee 12/14/06, and it's the first item, about 24 minutes.
But now city officials seem to be trying to give schools and students as little as they can get away with. Supervisors and other officials are pushing for providing as much of the voter-mandated support as possible via “in-kind services” — and stretching to extremes the definition of an in-kind service provided to schools. One city bean-counter, speaking at a December hearing, coldly defined sidewalk repair as an in-kind service to schools.
That’s not what the voters had in mind.
Sadly, supervisors seem to see limiting the Prop. H support as an opportunity to punish the school district for doing things they don’t like, such as closing schools and eliminating the popular JROTC program. They forget that when they punish “the schools,” in reality they’re wreaking vengeance on the children.
And there’s another key point. Our schools actually provide massive in-kind services to the city. If we want to play that game, it goes both ways.
In one school board discussion about using next year’s Prop. H funds, two needs on the table were increased translation services for immigrant parents and enhanced violence-prevention programs.
Yet translation services for immigrant adults and violence prevention are social and policing functions that should be the city’s responsibility, not the schools’, and shouldn’t come out of Prop. H money at all.
Here are a few of the many more in-kind services the schools gift to the city and the community, at the kids’ expense.
-- Diversity and desegregation efforts: The schools are expected to bear the burden of remedying societal racial and economic injustices, on a vast scale (with federal and state funding — but the onus is still on the schools).
-- School cafeterias: The feds fund school meals for low-income students, but the money falls far short of covering the cost of running cafeterias, especially with San Francisco’s high labor costs. Ideally, food sales to non-low-income students would balance the meal program budget. But actually, the school district subsidizes it. Yet feeding hungry low-income children is a community responsibility, not an educational expense.
-- Health care: This is not an educational expenditure. All health care provided at schools should rightfully be provided by the city; none should come from school budgets. With school nurses now a rarity, teachers and school secretaries routinely administer medication and treatment that should be provided by public health (and by health-care professionals, at that) and constitutes an in-kind service to the city.
City funding provides a Wellness Center at my son’s high school, which is great, but that’s not an in-kind service to the schools. That’s the city meeting a community need that is its rightful responsibility.
-- Gang prevention: My daughter’s middle school, like many schools, expends considerable resources and human effort on anti-gang strategies. That’s a social-service and policing function, not an education function — another in-kind service provided to the city.
There are many other societal problems for which the burden falls upon our schools — needs that go far beyond the sphere of education and are rightfully community responsibilities.
The supervisors need to understand that. And they need to recognize that it’s wrong to short the students by counting supposed in-kind services as Prop. H support – and to use that strategy to punish “the schools” (that is, the kids) for school board decisions. That’s not what the voters wanted.
Caroline Grannan is a San Francisco public school parent, volunteer and advocate who has children at Aptos Middle School and School of the Arts.
A Board of Supervisors’ committee discussion about Prop. H can be viewed here. Click on BOS Budget and Finance Committee 12/14/06, and it's the first item, about 24 minutes.
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