Rachel's Round 1 Scoop

Everything that could possibly be said about Round 1 has already been said, right? No, Rachel gives us an invaluable look at the big picture:

Virtually every seat in the district is full [...], this year could be the “game changer” for many schools that have been spurned by families in previous years.

Westside HS on a diet?

As I've already noted in my initial post about Round 1, the demand for high schools jumped dramatically. And in particular the ratio of applications to open seats at Lincoln and Washington went way, way up. Sources tell me that demand is not the only explanation. Both of these schools (and Lowell too) have been terribly over-enrolled for years now. The overcrowding on these campuses has stymied efforts to reduce or eliminate bungalows and cope with other facilities issues. And who knows, are they skirting with fire code issues? Now it seems like the district is putting its foot down and trying to address the problem by limiting enrollment.

So what do you think? Is it about time that SFUSD act to alleviate overcrowding at Washington and Lincoln? Or are they igniting new fires of controversy by doing this in a year where demand is so dramatically increased? Are there other high schools out there, like Balboa in recent years, that stand to benefit from an influx of students?

Round 1: glass half empty? or half full?>

So Round 1 results are known, The district has shared some stats with us. I took a look at the numbers can came away with the impression that this year was worse than last year and the lottery system seems on the brink of collapse.

Caroline kept her ear to the ground, reading through the hundreds of comments over on SF K Files, and heard much less gnashing of teeth, and concludes that this year was an improvement over last year, possibly with the aid of web communities like SF K files.

So what is it? Are people happier with the results this year? More open minded
about their assignments? Or is the lottery in crisis? Or both?

Annex Edison?

School demand increases, lottery odds grow longer

For the second year in a row SFUSD enrollment has increased significantly. The district mailed out placement results to all families participating in Round 1 and published information about the Round 1 results today. The summary paints a pretty worrisome picture of a lottery system that is not yielding satisfactory results.

The district press release can be found here(PDF) and the accompanying data sheet is here(PDF) with additional data on the EPC site here.

Note that demand is increasing for all grades, not just Kindergarten. To me that suggests that economic factors are at play, and not just demographics. But Kindergarten is where the anxiety is traditionally most accute and where the picture looks worst. Demand rose by over 8% with 406 additional applicants. 20% of all families applying for Kindergarten were shut out. -- that's 948 families that got none of their choices, which translates to 120 more strike-outs than last year.

But the more striking statistic to me is the fact that competition for high schools has shot up -- another indication that economics is at play. Among high school applications, "16% of 9th grade applicants (723) compared to 9% last year (380)" did not receive any of their choices. There were 9 applicants per open seat at both Washington and Lincoln. Folks, that's hard to imagine since those two schools account for such a large chunk of the overall open HS seats. Did every single HS application list those two schools?

To their credit, the district is scrambling to meet the demand. They have announced their plans to re-open the De Avila ES site with a new Cantonese immersion school. From the press release:

Due to the increased demand, SFUSD announced today it will be opening a new school. The new school will offer a Cantonese Two-Way Immersion program beginning with three kindergarten classes and two first grade classes and will be located at 1351 Haight St., the former De Avila Elementary site.

Associate Superintendent Jeannie Pon explained that the district chose to open the new school as a Chinese Immersion program because of the popularity of Chinese Immersion education for both Chinese speaking and native English speaking families and the Board of Education’s commitment to have all SFUSD students graduate bilingual.

“The plan is for this to be a Cantonese immersion program since Cantonese continues to be a heritage language spoken by a large proportion of our students at home. Similar to the Alice Fong Yu model, we are also considering introducing Mandarin in the mid-elementary years,” Pon said.

Families who will be receiving an assignment offer to this new school requested a Chinese immersion program but were unable to be placed at other existing schools. If all the students designated in Round One accept their assignments, the schools’ Kindergarten and first grade classrooms will be full.

Congratulations are in order to those of you that did receive good news. You are still the majority. But the continued trends do not look good for the current enrollment lottery.

Kindergarget class size FAQ

Courtesy of Rachel Norton (also available @SFUSD), we have the FAQ on the recently announced increase in Kindergarten class sizes next year:

Here is a FAQ the district created on the increase in class size. I think one of the most important reasons behind the decision to do this is the fact that due to fire code restrictions all K and 1st grade classrooms MUST be located on the first floor -- as the last item in the FAQ states, with the increase in applications this year, virtually EVERY K classroom is full at 22 students and we physically do not have space to open any more kindergarten classrooms at existing sites.

SFUSD Expansion for 2009-2010 School Year
Facing budget cuts of $51million over the next 16 months and increasing Kindergarten enrollment, SFUSD will increase some class sizes for the upcoming school year.

Which grade level class sizes will be expanded?
Due to the increase in kindergarten applications, and the limitations posed by the present budget situation, it will be necessary to expand class size in Kindergarten from 20 to 22 students. It may also be necessary to expand class size in grades 1-3. We will
make that determination for Round 2 assignments, and during the summer, as new families may request spots in these grades. State funding for smaller English and Math classes in the 9th grade was cut leading to the possibility increasing these class sizes as
well.

Which schools will see class sizes expanded?
Every elementary school will receive assignments of 22 students in Kindergarten, except for a small handful of schools that are required to keep their class sizes to 20 because of their participation in QEIA (Quality Education Investment Act), a state grant program.

Will the district lose state funds for expanding class sizes?
SFUSD receives some funding from the state to keep class size at 20 in Kindergarten through 3rd grade. However, the savings created by increasing class size far exceeds thesmall penalty for exceeding 20 students per class.

Is SFUSD opening more Kindergarten classrooms?
SFUSD is looking at opening more new kindergarten classrooms. Some schools have already added classrooms to accommodate this year's growth in demand for Kindergarten. However, most elementary schools are fully utilized and there is no space to expand due to fire safety rules requiring Kindergarten classes be located on the ground floor of the building.

About that school calendar change

The proposal to change the school calendar by starting earlier that we reported here back in November is bubbling up again. The Chron reports:
Schools look at changes in next year's calendar. Seems like the idea has been deferred to the 2010-2011 year. If you have comments, leave them here or send them directly to Deena Zacharin at SFUSD.

Anyone in favor of districtwide school choice?

An SFUSD district insider commented to me that all the advocacy the Board of Ed is currently hearing is from parents who want neighborhood schools (guaranteed/mandatory). The commenter wondered if the sentiment is that unanimous or if those who favor the current system, offering districtwide choice, are just less vocal.

So I thought I'd point that out in case there are parents who haven't spoken up.

My own view is that I'm really not sure how to make this process work ideally for everyone. Here's my blog post "A Dose of Reality," for anyone interested in the "yes, but..." view.

SFUSD Kindergarten Applicants Survey

This was poosted to the sfschools list and reposted here with permission. Sounds like worthwhile research:

I am conducting a research study examining SFUSD school choice for families with children eligible for 2009-2010 kindergarten enrollment. This study will be examining the role of culture on the decision-making process. Our study asks primary caregivers of kindergarten applicants to complete a survey. The survey will take approximately 20-minutes to complete.

I am recruiting participants who meet the following eligibility requirements:

1. must be at least 18 years of age, and
2. the parent or guardian of at least one child eligible for kindergarten enrollment in the San Francisco Unified School District(SFUSD) for the 2009-2010 school year.

To be screened for eligibility, please visit:
devpsych.sfsu.edu/schoolchoice

Once you are determined to be eligible, you will be prompted to begin the first portion of the school choice survey. You may complete the survey at your convenience.

All the information you provide will remain completely confidential and the questionnaires will be identified through the use of identification numbers, not names. Upon completion of the study, all surveys will be destroyed and in no way will your participation in this study affect the outcomes of your kindergartner's school assignment. I am conducting a research study in an attempt to understand the decision-making process for parents of SFUSD kindergarten applicants.

I hope you will participate.

If you have any questions, please contact me, Kathryn Riel, by e-mail. I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Sincerely,
Kathryn Riel
Graduate Student
San Francisco State University

We have been pretty slack reporting on the admissions cycle this year. Could it be because Caroline and I are in the midst of college applications? Hmmm...

A dose of reality about neighborhood schools

Neighborhood schools are a fine thing, in the general sense. They make families’ lives easier, reduce our carbon footprint, give us more time to live our lives, and encourage neighbors to get to know each other.

There’s a new passion for neighborhood schools among younger parents, and at least one community organization, called Plan C, is pushing for an assignment system that stresses them. And that’s all understandable.

But some of the advocacy blames the current all-choice assignment system for problems in our school district, and applies magical thinking to a future based on neighborhood assignment, speculating that it would inherently improve all schools, build parent involvement and enhance communities.

Those attitudes need a reality check — it’s not helpful to go into a project with unrealistic expectations and a lack of sense of history.

The fact is, only 10 years ago, most SFUSD assignments were to default neighborhood schools. Most families had certainty and a guaranteed school of assignment. But here’s the dash of cold water: A large number of middle-class families did not want the neighborhood school they were assigned to. In that era — this was the case in the 1990s, when my family first applied to SFUSD kindergarten (for fall 1996) — the official word was that families could only get their school of assignment or an alternative school (an official SFUSD designation for about 15 schools that had no neighborhood assignment area). Some alternative schools were highly popular and oversubscribed (Argonne, Buena Vista, Clarendon, Claire Lilienthal, Lakeshore, Lawton, Rooftop). A few were unpopular with middle-class families at the time and viewed as not a feasible option to the equally unpopular neighborhood school of assignment (21st-Century Academy, Charles Drew, Harvey Milk).

So families in my time understood that our choices were limited to our mandatory assignment-area school or a lottery for a prized, oversubscribed school that was nearly impossible to get into. (Some parts of the city were “satellite zones” for schools outside their neighborhood, a bizarre twist to the setup that mostly affected low-income areas.)

This was the setup that drove so many families off to private schools or suburbia.

Just before our day, another family-unfriendly policy made things even tougher. In the early ‘90s, families had to be officially “released” from their neighborhood school of assignment before they could apply to an alternative school. In that era’s version of a “diversity index,” they would not be released if they added diversity to the school. So even more families waved bye-bye to SFUSD because of that.

Then there was the era of camping out. In the ‘80s, alternative school enrollment was first-come, first-served. This meant that families lined up on the playground several days before the magic moment when applications were due. My cousin and his wife, taking shifts with my aunt and uncle, got their kids into Claire Lilienthal that way. All the best people did it — Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, for one, camped on the schoolyard to get his kids into Lakeshore.

Under that system, probably fewer families fled the district, because if you could just handle the logistics of the campout, you did have certainty. Needless to say, this system favored the resourced and comfortable. That’s why Ramon Cortines, superintendent here from 1987-’93 and now head of L.A. Unified, banished it by fiat, to howls of outraged from middle-class parents.

Through all these systems, the consistent thread was lots and lots of middle-class parents' not wanting — absolutely refusing — their neighborhood schools. The middle-class values system at that time (at least the ’80s through 2000) held that convenience must take a backseat to concern for the quality of our children’s education.

Things have changed. I follow the chatter among younger parents, and I get it. For one thing, the term “carbon footprint” was unknown in my day and earlier — and there are other shifts in values and ideals at work.

For the record, my family’s neighborhood school of assignment was then-unpopular Miraloma, around the corner from our house. We refused it and fought successfully to get into Lakeshore, about a 15-minute drive from us.

Here are three points, and then I’ll dispel a few myths (as I perceive them), because I do think the neighborhood schools push needs to be grounded in reality.

1. This seems obvious, but: How you feel about neighborhood schools largely depends on what schools are in your neighborhood. The notion that everyone covets assignment to the nearby school just because it's nearby is not based on reality.
2. Those younger than I am may not be aware of this, but “neighborhood schools” used to be a racist code. Today, I don’t know any white parents who don’t want their kids in ethnically diverse schools, but a neighborhood schools system in a city of segregated neighborhoods does promote segregated schools. So this connotation is something to be aware of.
3. A school board member recently made a comment at a meeting indicating that , as she perceives it, parents are willing to travel out of their way to get their kids to get to a school they prefer. Some younger parents were put off by that remark, assuming the official was out of touch and insensitive. But actually, that was exactly the case until recently. I can give endless examples of families I know spurning convenient nearby schools in favor of faraway alternative schools or distant private schools (at great expense, in the latter case). The values system until very recently viewed it as, basically, irresponsible parenting to put a priority on convenience over the perceived quality of the school. The change has been recent and sudden, so please cut veterans a little slack for not grasping that immediately.

Here are what I see as some myths and facts.

Myth: Of course all families would prefer their neighborhood schools.
Reality: See above.

Myth: All schools would be more successful if neighborhood families were assigned to them.
Reality: See above. And in fact, when we first applied, far fewer SFUSD schools were considered successful and desirable enough to attract middle-class families. The number has not just increased but exploded in recent years, under the all-choice system. I’m not saying correlation equals causation, but that’s the situation.

Myth: It’s the uncertainty and the fact that no one is guaranteed a nearby school that has driven a high percentage (about a third) of San Francisco families off to private school.
Reality: That percentage has held steady since the early ’80s, during the time that most families were guaranteed their neighborhood schools. As an involved SFUSD parent for 13 years now, I’ve seen the assumption that “anyone who can afford it goes to private school” transform, in fact. It has been under the all-choice system that San Francisco parents have approached, if not reached, a tipping point at which families who once would have looked only at private are now open to public school.

Myth: If everyone were assigned to their neighborhood schools, parents would be more committed to getting involved at school, and communities would be strengthened.
Reality: The countervailing view is that families who have sought out a school and taken some trouble to get their kids into it, not to mention to and from school every day, have a greater sense of ownership and are more likely to be involved. At the very least, it’s a wash. Families involuntarily assigned to schools outside the neighborhood would be a different story, of course.

Semi-myth: Schools have become less diverse under the all-choice system, so neighborhood schools would not increase segregation and might even promote diversity.
Reality: It’s true that SFUSD schools have become less diverse during the era of the all-choice system, but that’s because the former system imposed racial enrollment quotas on each school. Those quotas were outlawed by the Ho court decision in the late ‘90s. The elimination of the quotas coincided with the all-choice system, but it’s the elimination of the quotas that increased segregation. And back when all families were guaranteed an assignment-area school, it was almost always the alternative schools — which were all-choice — that were the most diverse.

(I do have to note that San Francisco schools are far more diverse than schools in most big U.S. cities, where it’s routine to see schools that are 95 percent black or Latino. Also, the standard in SFUSD is that a school that is 60 percent or more of any one ethnicity is viewed as segregated. By private school or suburban standards, a mere 60 percent of any one ethnicity would be viewed as heartwarmingly diverse.)

All this said, I understand and support the desire for convenient, nearby, community-based schools. I think proximity should carry significant weight in the assignment process, except in the case of specialty programs such as language immersion schools. I do think it would be logistically impossible to guarantee access to popular schools, and I support a preference system for at-risk, disadvantaged families' school choices, though I don't have a simple criterion for identifying those families. Again, I just think the advocates for neighborhood schools need to be aware of reality and recent history, and avoid magical thinking.

The big picture: SFUSD schools are getting better and better, and the new interest among young parents is a positive sign for our schools and our community.

SFUSD needs to be ready for the new baby boom

Is a baby boom about to overwhelm SFUSD kindergartens — that is, a baby boom among families who really and truly intend to send their kids to San Francisco public schools? There's a lot of discussion about that on The SFKFiles blog and the Parents for Public Schools listserve.

The SFUSD process that allows parents to choose any school in the district is already tough (some would say meaningless) when popular schools are so oversubscribed that it's harder and harder to get a school you want in the lottery. And even though the number of popular schools is soaring, all of those schools are becoming oversubscribed.

I asked veteran Board of Education member Jill Wynns, and she says the obvious is definitely on the table: reopening one of the schools that SFUSD has closed as the school population dwindled over recent years (or rather, decades).

Meanwhile, as I've posted previously, there’s a proposal afloat for a new charter school "inspired by Waldorf education.” When this was mentioned on The SFKFiles, it sparked a heated debate about whether Waldorf philosophy, based on the teachings of the multifaceted Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is a religious view, and whether it’s appropriate to fund a school based on Steiner’s often-startling ideas with public money.

My personal opinion is that no, it is not. But more than that, even if I adored the idea personally, it’s going to be a hot controversy. SFUSD has critical challenges in front of it right now, and we really don’t need an issue like this distracting and depleting the energies of our Board of Education and community. Just one speaker getting up during public comment and reading Steiner’s commentaries on race into the mike will light the fuse. (Aside from being racist, Steiner's views are just plain loony.)

Let’s not go there.

Meanwhile, SFUSD needs to keep on top of the number of applicants and be poised to respond effectively.

And it may not just be the number of applications. Back in the day we first applied to kindergarten (1996), the assumption that if you could afford it you went private prevailed among the middle class — but many of our private-school friends still submitted an SFUSD application listing just Clarendon or Lilienthal, as a token gesture. That surely artificially bumped up the number of applications — but with families who dropped out of the process without a peep when they didn’t win the lottery immediately, and sometimes even when they did. Today, those families' younger equivalents are submitting applications with seven SFUSD schools listed, and they really mean it. District officials need to keep a very close eye on this.


For complete information on the SFUSD enrollment process, check out Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco. And here's a source for those curious about Rudolf Steiner's views on race.

The list of possible hidden gems gets longer

An obvious solution to the angst of applying for San Francisco public school is to list schools that aren't oversubcribed. For years the notion that "there are only five good schools in SFUSD" ruled, but only the poorly informed give that any credibility now. But now it looks like there are more promising schools than even the savviest parent might have thought.

A reader of both the SFKFiles blog and the Parents for Public Schools listserve has compiled all the schools various posters mentioned listing on their applications for next fall. By definition, participants in discussion on both those forums are concerned, involved and informed, so it's a good sign for a school when those parents are seeking it out.

That list of schools is below. I know it seems unproductive to post it the week after the SFUSD first-round lottery deadline -- the list came from comments posted right up to the deadline -- but actually it's potentially valuable to applicants who don't get one of their choices in the first round.

In addition, there were schools that sounded to me at least worth checking out that weren't on this initial list, so I applied a simple pair of criteria and added six more names. My criteria were: located In a thriving, non-scary neighborhood; and achieving an Academic Performance Index score over 800. Also, a veteran PPS member pointed out that her kids' highly regarded school, Moscone, wasn't listed either. So the additional names are at the end of the original list.

1. Alamo
2. Alice Fong Yu
3. Alvarado General Ed (GE)
4. Alvarado Spanish Immersion (SN)
5. Argonne
6. Buena Vista
7. Claire Lilienthal GE
8. Claire Lilienthal Korean Immersion
9. Clarendon GE
10. Clarendon Japanese Bilingual-Bicultural Program (JBBP)
11. Commodore Sloat
12. Creative Arts Charter School
13. Daniel Webster SN
14. Dianne Feinstein
15. Fairmount
16. Francis Scott Key
17. Frank McCoppin
18. George Peabody
19. Glen Park
20. Grattan
21. Harvey Milk
22. Jefferson
23. Jose Ortega GE
24. Jose Ortega Mandarin Immersion (MN)
25. Lafayette
26. Lakeshore
27. Lawton
28. Leonard Flynn GE
29. Leonard Flynn SN
30. Marshall
31. McKinley
32. Miraloma
33. Monroe SN
34. New Traditions
35. Paul Revere SN
36. RL Stevenson
37. Rooftop
38. Rosa Parks JBBP
39. SF Community
40. Sherman
41. Starr King MN
42. Sunnyside
43. Sunset
44. Sutro
45. Ulloa
46. West Portal GE
47. West Portal Cantonese Immersion
48. Yick Wo

Add Moscone Elementary, as mentioned above.

And here are the six additional that met my off-the-cuff criteria, with neighborhood and API:

* John Yehall Chin, North Beach -- 869
* Garfield, North Beach -- 867
* Gordon Lau, Chinatown -- 836
* Longfellow, Outer Mission -- 825
* Jean Parker, North Beach -- 846
* Spring Valley, Russian/Nob Hill -- 833

I'm well aware that API isn't the be-all and end-all, and there are great schools with APIs far lower than 800. I was just using it as shorthand for a list aimed at parents new to the process, the kind who are more likely to use it as their first criterion.

And I still don't think this is a complete list of schools that are at least worth checking out -- not that I'm eager to fuel the frenzy for parents who feel they have to visit 30 schools. I'd just like parents to know they don't have to go nuts thinking they must compete for a tiny number of select schools when there are so many good options in our district.

Rachel gives us the scoop on student assignment redesign

Have I mentioned how great it is that Rachel Norton is on the board? Here's one example of why: her report on Monday's committee meeting:

Student assignment: report from committee:

Mary over on the sfschools list wants to know: “Is the BOE also looking to move towards a system that emphasizes neighborhood schools rather than parental choice?”

Not to speak for my colleagues, but after listening and participating in tonight’s discussion (at the Ad Hoc Committee on Student Assignment) I don’t think the BOE as a body has at all decided where to fall in the choice vs. neighborhood paradigm. The dialogue centered much more on equity, transparency, simplicity, predictability — things like that.

Read the rest. It is a nice short review of an important meeting that would otherwise be lost to anyone who did not attend.

Rachel is not the first BOE commissioner to have a web presence. Various commissioners have participated on the sfschools list over the years: Mary Hernandez, Jill Wynns, Mark Sanchez, Eric Mar. Eric was the founder of the Educational Justice blog, and now Kim-Shree Maufus has joined the team that continues there. Hydra and Jane used the web effectively during their campaigns. But there has never been anyone on the BOE who has used to web to report directly about the business of the board. It might seem like a small point—in the big scheme of things BOE matters are small potatoes—but that's why it is such a welcome turn of events. Those of us that care about and track local school issues will really benefit from Rachel's efforts. Voters that may only tune into school issues briefly will now have more information at their finger tips. Transparency is never small potatoes, especially in those nooks and cranies of government that get accustomed to being in the shadows.

Meanwhile, this meeting just gets the ball rolling on revising the student assignment process. There are a series of public meetings scheduled in the next few weeks, see our calendar for details. The district has a 2010 Student Assignment Redesign page that has a lot of useful info and a form you can fill out to express your views.

We'll keep you posted. Or more likely, Rachel will!

A sketchy guide to SFUSD's less-mobbed schools

Parents seeking a San Francisco kindergarten are freaking out right now about the looming decision and lottery. More and more SFUSD public schools get more applications than they have openings. It’s great news for our schools that the list of oversubscribed ones is increasing rapidly, but it also makes things tougher for families.

(For the uninitiated, SFUSD has an all-choice enrollment process – families may apply to any school in the district. They may – and are urged to – list seven schools.)

The school district provides year-by-year information on openings and requests for each school. I went over the list to see which schools had fewer first-choice requests than openings in the most recent year (last spring’s lottery for this school year), hoping that would help parents seek out some less-oversubscribed ones. The complication is that some attract many, many total requests – lower-ranked but not first-choice requests – and those schools still fill up fast. This is admittedly a simplistic list. For any number of reasons, some schools get far more lower-ranked (not top) requests than others, so this isn't a clear gauge of an applicant's chances..

Still, taking note of which schools get fewer first-choice requests than they have openings gives some guidance as to which aren’t the very most oversubscribed.

A number of SFUSD schools have a language immersion track and a general education track. SFUSD’s language immersion programs are designed to enroll half native English speakers and half native speakers of the target language. Many SFUSD schools also offer programs specifically designed for students with a first language other than English, to bring them up to speed in English. Our district calls the latter type of language program “bilingual.” I’m not including them on this list on the basis that since these posts are unfortunately in English only, families who don’t speak English are unlikely to be reading them.

Here are the SFUSD elementary schools that had fewer first-choice requests than openings for kindergarten for the current (08-09) school year. (Note another caveat: Younger siblings of currently enrolled students have priority for these openings.) Schools with asterisks got fewer total requests than they had openings.

• Bessie Carmichael*
  375 Seventh St., South of Market
• Bret Harte*
  1035 Gilman Ave., Bayview
• Cesar Chavez
  825 Shotwell @ 22nd, Mission District
• Cleveland
  455 Athens St. @ Persia, Excelsior District
• Commodore Sloat
  50 Darien @ Junipero Serra, Balboa Terrace
• Daniel Webster General Education (GE)* (note: Daniel Webster opened a Spanish Immersion track after the initial lottery round, so that isn’t reflected here.)
  465 Missouri @ 20th, Potrero Hill
• Dr. Charles R. Drew
  50 Pomona Ave. @ Thornton, Bayview
• Dr. William L. Cobb
  2725 California @ Scott, Lower Pacific Heights
• El Dorado*
  70 Delta @ Harkness, VIsitacion Valley
• Fairmount Spanish Immersion (SI)
  65 Chenery @ Randall, between Glen Park/Noe Valley/Mission districts
• Francis Scott Key
  1530 43rd Ave. @ Kirkham, Outer Sunset
• Frank McCoppin
  651 Sixth Ave. @ Balboa, Richmond District
• George Washington Carver
  1360 Oakdale @ Lane, Bayview/Hunters Point
• Garfield
  420 Filbert near Kearny, Telegraph Hill
• George Peabody
  251 Sixth Ave. @ Clement, Richmond District
• Gordon J. Lau
  950 Clay @ Powell, Chinatown
• Guadalupe
  850 Prague @ Cordova, Crocker Amazon District
• Harvey Milk
  4235 19th St. @ Collingwood, Upper Noe Valley
• Hillcrest
  810 Silver @ Cambridge, Portola District
• Jean Parker
  840 Broadway @ Powell, North Beach
• Jefferson
  1725 Irving @ 19th Avenue, Sunset
• John Muir
  380 Webster @ Oak, Western Addition
• John Yehall Chin
  350 Broadway, North Beach
• Jose Ortega GE
  * Jose Ortega Mandarin Immersion (MI)
  400 Sargent @ Arch, Ingleside/Ocean View
• Junipero Serra
  625 Holly Park Circle, Bernal Heights/Outer Mission
• Lafayette
  4545 Anza @ 37th Avenue, Outer Richmond
• Leonard R. Flynn GE (but not SI)
  3125 Cesar Chavez @ Harrison, Bernal Heights/Mission
• Longfellow
  755 Morse (near Mission/Geneva), Outer Mission
• Malcolm X*
  350 Harbor Road @ Middlepoint, Bayview/Hunters Point
• McKinley
  1025 14th St. @ Castro, Duboce Triangle
• Monroe GE (but not SI)
  260 Madrid @ Excelsior, Excelsior District
• New Traditions
  2049 Grove @ Clayton, Panhandle
• Paul Revere GE and SI
  555 Tompkins @ Folsom, Bernal Heights
• Redding
  1421 Pine @ Larkin, Tenderloin
• Robert Louis Stevenson
  2051 34th Ave. @ Pacheco, Sunset
• Rosa Parks GE
  * Rosa Parks Japanese Bilingual-Bicultural (note: the Japanese program is not specifically aimed only at native Japanese speakers)
  1501 O'Farrell @ Hollis, Western Addition
• Sheridan
  431 Capitol @ Lobos, Ingleside/Ocean View
• Spring Valley
  1451 Jackson @ Larkin, Russian Hill/Nob Hill
• Starr King GE
  * Starr King MI
  1215 Carolina @ Wisconsin, Potrero Hill
• Sunnyside
  250 Foerster @ Flood, Sunnyside District
• Sunset
  1920 41st Ave. @ Ortega, Outer Sunset
• Sutro
  235 12th @ Clement, Richmond District
• Tenderloin
  627 Turk @ Polk, Tenderloin District
• Ulloa
  2650 42nd Ave. @ Vicente, Outer Sunset
• Visitacion Valley Elementary
  55 Schwerin St. @ Visitacion, Visitacion Valley

For a far more sophisticated analysis of odds of getting into a given school, check out parent volunteer Dr. Adams Dudley's spreadsheet, posted on the Parents for Public Schools website.

I'm posting an ongoing series on The School Search on www.examiner.com — I'm trying to post those same commentaries here as well, but you can find them there if I miss some.

Proposed calendar changes

We've learned that the district is considering a fairly radical change to the school calendar. The changes are described below in an excerpt from a UESF email. The email and the UESF site refer to a survey that is already closed. Not sure if all three of these proposals are still under consideration or if the specifics have changed. More info has been posted to the sfschools list, and I'll try and get that published here too. At this point it is not clear how or when this will come before the BOE, but if you have an opinion about about this, you should contact the board without delay.

UESF is currently in discussions with SFUSD regarding the 2009-2010 school year calendar. At this time, the SFUSD has proposed three possible calendars, including two that would move the start date up in order to complete the fall semester by the winter break.

[...]

The three calendars are briefly presented below. For the complete calendars, including holidays and professional development days, click here.

Calendar Draft A - Early Start

Monday, August 10th	Teachers report back
Wednesday, August 12	First day of instruction
Tuesday, December 22	Fall semester ends
Wednesday, December 23	Friday, January 8 - Winter break
Monday, January 11	First day of spring semester
Monday, March 29	Friday, April 2 - Spring break
Friday, May 28	Last day of instruction/spring semester ends

Calendar Draft B - Early Start

Monday, August 10	Teachers report back
Wednesday, August 12	First day of instruction
Tuesday, December 22	Fall semester ends
Wednesday, December 23	Tuesday, January 5 - Winter break
Wednesday, January 6	First day of spring semester
Monday, March 29	Friday, April 2 - Spring break
Wednesday, May 26	Last day of instruction/Spring semester ends

Calendar Draft C - Traditional

Wednesday, August 19	Teachers report back/ Professional development
Monday, August 24	First day of instruction
Monday, December 21	Friday, January 1 - Winter break
Friday, January 15	End of fall semester
Monday, March 29	Friday, April 2 - Spring break
Tuesday, June 15	Last day of instruction/Spring semester ends

My first impression is that the calendar is already way too early. What ever happened to starting school after Labor Day? But I'm also hearing some good arguements in favor.

More to come soon...

Jill Wynns on SFUSD student assignment

Jill Wynns, incumbent Board of Ed candidate for re-election, has called for overhauling the student assignment process and making it more family-friendly. A chart in today's Chronicle about the candidates' positions on specific issues didn't make that clear. Here's Jill's position, from her campaign website:

Student assignment process

• The process for assigning students to schools is not working; parents don't understand the system and it has not resulted in more racially diverse schools.
• We need a new system which is simpler and more transparent for parents, and which does not leave some students without a school assignment until August or beyond.
• The Educational Placement Center (EPC) must strive to complete student assignments more quickly; the time between placement rounds should be shortened.
• The discussion about "neighborhood" schools and school choice has raged for years in San Francisco with no possible resolution that will please all sides; we need to start a new conversation.
• Community commitment to diversity and de-segregation must not be allowed to be pitted against the best interests of children and families.
• Rather than focusing on the old rigid assignment areas, we should be looking at giving weight to proximity, allowing those who live closest to schools to have priority, while still preserving choice for those coming from farther away.
• The EPC must improve its customer service, responding to parent questions more promptly and ensuring that all of the information it gives out is accurate and consistent.
• SFUSD should be working towards ensuring that comprehensive childcare on a sliding scale is available at every school.

Too many families feel that the current lottery system doesn't give them enough of a chance for a school which feels right for their child and their family. The student assignment process of spring 2008 was riddled with both human and computer errors, further eroding parent confidence in the assignment system. Some parents who followed all of the conventional wisdom about visiting many schools, seeking out less popular programs, and applying to a broad range of schools, still ended up getting none of their choices. The process must improve before the next round of student assignments in spring 2009, to rebuild the community's confidence in our schools.

Ironically, more students than ever applied for Kindergarten in spring 2008, reversing a trend of falling enrollment. Some schools which had struggled with low enrollment for years were overwhelmed with requests. A static assignment system which is not nimble enough to adjust for these kinds of changes does not serve our parents or our schools.

"Just make all the schools great schools" is often touted as the solution, but schools are only as strong as their leaders. Hiring qualified teachers for every school, recruiting and training the best Principals, and providing extra resources for schools serving low income students help level the playing field, but nothing is more appealing to parents touring schools than seeing an active parent body engaged in working for the benefit of their school and its students. We must make every effort to ensure that every school has something to entice parents in the door, whether it is a special program like language immersion or Montessori, or extended childcare, or additional arts and enrichment, or partnerships with local museums and cultural institutions. Different models for language immersion should be added to existing models to expand the availability of these popular programs to the large number of English-only applicants.

No family should feel that they must move out of San Francisco in order to be assured of a good public education for heir children. Strengthening public schools in San Francisco is a key requirement to the future of our community.

One family's unhappy encounter with SFUSD

Kortney Malkin, the mother of a kindergartner at a Mission District private school, gives us a detailed account of her entanglement with the SFUSD student assignment process.

I didn't play the game right. I didn't throw down the way I should have. But I did do my homework — more than any district should expect the average family to do. In fact, I was in a position of "privilege" in that I had just closed my business and was unemployed. So I threw myself into the kinder research process, and volunteered to be the "go to" person at my preschool.

But I still managed to f*** up my child's school lottery. And now when I get the dozens of emails from preschool parents asking me, the self-proclaimed lottery expert, for advice, i shrink back and shrug my shoulders. Why ask me? I worked this system to the best of my ability and became a whiny mess on a blog. To this day, we are not enrolled in a public school.

Here is what happened:

I toured about 15 schools. The day the tours started I was on the phone scheduling appointments. I quickly understood how much of a time commitment this touring was going to be so I added schools to my list that I was not initially interested in, so that I could report back to the parents in our preschool who were unable to take the time off work to tour.

I learned after the first few tours that

1. The parents touring ask the same questions over and over again throughout the touring process, i.e.: "if you have a bright kid, how do you challenge them?" Because everyone thinks their kid is bright, but no one researches to find out that every school in our district does the same thing: They evaluate students periodically for being both under-challenged and over-challenged, etc. The repetitive questions not only wasted time on the tours and make them go longer than scheduled, but they become b-o-r-i-n-g.
2. There is a CA state-mandated curriculum that is the same in every school, but extracurricular activities vary depending on how much money is raised, and what it's spent on. The main question of interest or me became "how much do you raise, and what do you spend it on?"
3. There are different school times. 7:50-1:50, 8:30-2:30 (i found a few schools 8:20, and 8:40), and 9:30-3:30.

Early start does NOT work for us. I repeat: Does not. So we eliminated all early starts from our list. On our side of town (Bernal/Excelsior/Noe/Mission/Potrero) that limited our choices a lot. Our elimination included Rooftop, Miraloma, and many of the popular schools. We debated this over and over, but agreed that the limited choices were worth a sane school schedule. Now that we are in school, our decision regarding start time has been fully validated. But I digress...

I toured Buena Vista (Spanish Immersion, or SI) Flynn (both SI and general education, or GE), Fairmount (SI) Monroe (SI, Mandorin Immersion, GE), Moscone, SF Community. All seemed nice enough. Kids seemed engaged, happy. Principals had their strong points. Communities seemed strong. They all clearly lacked enough resources, complained about space, bungalows, budget issues, but it was public school after all. Since we live 2 blocks from Flynn, were considering Spanish Immersion, and had a community of people there, we were set on Flynn...until...

I toured Clarendon.
Yikes.

The tour itself was impossible. There were so many people there that I couldn't see or hear 1/2 of what was being shown/said. But something struck me so hard that I had a headache for 3 days ... this school had everything that ALL OUR SCHOOLS SHOULD HAVE. A librarian to die for, who kept in touch with students long after graduation, to name one charm about Clarendon. I don't know exactly why it was so appealing to me personally, but wow. At this school it seemed if one kid has an issue, there was support for that kid. The campus wasn't any better or worse than most of the public schools I have toured, albeit smallish and foggy. but the program inside the mediocre facilities were heavenly (to me.) They took all the extracurricular activities and put a cherry on the top.

Now this school wasn't trying to sell itself. The principal basically told us all to go on more tours, cast a bigger net around the city, and find an other school to drool over (were we drooling?). Still, it was obvious that Clarendon was able to make up for the economic distress that all the other schools I toured complained about — they raise $400K through their parent group annually. WHAT?? $400K? That sounds like PTA boot camp.

For the rest of the week I was seething. It isn't fair. The state obviously needs to fund our schools better so that there isn't this kind of discrepancy. If CA gave each school an additional $200K annually, think of the potential...

That said, we fell in love with Clarendon and our whole world turned upside down. OK, dramatic I know ... but you haven't heard the rest of it.

At this point it is important to note that our family situation changed a bit. My husband's career shifted, and we realized that we could not give a 5-year commitment to San Francisco going forward. It was likely that we would move in the next 2 years. Therefore, language immersion was out.

I started to look at later start schools on my side of town with GE programs that were popular. I toured West Portal on a sunny day. Unfortunately my tour guide was awful (the Principal was on parental leave.) But i loved the campus, the programs, and heard enough from friends that I liked it. So we now favored two highly prized schools. Ick.

Early start was crossed off. Language immersion was crossed off. Our choices got smaller.

I threw a wider net out there and decided to tour a little-known school (to my Mission friends) called Lakeshore. Lakeshore was huge, had terrific programs, a wonderful library, and this amazing garden-centered curriculum. It was perfectly diverse, and the PTA raised a moderate amount of money. The Principal seemed overwhelmed by its size, but that (and its location) was the only negative. It was the best of both worlds. I really liked it. Still, the drive ... the drive ... So I toured Commodore Sloat hoping to love it because it was slightly closer. I had to tour this school twice because the first time all I saw were kindergartners sitting quietly at their desk doing worksheets. I didn't like how the tour guide represented the free-lunch takers, either. I wanted to like the school so much, I went back.

Oh, well. I know that this was probably a harmless mistake, but my second tour guide/parent volunteer actually referred to kids as either "smart" or "stupid."

I believe in omens. This school did not make the cut.

Parents for Public Schools came to the rescue when they visited our preschool for a parent info night. They explained the whole confusing lottery process in refreshing detail. If you put 7 schools down, you were in better shape than if you put less than 7 schools on the lottery app. The thing I got out of it was important: Vicki said, and I quote "I believe you will find 7 schools that you like ... but if you do not want your kid to go to a school — do NOT put it on your lottery application." Some of the parents tried to find a way to work the system. There was lots of buzz about putting down your favorite school, then the 6 hardest to get into schools. That way if you didn't get any, you would be in the first cohort in the waitpool. PPS assured us that it doesn't work that way — you can't beat the lottery system.

My husband and I went over our information and found that we could not accept seven schools. So, we decided to fill out our applications as honestly as we could. We put down Clarendon, West Portal and Lakeshore (not in that order) because those were the late-start schools that we loved. At the last minute we put Fairmount, too, in case SI was our destiny. I don't know. We just put it down as #4 to see what would happen.

We also toured only two private backups. One, Synergy, we liked a lot. Our preschool assured us (with the best intentions) that they had a great relationship with Synergy and our daughter would have an above-average chance of getting in. Money aside, Synergy was the best fit for our daughter and our family BY FAR. So, we happily applied to Synergy.

With all applications in, we sat back and waited. This is what happened:

The mail came with our SFUSD letter re: the first round. We got none of our choices, but were assigned to Flynn GE. Synergy: A week after SFUSD's letter came, the Synergy rejection arrived. We were invited to wait.

I don't have to tell you how emotional the results were for everyone — just read that part of the SFK_Files blog! We were disappointed, to say the least. By now, we were sure that Immersion was out for us, but because it was on our radar when we toured Flynn, the GE program didn't appeal to us AT ALL. So for our second round we decided that we didn't want Flynn GE. It felt fair to give up that Flynn GE spot and not register. After all, somebody wanted it and we didn't. We believed that things would shake up in the second lottery. So, we put down 7 schools this time: Clarendon GE, Lakeshore, Jefferson, Lawton, W.Portal, Harvey Milk & Sunnyside (two schools I toured after round 1.)

Result: nothing. We waitlisted Lakeshore with about 30 other people, but since we didn't put 7 schools on our 1st application, we were in the second cohort (priority) behind about 18 people. And we were not assigned to or registered at any school.

Private school was still a bust. Apparently so many families were applying to kinder this year every school was a mess. (how hard was it to check birth rates in SF??)

Somewhere between round I and round II lottery runs, I started visiting EPC (the SFUSD Educational Placement Center) and met my counselor, Shem. He was personable, thoughtful, polite. He appeared to be helpful, albeit very casual and laid back about the whole thing. I was determined to make sure he knew who I was and tried to connect with him. I got his work email address. When I checked in with him about our waitpool school, he signed his response "at your service." (note: that is his personal signature. It had nothing to do with me. However, I was fooled into thinking he was at my service.)

By this time I was obsessed with TheSFKFiles blog, too. The best thing about the blog was that people were offering up answers to questions that the EPC did not (and the PPS did not). It was a place that not only offered up instant answers, but also gave me questions I didn't know I had ... AND a place to rant and rave about my frustration with not having a school. The worst thing about the blog was the mud-slinging anonymous posters who made ignorant assumptions about other posters. It was maddening!!! And I couldn't get enough. I was becoming an obsessive-compulsive addict. My husband was so frustrated by my frustration that he forbid me to read "The Blog" — which I of course still did. I was quick to switch screens when he walked into the room....

With no school assignment, and the waitpool not moving at all, waitpool run after waitpool fun, i attended Open Enrollment. I got to the district office at 555 Franklin at 5 a.m. — and was 12th in line. They actually opened the door early so we could wait inside. At 8 a.m., after yelling at us for creating a fire hazard (we didn't form a neat enough line — public school policy) they handed out numbers. I new the list of schools with openings. It was bleak, but somehow I thought that maybe — just maybe — when my number came up, 20 spaces at Lakeshore would open up. I took Junipero Serra and went home defeated. Then I discussed JSerra with parents on the blog, and set up a group tour with the school. And you know what? It was an OK school. It had the same basic core curriculum everyone else had cause it's mandated. But still, the school focused where it should — on its community — which was heavily ESL Latino/Hispanic children. I liked that it was still a neighborhood school, but it wasn't the right fit for our daughter. If I was going to settle for a school, at least I was going to be able to walk there. And JSerra was not close enough to our home to do that. So, we didn't register there, either.

Since I used my name on the blog, I was vulnerable to attack. If I hinted that I didn't want JSerra, i was called an elitist, racist, etc. But I didn't care — I needed to get as much information about SFUSD as possible, so I kept participating. Someone was bound to offer information that would give me an edge (I know, ridiculous thought process. but I was a desperate addict, remember?)

Anyway ... weeks pass. With each waitpool run we are more disappointed. I continue to obsess with friends over the strategy of which waitpool list to be on. I would run over in my head — over and over again — what is the smartest move? However, by this time I don't trust my instincts, nor do I trust EPC. I'm missing some details as to why i started to mistrust EPC. For one, their answers seemed vague to me. But I also know about some people who were approved for special circumstances for bogus reasons (because the Board who approves these things doesn't bother to confirm the family's claim.) To protect people's privacy, I can't go into detail, but a friend of mine was actually told that she did not qualify for special circumstances because her needs are not unique!? Ugh! I could scream. Needless to say the system isn't completely random, or obviously fair. I'd argue it isn't sane....

On one visit to the EPC, Shem helped me work through an "am i waitlisted at the right school" question, and hinted that Lakeshore would never happen for us. Not this year. Nothing was moving and I was in the 2nd cohort. Flynn GE was my best chance. Start time worked and we could walk. So we changed our waitpool school to Flynn GE.

The irony. That was our original assigned school.

Two days after I changed our waitpool school to Flynn GE ... just two days ... some of the registered SI families were disenrolled by the district!! Months earlier the district had overenrolled English-speaking kids to the SI program, but did
nothing until 3 weeks before the first day of school. Now, they decided to just kick families out of Flynn SI (and Alvarado SI). The Flynnerado 23 episode. Naturally, these families were given priority (over me) for Flynn GE. Well, I was furious at the district, for sure. But I also couldn't believe that my Shem would steer me to a school that would end up in such a mess! He had to know this was about to happen. I sent him an angry email and didn't hear back from him. I was screwed. Now my chances of getting in were impossible! We had no school, and school was starting in less than 3 weeks.

OK.

Thankfully a person who participated in the blog reached out to me and told me that a spot was open in the Kinder program at a private school near us. KMS. It fit our criteria (9 a.m. start time, walking distance, art-heavy curriculum with play-based philosophy, blah blah blah.) My criteria was shifting — and I was becoming bitter towards SFUSD. A private school i knew little about was more appealing than "giving in" to SFUSD at this point. I never promised this would make good sense.

I toured, filled out an application and signed up in 1 day. Safely enrolled in a school, I marched back to the EPC and changed our waitpool school. CLARENDON. Why not? At this point it is the only school that could lure me away from our cozy private school. The only problem is, she won't continue to 1st grade with KMS.

So we will have to try again for 1st grade. This time I'll put down 7 schools. The one I want, and 6 of the hardest-to-get-into schools in the district. I will work every angle I can and not take anything for granted. I will wear a padded push up bra and bring picnic lunches to my counselor at the EPC. I will probably start reading the blog again, too. But to be sure, we will line up more than just 1 private school this year. Just because you prefer a private school, or prefer public school, doesn't mean you get one.

We are thinking of leaving SF for a variety of reasons. If we do, I bet our new neighborhood school will welcome us, without a waitlist.

Updated wait pool spreadsheet

Back in August the district published complete information about all wait pools for all programs, all grade, all schools. They published it in PDF form, and I converted it to a spreadsheet and published it.

Now the district has published an updated version of the wait pool data, and I've once again converted it into a spreadsheet:

SFUSD Wait Pool September 19, 2008

The spreadsheet is handy because it lets you sort and search for whatever you're looking for. As published, the spreadsheet is sorted by grade and total wait pool count.

I fiddled with the Kindergarten data and found that there are 905 kids waiting for 89 different Kindergarten programs in 64 different schools. The bad news is obvious: a lot of Kindergartners are in unsettled circumstances. The good news: there is real demand for a whole lot of schools, and a whole lot of programs.

Enrollment survivors speak out

Fresh from the Kindergarten enrollment battleground, Abigail Marks decided to conduct an informal survey about parents feelings about SFUSD's enrollment process. She quickly put together a survey that garnered 167 responses, the results of which are found here. Now she has followed through with a very interesting review and analysis of the results found here:

Kindergarten Assignment Survey:

The tentative findings suggest that most families would support changing the neighborhood assignment system to one that incorporated some kind of zone or geographic area where a family would have preference, with an ability to enter a lottery for schools outside this area. The key element in such a system would be to safeguard parents’ abilities to get an assignment of their choice.

However, the more serious finding of this survey is the lack of trust among parents for the way the District/EPC runs the assignment process.

One can quibble with the methodology, sample size, and the validity of the results. She clearly notes the limitations of the survey herself. But the results are very thought provoking and resonate with me, and I suspect with others who endured this year's harrowing enrollment process.

Update: Abigail has made the formatted version of the report available for download here.

Full kindergartens: the good and the bad

Today's Chronicle story announcing that San Francisco Unified School District kindergartens are full the first week of school, for the first time in 10 years, is great news for our district overall. In contrast to districts with overcrowded schools, SFUSD has struggled for years with dropping enrollment districtwide and empty seats in the less-popular schools, and each seat filled brings in state funding.

But it's alarming news to families still in the wait pool for a kindergarten spot in a school they want.

The announcement that classes are full doesn't mean there aren't no-shows — it counts kids who were registered when the assignments were made in the spring, not all of whom actually show up. This year, the spots will be released next Tuesday, giving no-shows though the Labor Day weekend to turn up. So the next good shot for families who are still waiting is the middle of next week.

Repeating my assurance to newcomers: In the 12-plus years I've been an involved SFUSD parent, I've never known of a family who stuck it out through the whole process who did not get a spot in a school they were happy with. ("...who stuck it out through the whole process" is key here. I know lots of families who gave up early on.) My fingers are crossed for those anxious families still in the wait pool.

SFUSD stiff-arms the Grand Jury

The district published a formal response(PDF) to the Grand Jury report "San Francisco Kindergarten Admission: Back to the Drawing Board"(PDF). We were highly critical of the report ourselves, so its not too surprising to see the district respond defensively. But it is an interesting read nonetheless.

The first excerpt that caught my eye was this one:

FINDINGS

1. 1. The SFUSD school choice process and its Diversity Index are unnecessarily complex and confusing, time consuming, alienating to families they purport to serve and, most damning, fail to deliver a diversified school population.

Disagree in part. The report provides no factual support for this conclusory finding. The District has not unnecessarily complicated its student assignment process. The student assignment system is complex, because it was designed to meet complex goals and challenges such as equity of access, family choice, and diversity. The grand jury report concludes that the Diversity Index fails to provide a diversified school population, but does not define what it means by “diverse.” The Student Assignment System, formerly the Diversity Index Lottery, was designed to facilitate economic, academic and linguistic diversity. The Student Assignment System achieves diversity in these three areas to the greatest extent possible within the pool of applicants who choose to apply to any particular school.

So the enrollment process is not overly complex, or at least not unnecessarily so? That will be news to a lot of readers of the SF K Files!

Another response that caught my attention concerned the call to drop the Diversity Index lottery weighting. I have advocated this approach myself. So I have to question the district response. The Grand Jury recommended that, since dropping DI will have little impact, keeping DI is not worth it. The response comes back that the 2005 district simulations showed that "'the number of schools with high racial concentrations would be slightly increased' with the use of a 100% random lottery." So there you have it. DI has a marginal impact on the racial composition of some schools. So live with it.

Overall the response was summary: we will not implement any of the suggestions except the one platitude about making all schools excellent. They claim to have done that by adopting the strategic plan back in June.

I'm beginning to see why no authors were listed on this response. They basically tell the Grand Jury to shove it.

Back to school

We're big fans of the SF K Files blog. Over the years we've been through the enrollment ringer six times now, so I really connected with Kate's search, and baggage that comes with it—especially for first timers. And it turns out, especially for families of incoming Kindergartners this year!

So it is heartening to read her account of her daughter's first day at Jose Ortega::

On October 2, 2007, I launched The SF K Files and wrote my first post that started with the paragraph below.

'Every few nights my sleep gets disrupted by a recurring nightmare. I go to drop my daughter off at school on her first day of kindergarten. It's our dream school--the one I ranked first among the seven on my San Francisco Unified School District enrollment application or the private school where I'm certain my daughter will thrive. We walk up to the front door, I'm holding her little hand, and the school suddenly grows legs and runs away from us. We chase after the school, running as fast as we possibly can, but we're unable to catch up. Finally, we give up, our tired bodies flopping down onto the ground.'

I'm happy to say that when I dropped Alice off at Jose Ortega this morning the school didn't grow legs and sprint off. Instead it reached out and gave our family a great big hug. In fact, Alice's first day of school was near perfect--and it was truly one of the happiest and most memorable days of my life. People kept telling me that there's an end to the school madness, and now I finally believe them.

Congratulations to all of the enrollment survivors and condolences to the many who are still in wait pool limbo. It, as far as I can tell, has never been this hard in recent times. Hopefully the pain experienced by so many this year will spur improvements in the coming years. Meanwhile, many of us battle scarred veterans that offer enrollment advice have said over and over again that the process works out in the end, but it means so much more coming from Kate.

Good luck to all in the coming year.

Wait pool spreadsheet

Update: Newer info (9/16) here

The district recently published their "wait pool" data for all schools as of August 1st. It gives a detailed breakdown of the number of students on wait lists for each grade at all schools/programs/grades where there is a wait pool. It may not have made any of the waiting families happy, but it was a welcome sliver of helpful information and transparency amid a nightmarish enrollment endgame.

That was before the "Flynn-Arado" mess landed with a thud. By now, some two weeks later, the data is almost certainly stale. Seats were opened to accommodate displaced families. They've received new assignments. Lots of pawns students have moved around in this game of musical chairs.

But it is an interesting souvenir of this years punishing enrollment marathon. And I may have added value by liberating the data from the district PDF. I converted the file into a spreadsheet, sorted it by grade and total waitpool count, and published it here:

SFUSD Wait Pool August 1, 2008

What leaps out? The district clearly did not prepare for this incoming class. There were, according to this document, 90 different Kindergarten schools/programs with waiting lists, with a total of 953 applications. There is no way to know how many wait pools each Kindergartner is on, so we can't tell how many kids are left wanting and waiting. Clearly, there are too many.

And the schools with the longest Kindergarten wait lists? Fong Yu, Rooftop, Lilienthal, Clarendon, Lawton. Yes, the district has many more appealing schools to desperately compete for choose from. But the same "alternative" schools that have always been the most coveted still attract the most moths to the flame.

More info on the "Flynnerado" SNAFU

PPS-SF continues to do an excellent job providing updates on the Flynn/Alvarado enrollment problems.  Visit their issues page for the latest news.  (Kudos to them for their site redesign too!)

One of the many stakeholders who have been ignored by EPC and the district is the group San Francisco Advocates for Multilingual Education (SFAME).  They have issued a very informative and provocative letter to Superintendent Garcia and the BOE that we are able to publish here.

Some of the more eye opening passages include this one that places this error in the context of a history of comparable enrollment mistakes:

The Educational Placement Center has repeatedly made mistakes over the years, contributing to this problem. When their mistake was first discovered in March, instead of involving all stakeholders directly, the district first appeared to pressure the immersion program schools to simply swallow the situation, as they have done for years and years in the past. This year, however, things unfolded differently. For the first time, Spanish-speaking families who had applied for immersion, united and said “we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore,” forcing the district to change their placement after assignment letters had gone out. 

They also make an excellent point about the potential for creating a new Spanish Immersion program at Webster -- and option that I have covered favorably here and on the list:

By unexpectedly shifting Webster’s incoming Kindergartners from bilingual to immersion, EPC and the district demonstrate a shocking obliviousness to the wants and needs of those Spanish-speaking families. With no time to educate and counsel those families, the district is bound to run into some resistance and anger.

Anyone following this issue really should read the entire letter.  There is a bit too much finger pointing and second guessing of the districts responses to the unfolding problem for my tastes.  The first priority right now must be to bring all parties together to find a solution that is as fair as possible to everyone.  But once the incoming Kindergartners are placed, there needs to be a review of this event to try and improve the enrollment processes and strengthen the bilingual programs in the district.  When that time comes, its clear that SFAME needs to be at the table along with PPS and others.

Incoming Kindergarten Parents Aren't Going to Take it Anymore!

Parents of incoming SFUSD kindergarteners this year are experiencing unprecedented issues with the enrollment system. Not surprisingly, they're mad, and they're organizing. Below is the text of a petition that parents are circulating; click here to add your name (anyone can sign, not just parents of incoming kindergarteners).

Dear Superintendent Garcia, Darlene Lim, and members of the School Board,

We, the undersigned, are writing to express our hope that you will keep the spots you are offering to the displaced families from Flynn and Alvarado open to those of us who are listed in the waitpools for those schools, both in the August run and in the 10 day count.

We are pleased that you are making accommodations for the 23 families, spreading the impact over the district by increasing a few class sizes at the most popular schools to 21 kindergarteners. Since the District is prepared to expand the number of slots by two at select schools, we are requesting that --regardless of any movement during the 10 day count-- that you continue to keep those places available, and not reduce the open spots by two (to return the class size to 20) when attrition occurs during the 10-day count. In this way, the spots that you are generously offering to the displaced Flynn and Alvarado families now would not be ones that were simply being taken away from those of us who received nothing in Round I or Round II and are in the waitpools for those schools.

In addition, we would like to request that you keep the waitpools open for all schools until the end of the first semester of this year.

In your literature and publicity about the SFUSD assignment process, you say that it "promotes and supports family choice", and that 87% of families receive one of their Round I choices. The implication often heard during the application process about those families who did not get their choice, is usually that those families did not list 7 choices or that they only listed the "7 most popular" schools.

Many of us with soon-to-be kindergarteners diligently took time off of work and got extra childcare to spend the fall and early winter touring the 10 or 15 schools closest to us in order to make sure that we listed 7 schools that would be good fits for our family and our children in years to come. We made sure that our list included schools that were underenrolled or were not as popular the year before. We got excited about our child's attending any one of those schools. Little did we know that nearly half of us (45%) whose first child was entering kindergarten would not receive ANY of our choices.

So we scrambled to visit more schools to try to expand our lists for Round II. We included schools that were nearly always underenrolled, we included schools farther away, and still, many of us got nothing.

In Open Enrollment, we had few choices, and many of us ended up enrolling our children in schools which were across the city, with start times that were difficult for work schedules, ending times difficult for younger siblings' nap schedules, some with no aftercare options. Many of these schools had qualities which might be a good fit for some families, but were completely different than what we had been looking for in our original and exhaustive searches. This is not "family choice" at all. For 45% of us, it is random placement, at a school which could be across town, unworkable logistically, which may not be a good fit for our families.

We do not think that this is how the system was intended to function, and it is certainly not how the SFUSD portrays the system as an attempt to keep families in San Francisco and attending public schools.

Those of us who got nothing in Round I were counting on our priority status in this last waitpool run in August, and especially in the 10 day count, to give us a chance at getting a school that works for us logistically, a school we could be happy for our children to attend, a school we could be involved in, a school we could love. We were counting on the fact that, aside from those with a family hardship, those of us who had gotten nothing in Round I after listing 7 choices, would be given the highest priority in filling spots left by children who were enrolled, but not planning to attend kindergarten in public school in San Francisco this year.

Now we have learned that, to rectify a District error, families displaced from the Flynn and Alvarado immersion programs will be offered a special lottery, where they can choose from "found" spots at many of our neighborhood schools, where we have sat on the waitpools for months with no movement. We do not begrudge these families the right to the best solution, given what has been done to them. But we question why the solution that has been found cannot be left in place for us as well, so that any slot one of these families takes, does not take away a spot from anyone in the waitpool.

This is simple to remedy: the EPC would only have to agree to keep those spots open through the waitpool run after the 10 day count, so that any spots taken by the displaced families were, if more spots opened at the school through attrition, not lost to those of us in the waitpool. We urge you to do so, as a part of your attempt to make the idea of "family choice" a bit closer to reality.

Sign the petition >>>

Comments from PREFund about the Webster dual immersion program

As this enrollment fiasco has unfolded, I have been very interested to hear more about the impact this event may have on Daniel Webster ES. I've been following this story every since the school closure dramas back in 2005 (here and here), and frankly I've been rooting for the parents and volunteers that have been working to strengthen the Webster program and community.

So I contacted Katherine Doumani at PREFund and asked her if their group had any comments they could share with this audience. Sure enough, here is her response:

We really hope that SFUSD can accommodate these families and make them feel confident about the solutions they are offering.

We learned about the displacement a week ago, and have been trying to offer our support to the affected families by making sure they are aware of everything PREFund has done and has in the works to turn Daniel Webster into a first-rate school, so that they can make a fully informed decision in this difficult process.

Daniel Webster's immersion program was scheduled to open in 2009, converting the existing Spanish Bilingual program into a Dual-immersion program by adding native English speakers to the current native Spanish speakers in the bilingual program. The principal, staff and current population at DW are very supportive of the program, as is SFUSD. The Principal, Ms. Moriama Machado is a native Spanish speaker, as are several current staff members. There is an active native Spanish-speaking population at the school. And Because the school has been historically under-enrolled, there is ample space to establish and grow this program.

At Daniel Webster - Our goal has been to help increase and integrate enrollment, so that it better reflects our whole community, by attracting families from Potrero Hill and the surrounding neighborhoods into the school. In addition to the programs currently in place, We are working to establish additional inclusive programs to help bridge all the various groups in DW to create one community--these include nutrition programs for all with hot breakfast and lunch, inclusive after-school programs for all students, tutoring & mentoring programs, and classroom volunteers. These are in addition to the physical improvement projects we have completed over the past year: Gardening, tree planting and painting of the entire school building by Rebuild Together San Francisco, Friends of the Urban Forest and scores of local volunteers, that have improved the physical environment for the existing families.

We are proud to showcase Potrero Kids @ Daniel Webster, our Spanish Bilingual Preschool, scheduled to open September 29th 2008, as an example of what we have done by working together with our community. Including 25% scholarship slots, it is fully enrolled, with a waiting list, though we may be able to offer additional slots once we complete licensing, to the SFUSD displaced families.

We are aware that there are no official 'feeder' preschools for public schools in San Francisco, and that if successful, and if the current enrollment lottery stands, we may, in effect, close ourselves out of Daniel Webster in the future as we have no guarantee of specific school or program placement. This, however, is a chance we are willing to take as we strongly believe that our neighborhood schools should be a reflection of our community, and are what raising a family in a community is about. If through our efforts Daniel Webster becomes the fine and sought-after school we envision, we will have done our job, and then some.

Please see www.prefund.org for more information about us. We welcome the opportunity to talk with any parents considering Daniel Webster, as well as connecting them with other interested parents or people we have worked with who may be able to answer questions about DW and the programs there.

Update on the Alvarado / Flynn enrollment SNAFU

When I first heard about the dual-immersion enrollment debacle at Alvarado and Flynn, I thought it was a fairly private matter that mostly affected the handful of families in each incoming Kindergarten class. Now that word of the problem has spread, it has become a public issue with potentially far reaching impact on the enrollment issue going forward.

In that spirit, I contacted the district to get their response and received the following publicly released memo that I'm sharing with you:

Leonard R. Flynn & Alvarado Elementary
Two-Way Spanish Immersion Re-Assignment

OPTIONS FOR RE-ASSIGNED FAMILIES

Kudos to the district for providing this response. Reading through it I am struck that they have made a terrible but very human mistake and are now struggling t do the right thing. The bottom line about what the district is doing now is found in this response:

What did the district do once it realized the coding error?

As a result of this error, the district was faced with tough choices. Officials decided that it was best to assure access to the non-English speaking families who were not given their higher choice due to the coding error, and to uphold the integrity of the Two-Way Immersion model, by re-assigning some of the English speaking families.

Several different options were considered and discussed at length with district staff, including teachers and principals at Flynn and Alvarado. One staff member called native English speaking families affected by the error to inform of the imbalances and asked these families if they would consider a re-assignment to the general education class at the same site. Through multiple phone calls, all families who were reached indicated that they preferred to remain assigned to Two-Way Immersion even though there was an imbalance of English Home Language Speakers.

The main options that were discussed included:

1. Create a “bubble class.” This option was seriously considered but numerous factors (facilities, capacity, program implementation and quality issues) were major barriers.
2. Add a team teacher to each Immersion class and expand enrollment. Numerous factors (physical classroom size, capacity, program implementation and quality issues) were reasons why this option was eliminated.
3. Change the program from a Two-Way Immersion class to a Total Immersion class. This option would have been unfair to the Spanish speaking families who requested the program because Total Immersion is designed for non-native speakers whereas two-way Immersion is designed to include both native and non-native speakers.
4. Create a new Dual-Immersion Program at a nearby location that can accommodate space and programming needs. This is one of the options currently being pursued.

Having just endured a weekend of flying the crowded skies, I am struck by the analogy to airlines booking errors. The airlines freuquently overbook their flights and have to secure the cooperation of flyers to resolve their mistakes. They do this using incentives like cash rewards and flight discounts. I wonder if there is something the district could offer to the affected families -- maybe a priority placement guarantee for any family that volunteers to move their child? Move to a balanced program now and be guaranteed a middle school placement later? Maybe even commit to opening more middle school classrooms for graduates of dual-imersion programs? Just an idea...

Kindergarten enrollment meltdown: meeting 2night

A foulup in enrollment threatens to disrupt the assignments of 23 kindergartners who had been placed in Spanish immersion programs at Alvarado and Leonard Flynn elementary schools. A forum TONIGHT will address the problem. Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco has put up a web page with updates on the issue. An explanation of the problem from PPS is pasted below:

PPS-SF has recently learned about an error made by the school district in enrollment of English and Spanish speakers in the Immersion programs at Alvarado and Flynn. This is information we have as of this writing:

• The desired balance of English to native Spanish speakers in Spanish Immersion programs is 50%/50%, but due to an error in coding siblings in the system, a disproportionate number of English speakers were assigned to each school.
  
• 23 families will receive phone calls and letters offering to enroll them into a new Spanish Immersion program at Daniel Webster Elementary.
• Families who don’t choose this option are being given the option of priority in the waitpool for any other school.
• Spanish-speaking families who listed the immersion programs at Flynn and Alvarado as their first choice but who didn’t get assigned there are being contacted to offer them spaces in the immersion program at Flynn, Alvarado and Webster.
• Additionally, Spanish-speaking families from Marshall and Paul Revere may also be contacted to offer them spots at Flynn, Alvarado and Webster, opening up spots up for the displaced English-speaking families.
• The district is having an informational meeting on Tuesday, July 29 at 6pm at Daniel Webster to give more detailed information and to clarify any concerns or questions.
  

PPS-SF is hosting a forum:

Monday, July 28 at 6pm
The Women’s Building
3543 18th Street between Guerrero and Valencia.
We recommend public transportation as parking is limited.

Please RSVP for KidsWatch and Spanish translation to 861-7077 or info @ ppssf.org

The purpose of this meeting is to have a forum for parents to share their viewpoints around this issue. As there are many perspectives within the parent community, all viewpoints will be respected. PPS-SF is compiling and summarizing notes from the forum and all other comments, phone calls, and emails to share with the district. Please note that SFUSD representatives will not be present on Monday to clarify or answer questions.

Please help us reach people who are interested in this issue to invite them to this meeting.

My view, for the record, is that SFUSD cannot rescind these assignments and must find another way to deal with the problem -- either accept the imbalance or find room to open a new class at Flynn or Alvarado, presuming that a few families would have to accept that move.

Discussion is heated on TheSFKFiles blog about this foulup.

For more info: Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco, 415/861-7077 or info@ppssf.org

More progress at Daniel Webster

Efforts to revitalize Daniel Webster ES took another step forward recently, as reported in this Chron article: Volunteers give S.F. school a fresh look

Enrollment is on the decline and budgets are tight, but a Potrero Hill elementary school received a major face-lift Saturday, as more than 100 volunteers painted its walls and planted flowers in hopes of wooing new students and their parents.

"A fresh coat of paint can do wonders for the community," said Stacey Bartlett with the Potrero Residents Education Fund, a group that supports Daniel Webster Elementary School. "The school district does not have money for the improvement, and it takes the community to help them out."

The Rebuilding Together project at Webster that the article highlights is not the only news at Webster. Their blog chronicles the continuing efforts to get the new preschool up and running. I've been watching this story develop for years now. Nice to see the hard work of volunteers start to bear fruit. Congratulations and good luck to all involved

School Beat: Schools Are What We Make Them

Another excellent School Beat column from Lisa Schiff with a timely message for all families of school age kids, especially those who have gone through the enrollment process, or are still caught up in it: Schools Are What We Make Them

Hey 8th graders, time to plan your path to college!

The UCSF Center for Science & Education Opportunity is hosting a seminar aimed at incoming high school students that will help them understand what UC, CS, and other schools expect and require from graduating high school students.

Plan on College! 2008
Ninth Annual "Plan on College"
Saturday, May 10, 2008
University of California, San Francisco
513 Parnassus
9:00 A.M - 1:30 P.M. [Check-in opens at 8:30 A.M.]

"Plan on College!" includes workshops for students and parents (in English, Spanish and Cantonese) that will provide answers to such questions as:

• What classes do I need to take to become college eligible?
• What is the difference between a UC, a CSU, a Community College, and a Private University?
• How do I pay for a college education?

Opportunities to meet with Counselors from San Francisco and Daly City high schools!

My wife attended an event similar to this when our older daughter was entering high school and I highly recommend it. We still have some questions about what is required versus highly desirable when it comes to course loads, SAT subject tests, etc. But if we had not learned the basics by attending one of these conferences our daughter could have easily neglected some of these UC requirements.

Who will protect vulnerable schools?

The Chronicle coverage of the flap over the Excelsior and Denman situations gets it right in pointing to encroachment by charter schools as the problem here.

"Blindsiding ethnic minority school communities to appease aggressive charter school machinations is an injustice," Denman parent Craig Wong told the Chron's Jill Tucker.

Tucker's article sums it up here:

The district is required under the state's Proposition 39 to provide classroom facilities to charter schools that request space. Charter schools and their advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against school districts that they say don't fulfill the complicated requirements under the law.

San Francisco Unified has been threatened with such suits, which means the school board can legally meet behind closed doors to hammer out agreements and settlements with the specific charters, district officials said.

"It isn't that the staff hasn't considered the impact on the school," said school board member Jill Wynns. "We wouldn't do any of this if we didn't have to."

In following news coverage about charter schools around the state, I've seen many, many articles about situations like this: charter school demands space; school district has no choice but to come up with some; existing school (somehow always one serving low-income minorities) protests the disruption of having to share space with a second school. Now I'm sorry I haven't been archiving those articles. It's an ongoing problem and one of the ways charter schools harm other schools and their students.

The charter schools have all the power in this situation. The current interpretation of Prop. 39, which requires districts to provide sites for charter schools, allows charters to displace existing programs. The charter schools, I note as usual, are fervently backed by the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations, their own well-funded lobbying groups such as the Center for Education Reform and the California Charter Schools Association, and the whole array of right-wing "think tanks," advocacy groups and policy organizations. Oh, and oceans of funding from the billionaires whose hobby and plaything is school reform, of course.

It's really time for advocates to stop feeling like they can't speak up lest they offend someone and start protesting this situation. As we've seen in SFUSD, it's the schools that largely serve low-income minorities that wind up the targets. Those who defend this situation need to step up and say, "Put it at my school." Miraloma? McKinley?

SFUSD handled this badly. But that is not the root of the problem. The laws giving charter schools the right to do this and the clout to wreak as much havoc as they want are the problem.
I just wonder when the situation will get extreme enough that activists become willing to step on some toes to raise a protest.

Quoting from Sharon Higgins' Perimeter Primate blog:

Some of the primates position themselves at the perimeter of the group - where they sit, and watch.

Their role is to warn the inner, oblivious members of the group about dangers that approach.

I already know the charter folks' responses will be: "Nobody reads your charter rants ... ho hum ... whatever..." As the charter defenders don't seem to have any actual case they can make in response to this and other criticisms, they routinely resort to ridicule. I'm sorry that's the case, because I would like to hear how they defend this situation.