School Board Notes 2.13.07

School Board Notes 2.13.07
By Nicole Achs Freeling
Greatschools.net Correspondent

• Mayor Proposes City/District Partnership
• Tech Union Demands Wage Increase
• Timeline for Finding New Superintendent
• Problems, Hopes at Horace Mann
• Former Board Member's Travel Expenses Questioned

Mayor Proposes City/District Partnership

It is a rare occurrence for a sitting mayor to publicly address the Board of Education, and even rarer for it to happen under collegial circumstances. But Tuesday, Mayor Gavin Newsom appeared before the board to pitch a "Partnership for Achievement" that would lay a framework for collaboration between the city and school district in working to improve the schools.

At a time when mayoral takeovers of school districts are grabbing headlines, Newsom's initiative would allow the city and district to work more closely together and pool resources, while respecting the line of governance between the two.

"This is not about governing or creating policy, but setting up a framework where we all respect our roles," Newsom told the board.  "If we have a plan, we can support you in making tough decisions in a proactive way, not in a reactive way like we did last year," he said, referring to his objection to the board's decision to close schools, specifically merging John Swett Elementary into John Muir Elementary.

The city, Newsom said, has more than 60 departments and almost everyone provides services that has some connection to youth and education. From shared facility maintenance to greening the schoolyards, "we haven't scratched the surface of what we can do in collaboration.

Board members and acting Superintendent Gwen Chan were full of praise for the plan, which will come to the board for a vote at its next regular meeting, February 27.

Newsom's office has long been working to build a closer relationship with the district. He hired Hydra Mendoza to serve a liaison between the city and BOE, a post she continues to hold while serving on the board.

The partnership was created with input from the board members and Chan. It identifies six strategic areas:

• A marketing campaign to showcase school programs and professionals
• Initiatives to recruit and retain educators, including a plan by the mayor to help teacher's retire student loans and get low-cost home loans
• Use of local funds to expand services that will help students come to school healthy and ready to learn
• Increased investment in early education, after-school programming, collaborative wraparound services and violence-prevention programs
• Strategies to prepare students for the modern workforce, such as the development of career pathways in competitive workforce areas
• Alignment of facilities planning efforts to develop “hubs” to share in creating safe neighborhoods and community centers

Tech Union Demands Wage Increase

Members of the union representing information technology professionals at the district said that after five years without pay increases it was time for the district to negotiate with members and increase their wages. Information technology employees have not had an across-the-board pay increase since 2001, and now make almost 30 percent less than employees in comparable posts working for the city, representatives said. The union met with District Labor Relations Manager Tom Ruiz in January. The district would not negotiate with the group under former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, but it changed its position under Chan and agreed to meet with members, according to the union's newsletter. So far, however, district officials have said they don't have the money to fund the increase the union is asking for, which would bring its salaries in line with those of city employees.

"It goes deeper than equal pay for equal work," Frank Morales, an IT professional who has been with the city since 1980, told the board. In the central office alone, he said, eight people have left for better pay elsewhere. Those employees have not been replaced, he said. "Their responsibilities and duties didn't leave with them but got heaped on the remaining employees." Burdensome workloads have made it difficult to meet federal and state reporting requirements, he said, and "morale is devastated."

Timeline for Finding New Superintendent

The board has set May 17 as its target date for finding and making an offer to a new superintendent, Commissioner Hydra Mendoza told the public, recapping discussions that have been held in committee. The district will spend the next month and a half soliciting public input that will be used to create a profile of the qualities the community values in a leader. The board hopes to interview finalists May 10 to 12, and make a final choice the following week. "It's a very aggressive timeline, but one I feel we can meet," Commissioner Mendoza said.

Commissioner Eric Mar announced that the district is establishing an interactive Web site, also available in Spanish and Chinese, that will allow people to respond to a questionnaire about what they want from their schools and from a superintendent.

Problems, Hopes at Horace Mann

A report by the state intervention team charged with monitoring the progress of Horace Mann, an under-performing middle school that has been under state sanctions since 2004, said the school is working hard to put rigorous teaching programs in place but is still struggling with several intractable problems. District representative DeeDee Desmond reported that 84 percent of incoming sixth-graders are below grade level in math and language arts, a problem she attributed to the current student assignment process. Staff turnover has also been a problem, Desmond said. The school has had three principals in three years, and 14 of the school's 32 instructors are new to teaching.

"Horace Mann was a high-achieving school when we were using a race-based assignment process and should be considered when we have that discussion," Commissioner Jill Wynns observed.

School officials are hopeful the Horace Mann may qualify for funding under a recent legal settlement between the California Teachers Association and the state that will bring $2.9 million to under-performing schools. Some 23 schools in SFUSD are eligible. There is enough money to fund about a third of the schools in the state that qualify; The state has committed to funding one school in each county, then allotting the rest through an application process.

Former Board Member's Travel Expenses Questioned

A consent calendar item pulled from the last general meeting questioned a request to reimburse former Commissioner Dan Kelly for $12,474 of expenses incurred traveling on district business. At issue were not the expenses themselves, which were all deemed legitimate, but that they dated back to 1992.

"Making reimbursements that date back that far seems unreasonable," said Commissioner Jane Kim, who proposed reimbursing expenses up to three years ago, the legal statute of limitations.

"I'm concerned about where this money is coming from," Mendoza said. "It's a significant amount of money that could impinge on what's going to school sites."

Other members, however, said that since the board currently has no rules specifically articulating reimbursement of expenses, it was not fair to make those rules and apply them retroactively.

"There are some extraordinary circumstances with this person, and I don't think it's fair to expect us to apply rules that don't exist," Commissioner Kim-Shree Maufus said, adding that it was important to establish some rules as soon as possible.

Board members ultimately approved the expenses, with Jane Kim casting the sole dissenting vote, but agreed to look into setting rules regarding reimbursement of expenses. Typically, board members have paid their own way on trips or had the trips funded by charitable groups unless they were traveling as representatives of the district, as Dr. Kelly had been on all the occasions in question. Commissioner Wynns pointed out he had paid his own expenses on numerous occasions.

School Board Notes 2.5.07

School Board Notes 2.5.07
By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

Superintendent Search Begins

The board, meeting as a Committee of the Whole, took its first steps toward finding a new Superintending, working with search firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates to make several important decisions about the process.

The biggest issue was whether to conduct a confidential or open search. The latter would allow community input in the final decision but, search executives say, would discourage many qualified candidates from seeking the post because they don't want it known they would consider leaving their current position.

In the last search for a Superintendent, the names of some of the candidates were leaked by, according to Commissioner Jill Wynns, members of the Community Advisory Council. "Your district does have some history where confidentiality was not maintained and, quite candidly that's going to hurt you," said Bill Attea, partner in the firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, which is leading the search.

Attea told the board that the most qualified candidates usually request confidentiality. Those the least concerned with it, he said, tend to be not currently employed, are from another field, or are serving in a lower-level capacity so even their consideration for the post would be seen as an honor.
"We've never had any sitting superintendents who have gone public with their candidacy" before a job offer was made, Attea said. "We have had several situations where there was a leak and the candidates withdrew their applications."

The Committee decided to hold a confidential search with the possibility of making the process open to public input in the very final stages, subject to the candidates being willing to have their names revealed. It also decided to solicit a large amount of input on the front end. Over the next two months, the search firm will hold stakeholder focus groups and a number of public meetings to gather public opinion on what San Francisco residents want from their schools and their new superintendent. One proposed forum was an upcoming Parents Conference, sponsored by local community-based organizations, to be held on March 5.

The board will convene a Citizens Advisory Council of at least 20 members including youth, parents, advocacy group representatives, union leaders and other stakeholders. The CAC will be charged with taking the report generated from the public engagement process and using it to develop a list of criteria the search firm will use in finding candidates. "These will be our marching orders, the criteria we're going to measure every candidate against," Attea said.

The firm wil then publicize the search and begin recruiting. It will ultimately come up with a short list of 12 to 15 candidates, and then narrow that down to about five for the board to interview. The board is looking to search for, decide on, and make an offer to a candidate by the end of May. Interim Superintendent Gwen Chan's contract expires in June.

Wynns, the only board member to have already presided over a superintendent search, shared a problem encountered during the last search, when the board did not review the applicants' resumes until the finalist candidates were presented. Several of the people recommended as finalists, she said, "were unacceptable to us because they would have been unacceptable to the community." The board asked to review all the applications of serious candidates, not just those on the search firm's short list.

San Francisco School Board Notes: School Board Notes 1.23.07

School Board Notes 1.23.07
By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• Board Adopts Prop. H Spending Plan
• Norman Yee Back at his Seat
• Board Denies Charter School Petition
• Wallenberg HS Wants Beloved Counselor Back
• Gloria R. Davis to Move to Marshall

Board Adopts Prop. H Spending Plan

At its regular meeting Tuesday night, the board approved a Proposition H spending plan that allocates significant funds for violence prevention and translation services, while slightly increasing the amount of money for academic support, a cause that had been championed by district staff.

The board spent more than two hours taking public testimony, discussing line items and tinkering with amounts before deciding on a figure its members could support. The biggest debate arose over how to spend the discretionary portion of the funds, which represent half the $20 million SFUSD will get in Prop. H funds this year. The Community Advisory Committee, along with members of the public and the Youth Council, had supported funding that was heavy in violence-prevention programs, peer resources and translation services. The superintendent's office had requested more of the funds go to academic support, specifically computer upgrades for students and teachers, a system for tracking individual student progress, and reading and math coaches to help teachers improve their instructional practice.

In the end, the board united behind a proposal by President Mark Sanchez. It called for adopting almost all of the CAC's recommendations but shaving $350,000 off various allocations and giving that money back to the superintendent's office for greater academic support. In its original recommendation to the board, the superintendent had asked for $3.1 million for academic support. She recently came back to the board with a compromise recommendation asking for $1.5 million.

Members of the community appealed to the board about the critical need for violence prevention, peer resources and translation services. Two students said they had been suicidal before they became involved with the peer resources program. They described the program as transformational in its ability to help them gain confidence and self-respect. Other students spoke about witnessing friends being killed or assaulted over minor disagreements, and urged the board to adopt the CAC's recommendations for violence prevention.

The board ultimately adopted the CAC's recommendations, with the following modifications:

• Allocating $550,000, rather than $600,00, for peer resources (-$50,000)
• Allocating $550,000, rather than $600,00, for translation services (-$50,000)
• Allocating $1.55 million, rather than $1.65 million, to middle and high schools for developing violence-prevention programs (-$100,000)
• Eliminating an allocation for a full-time security aide, to be shared between school sites (-$100,000)
• Eliminating an allocation for noon-time monitors (-$20,000)
• Reducing from $250,000 to $236,072 the allocation to establish an evaluating system and hire a coordinator to track and assess use of Prop. H funds (-$14,000)

A copy of the CAC and the superintendent's respective recommendations can be found at the district Web site.

Norman Yee Back at His Seat

Commissioner Norman Yee, who has been hospitalized since being hit by a car while crossing the street December 26, attended the meeting for a short while Tuesday. Yee wore a neck brace and walked with a cane, and could only stay for about an hour. But the commissioner appeared to be in good spirits, and participated actively in the Prop. H discussion. Although he did not say for the vote, he expressed his support for some form of compromise that would retain much of the CAC's recommendations while supporting teachers and administrators need for greater funds for academic support.

Board Denies Charter School Petitions

The board denied two charter school applications before it Tuesday evening, for Bay Area Technology School (Baytech – San Francisco) and Sputnik Math, Science and Language Academy.

BayTech had been proposed as a high school in Bayview/Hunters Point. The owner, Willow Corp., operates a similar school in Oakland. After reviewing the application, staff recommended it be denied for several reasons. Staff members did not feel the charter had adequate community support, and many of those who signed its petition for a charter were not San Francisco residents. The school would not have a local board, but rather be run by Willow's San Mateo-based office. Also, the district was concerned about the charter's plan to draw at least 50 percent of its students from SFUSD schools. Willow had stated a plan of going into local schools and attempting to recruit students, a move Commissioner Jill Wynns said would be "unprecedented and possibly illegal."

Supporters of the school said that it had a successful track record in Oakland of helping under-served students perform and excel. They also pointed to the fact that, with the closing of Gloria R. Davis, Bayview/Hunters Point residents have asked the district to consider locating a charter school in their neighborhood.

Sputnik Academy had been proposed as a K-3 school with a Russian-language focus, targeting English-language learners. After reviewing its application, staff recommended denying the charter because the owners had no track record and staff members were concerned about the ability of the school to meet the needs of English language learners. Its plan did not call for a way of assessing English proficiency, nor did it indicate the instructional support (such as an additional half-hour of classroom instruction per day) and special textbook materials needed for ELL students.

Supporters of the school said it offered them a valuable way to preserve their native language and Russian heritage. District officials noted that SFUSD is working begin a Russian two-way immersion program in the near future.

Wallenberg HS Wants Beloved Counselor Back

About three dozen parents and students at Raoul Wallenberg High School in the Western Addition asked for the return of a beloved counselor, Ernest Stanton, who had been moved to an administrative job at the district. Audience members, who waited long into the night to make their case to the board, held signs saying Mr. Stanton "enhances educational development," "strengthens efforts of staff," "practices individual assessment" and "monitors student achievement."

Gloria R. Davis to Move to Marshall

After waiting late into the night to hear the fate of their school, Gloria R. Davis students and teachers got good news. The district will most likely be able to keep the school as a separate academy within Thurgood Marshall, Superintendent Gwen Chan said. As long as 30 students from the school agree to transfer to Marshall, and "the numbers look good," Chan said, the district should be able to keep the students together, keep some of the teachers, and offer core curriculum as a separate Gloria R. Davis academy co-housed within Marshall. Students would also be able to take advantage of extracurricular activities, honor courses and enrichment activities available at Marshall. The fate of Gloria R. Davis has been uncertain since the board voted at its last meeting to close the school due to its inability to build enough enrollment to support a 9-12th grade program.

School Board Notes 1.16.07

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent
Originally published here

• Committee Considers Prop. H Plan
• Task Force Presents Small Schools Policy
• District Launches Parcel Tax Initiative
• Meetings to Start an Hour Earlier

Committee Considers Prop. H Plan

School board members on Tuesday night considered a plan submitted by the Community Advisory Committee on how to spend the $20 million the district will receive this year in Prop. H funds. The board, meeting as the Committee of the Whole, also considered a plan outlined by the superintendent’s office on how the money could be spent.

The board will vote to adopt a Prop H spending plan at its next meeting, January 23. Copies of the CAC’s proposal can be obtained on the Web .

The CAC reviewed the superintendent’s proposal in developing its spending plan and included most of staff’s recommendations and requests. However, there were several areas where the two differed significantly. The CAC recommended some allocations not included in the superintendent's proposal, including:

• $1.65 million for violence prevention, with site allocations of $50,000 for each middle and high school. The site council would work in conjunction with the students to determine how to allocate the funds, and would solicit proposals from community-based organizations such as YouthSpeaks, a youth newspaper, and United Playaz, a performing arts program. The CAC also recommended expanding the peer resources programs at secondary schools to include six additional schools. The superintendent’s request did not include funds for violence prevention, and sought only to maintain the existing peer resources programs already established through Prop. H.
• $600,000 for translation services, which would allow for expanding the hiring of interpreters, translation of school and district notices, and translation to other languages, including Russian and Samoan, from only Spanish and Chinese. The superintendent’s proposal recommended $125,000 for the purpose of expanding translation.
• $770,000 to support adding wellness centers, which provide nursing care, counseling and peer resources, at four additional high schools so that every high school in the district would have one. The superintendent’s proposal sought three wellness centers for $577,500 and would leave one school, Washington High School, without one.

The CAC spending plan also left out some funds in the superintendent’s proposal, including:

• A computer replacement program requested by the superintendent that would have provided updated computers for teachers, classrooms and computer labs at the high school level.
• A request for a district-wide assessment system to gauge student progress.
• Half the $1.4 million the superintendent had requested to acquire 10 math and language arts coaches to support teachers in improving instructional practice.

Superintendent Gwen Chan expressed concern that the CAC had rejected significant allocations for academic support and placed them instead in violence prevention and peer resources programs. In particular, district staff emphasized the need for math and language coaches, computer replacement and a district-wide assessment program. The district has recently failed to make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind law because of the achievement gap between the minority students and the district as a whole. A staff representative said coaching has been effective in helping teachers better serve under-performing students.

The staff also said that the high school computers are outdated and can’t support programs the schools would like to offer students.

Committee members, for their part, said that in public meetings, that they had heard over and over again the need for violence prevention and peer resources.

“If there was anything we heard over and above anything else it was the value of peer resources to the youth,” said Prop. H CAC member Sandra Fewer, who works with Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth.

Community meetings also elicited strong testimony about the need for increased translation services for non English-speaking parents. A large contingent of foreign parents appeared at the meeting to appeal — in languages including Chinese, Spanish and Samoan — for services that would enable them to better communicate with teachers and the district. Parents told of the many complications that arose from not being able to read letters sent from the school, as well as the frustration of not being able to actively participate in their children’s academic progress. One parent said she almost missed an opportunity to enroll her daughter in a gifted program because she couldn’t read the letter informing her that her daughter qualified. Another parent at Tenderloin Community School spoke of how panic at the largely ELL school after a student died suddenly as a result of a viral infection. Parents couldn’t read the letters sent home and didn’t know whether a critical risk had been posed their children.

Such testimony had prompted the CAC to support the recommendation of $600,000, a figure put forth by immigrant advocacy groups. District staff said its lower $125,000 figure came from assessments in consultation with its translation staff about how much it would cost to increase translation services. The district currently spends $375,000 on Spanish and Chinese translation services.

Task Force Presents Small Schools Policy

The Small Schools Task Force made a presentation pitching the value of small schools and presenting a draft policy for how the district could support and develop small schools by design. The small schools initiative seeks to boost student achievement through smaller student populations, more personalized instruction and, in some cases, unique curriculum approaches. It is largely aimed at closing the achievement gap between the district as a whole and English language learners and students of color. It also seeks to create high-quality schools that will help retain and attract students to the district, whose enrollment has been declining.

The task force was chartered by the district last June to develop a policy framework for supporting small schools; it comprises SFUSD staff working at existing small schools, as well as parents, students, district staff, union representatives and community-based organizations. The group’s draft policy lays out how the district would define small schools, how schools could become eligible to join the initiative, as well as how they would be funded, staffed, assessed and held accountable. It also outlines the district’s role in supporting the schools.

The policy was drafted by the task force in collaboration with district staff. Copies can be obtained by contacting district representative Mary Richards at (415) 355-7323. The policy will be presented to the full board for first reading at it next meeting, Jan. 23. It will then be forwarded to at least two committees. Board members would then revise the draft or give it back to the task force or district staff to revise before it comes before making a final vote.

District Launches Parcel Tax Initiative

The district is drawing up plans for a parcel tax that would raise money to increase pay for educators and other staff.

The tax would seek to raise funds to achieve the following:

• Raise the salary schedule to be a more competitive district.
• Provide financial incentives to attract teachers to hard-to-staff subjects and schools.
• Provide greater and more consistent professional development.
• Provide increased support through classroom aides and teaching materials.

No timeline has been developed yet for the tax. Board President Mark Sanchez said: “The need is so immediate, I would want this to go forward in November.” Timing, however, would also be based in part on the period needed to build public support, board members said. One next step will be polling to gauge public opinion on the measure.

Meetings to Start an Hour Earlier

The committee decided to move the start time for general meetings (held the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month) from 7 p.m. to 6 p.m. starting with the February 12 meeting. The change was made so that the meetings, which often stretch until close to midnight, could end earlier. The committee also agreed to hold its closed session meetings the Thursdays before the general meetings. Closed session meetings are currently held before the general meetings, and often delay the start of the meeting.

School Board Notes 1.9.2007

School Board Notes 1.9.2007
By Nicole Achs Freeling

• New Members Take Seats, Yee Joins By Phone
• Sanchez Lays Out Policy Goals
• Bayview Dream Schools Reconfigured
• Bus Drivers Slapped with Health Cost Hike

New Members Take Seats, Yee Joins By Phone

The first board meeting of 2007 began with three brand new members — Hydra Mendoza, Kim-Shree Maufus and Jane Kim — and one empty seat, that of 2006 Board President Norman Yee, who is in the hospital after being hit by a car on December 26.

Yee was hit while crossing the street at Fourth and Bryant streets. He in stable condition after two spinal surgeries and is "in good spirits," according to a statement from him read by Commissioner Jill Wynns. Yee participated briefly in the meeting, speaking by phone from his hospital bed, to nominate Commissioner Mark Sanchez as president. Yee was elected as vice president.

Sanchez Lays Out Policy Goals

After his nomination was unanimously approved, Sanchez laid out his list of priorities. They included:

• "Focus on the neediest... The ones that haven't been part of the success story." African-American students in particular, he said, had shown a marked lack of progress over the last few years, and the district needed to determine ways to address that.
• Implement more "small schools by design," facilities with small student bodies and a focus on personalized learning.
• Look at student assignment not only to desegregate the school system, but the schools themselves. "Some of these schools may look integrated by the numbers, but if you look in the classroom, it's totally divided by race," he said. "If we're going to integrate, we need real integration and not the apartheid that's existing right now."
• Look at getting board members compensated so they can "do the job (they) need to do." Currently, board members get paid $500 a month. Most hold full-time jobs in addition to board service, which, Sanchez admitted, doesn't always leave time to fully research the issues before them.
• Add committees, such as a personnel committee to work on the search for a new superintendent and a labor committee to work with bargaining units and attempt to avoid conflicts such as those that almost provoked teacher and employee strikes last year.
• Start meetings earlier and end them earlier. He proposed beginning the meetings at 6 p.m. and shifting closed session meetings to a different day so the regular meetings start on time.

Bayview Dream Schools Reconfigured

The board voted to

• Keep Charles Drew as a K-3 academy
• Change Willie Brown from a 4-6 to a 4-8 school
• Close Gloria R. Davis (currently a 7-9 school) or move it to an alternate location, where it would become a 9-12 school

The board heard public testimony from Davis supporters — as well as impassioned outbursts from the audience, which included over a dozen uniformed members of the Gloria R. Davis marching band. Community members spoke of the success and impact of the Dream Schools, special programs designed to serve under-performing communities with longer hours and Saturday sessions, uniforms and a rigorous academic curriculum to push students to succeed. Community members also spoke about the importance of continuing to have a high school within the Bayview community, and urged the district to establish Gloria R. Davis as a separate academy housed at nearby Thurgood Marshall High School.

Board members supported the idea, directing staff to explore how it might be achieved and find out how many students would chose that option over going to other high schools. In the meantime, so the students can participate in the Round 1 enrollment lottery January 19, the board voted to give Davis students their first choice of high schools for 2007-08. If students wish to apply to Lowell, they can still be considered (the deadline was in December), although they would have to meet the school's academic standards.

Bus Drivers Slapped With Health Cost Hike

A week before Christmas vacation, the district's school bus drivers were told they would be facing increases in health insurance costs of up to 500 percent when school started again in January. For a family with children, the cost deducted from employees' paychecks soared from about $60 to $450, said school bus driver Brock Estes. The bus drivers believe the last-minute notice about the increase violates their contract. Estes said Laidlaw, the company that employs the drivers, has refused to expedite arbitration, which means it could take eight to 10 months for the issue to be settled, and the money will continue to be deducted from employees' pay.

Although the district contracts with Laidlaw for transportation services and has limited ability to influence the issue, Estes urged the board to ask Laidlaw to expedite arbitration and settle the issue quickly. The San Francisco bus drivers have an outstanding safety record, Estes pointed out at a previous meeting: Each year, about 75 children are killed on, entering or exiting school buses. "The rate for San Francisco over the last 35 years we've been providing bus service is zero."

GreatSchools.net: Prop H Committee Decides How to Spend Discretionary Funds

Originally published on GreatSchools.net here
Prop H Committee Decides How to Spend Discretionary Funds
By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

A community advisory committee decided Thursday evening, January 4, 2007, how to allocate $10 million worth of discretionary funding through Proposition H, a voter-approved initiative that provides millions for programs to enrich public education.

Proposition H allocations will total $30 million in 07/08. One-third goes to the First Five Commission for preschool for all, one-third goes specifically for sports, libraries, arts and music programs (SLAM), and one-third can be used at the committee's discretion for a wide range of purposes. The Proposition H Community Advisory Committee voted Thursday on the portion known as the "third third," the portion allowed for general uses.

The committee sorted through numerous competing requests for the funds, including a spending plan proposed by the Superintendent's office and about $1.8 million worth of programs proposed by the Student Advisory Council. Since the committee plans to continue funding all of the programs it has initiated in previous years, the amount left for new programs in the "third third" is about $3.3 million.

The appropriations the committee approved included:

• $600,000 for translation services to help teachers, administrators and the district communicate with parents, both orally and through written materials. It is intended to include interpretation and translation in languages such as Samoan and Russian, for which there are currently no translation services, as well as expanding services in Spanish and Chinese.
• $600,000 to support Peer Resource Programs at middle and high schools. The funds continue programs initiated in prior years through Prop H, and add two new middle school and two new high school programs, for a total of six middle school and eight high school Peer Resource Programs.
• $770,000 to add wellness centers at four high schools. Wellness Centers provide health and mental health services including nursing services, substance abuse counseling and conflict resolution. With the addition of these centers, every one of the district's high schools will now have a wellness center.
• Close to $3 million to have a part-time nurse, counselor or other learning support professional at each elementary school. This allocation would simply continue to fund a program already initiated through Prop H; it does not allocate any additional funding or
• $585,000 in new funding to provide middle schools with mental health services. The funds would add one part-time mental health professional at each middle school.
• $250,000 in in-kind services (rather than funds) from the city's department of  public health, possibly to be allocated for a pilot mental health program in secondary schools.
• $300,000 to develop a program at O'Connell High School and a  as-yet-to-be-determined middle school providing targeted support to students who reenter the school system after being chronically truant. The program would help these students catch up with their peers and reintegrate into the school system, as well as provide emotional support.
• $741,017 for custodial services. The district facililities office had proposed the money be allocated at 16 elementary schools and several CDCs. Committee members, however, took issue with the funds not going to any middle or high schools, especially after hearing testimony from many high school students about the condition of their bathrooms. It asked the district to  allocate the funds equally between CDCs, elementary schools, middle schools and high schools, identifying the schools of greatest need within each category.
• A pool  of money, amount to be determined, to be given to each high school to bring in nonprofit organizations to provide violence prevention and/or youth-driven programming. The funds would bring community-based organizations such as YouthSpeaks (a youth media project, United Playaz (a performing arts program) and similar program into the schools. It will be dispersed through each of the schools' wellness centers in conjunction with peer resources.
• $73,110  to add a full-time teacher for career and technical education.
• $250,000 to establish a system for evaluating the success of Prop H programs and to hire a staff person to serve as the Prop H coordinator.

The Committee voted down a proposal by the district for $255,161 for emergency supplies, which would ensure a baseline level of disaster preparedness at each school, including water, food and supplies in each classroom. Committee members said other funds should be available to cover those expenses, including federal funding provided through the Department of Homeland Security.

School Board Notes 12.12.06

Thanks, as always, to Nicole Freeling and GreatSchools.net for producing this invaluable notes and allowing us to publish them here. Don't forget, they can also be found here.

• Board OKs Sweeping Language Initiative
• District Squeezed By Charter Schools Seeking Space
• Exiting Board Members Offer Parting Thoughts
• 2007-08 School Calendar Adopted
• Board Chooses Firm to Head Superintendent Search

Board OKs Sweeping Language Initiative

In an ambitious plan backed by the school board Tuesday night, SFUSD will aim to give very student in the district the opportunity to be a bilingual or multilingual graduate.

The board passed a unanimous resolution calling for the superintendent to draft a 21-member Blue Ribbon Task Force comprising parents, teachers, school planners, language experts, employee groups, business organizations and civic leaders to develop models for achieving this goal. The resolution also calls for the superintendent to use these findings to develop a plan for multilingual education, which will be presented to the board by Oct 1 of next year.

"This would not necessary be an all-immersion model," said Commissioner Dan Kelly, who authored the resolution along with Commissioners Norman Yee and Eric Mar. Immersion programs are expected to play a big part, however. The resolution builds on one passed earlier this year that called for expanding the district's popular two-way immersion programs and creating programs that could serve upper as well as lower grades.

The initiative approved Tuesday seeks not only to serve native English speakers, but also to help non-native speakers become English proficient while receiving a level of instruction equal to that of their English-speaking peers. The task force will work in concert with the district's Bilingual Community Council, which recently issued a report saying that English language learners are not being adequately served by the district's programs.

The move, board members said, could be an opportunity for the district to create a model for multilingual instruction with wide-ranging influence. "This is really cutting against the grain of an English-only wave that is going on in this country," Mar observed.

An obvious obstacle is funding such a large-scale effort at a time when the district faces dire budgetary constraints. "We're going to aggressively seek out external funding sources," Mar said. "We'll use every means at our disposal to find funds to pay for this program."

District Squeezed By Charter Schools Seeking Space

The district is scrambling to respond to an unusually large number of requests for facilities by new and existing charter schools, and may have to force many under-enrolled district schools to share their space, according to a board discussion Tuesday night.

Under Proposition 39, a voter initiative approved in 2000, the district is legally required to provide facilities to approved charters equivalent to those provided to students at traditional public schools. The charters in turn pay rent for the space.

This year, the district is facing requests from five existing schools representing about 1,700 students and four newly formed charters. The district has until April 1 to find a home for these schools.

They include:

Existing Schools

• City Arts and Tech High School (391 students)
• Metropolitan Arts and Tech High School (303 students)
• Kipp Bayview Academy, a fifth- to eighth-grade school (265 students)
• Edison Elementary School (401 students)
• Leadership High School (360 students)

New Schools

• Bayview Essential School of Music, Art and Social Justice
• Bay Area Technology Charter School
• Sputnik Math, Science and Language Academy
• Aim High Community School

"We're probably not going to be able to provide stand-alone facilities in response to all these requests," Yee said. "There is a strong possibility more schools are going to need to be merging. We should really start telling the community this is going to happen."

Sites mentioned as possible homes for the charters included DeAvila, which was closed a few years ago and is currently leased by City College; Treasure Island, which closed last year; and Newcomer's existing site if the city is unable to lease it, as hoped. Schools that could be adapted to co-house charters include Mission High School, Balboa High School, Denman Middle School and Everett Middle School, according to David Golden, facilities director. Board members also cited Malcolm X and Gloria R. Davis Academy as possible charter locations, if those schools are closed.

Exiting Board Members Offer Parting Thoughts

In their last meeting before new members are sworn in January, departing board members Dan Kelly, Sarah Lipson and Eddie Chin thanked their colleagues, the staff and the community, and offered thoughts about their respective tenures on the board.

"I'm very proud of our proud of the quality of our schools," said Lipson, who has served four years on the board. "I wish the media would focus more on that." Lipson said if she could give any advice to the new board members, "it would be ... agree to disagree respectfully. We had trouble with that a couple of years ago and it's taken us a long time to rebuild our credibility."

Eddie Chin, who has been on the board eight years, specifically thanked the interim superintendent, Gwen Chan, "for your exemplary leadership through the hardships and difficult times of the last year." He assured the public, "I'll still be around, doing public service if not holding public office."

The most senior member of the board, Dan Kelly, who has served for the last 15 years, praised San Francisco's role as a national leader in school policy, with such initiatives as small class size, restoring arts programs to elementary school, the weighted student formula, site-based budgeting, and even "our innovated consent decree, that highlighted student achievement as the real issue." Kelly said the credit lay not only with the board: "We're just the foam on the very big wave that is the progressive thought and positive influence of the people of San Francisco. We've been very fortunate to be the voice of this community to the nation and to push the rest of the nation to follow San Francisco values."

Lipson and Chin had not sought re-election; Kelly was unsuccessful in his bid for a fifth term. In January, newly elected commissioners Jane Kim, Hydra Mendoza and Kim Shree-Maufus will join the board.

2007-08 School Calendar Adopted

The calendar for the school year starting next fall is as follows:

• Aug. 27: First day of instruction
• Sept. 3: Labor Day (School closed)
• Oct. 8: Columbus/Indigenous People's Day/Dia de la Raza (School closed)
• Nov. 12: Veterans Day (School closed)
• Nov. 21 — 23: Thanksgiving recess
• Dec. 17 — Jan. 01: Winter break
• Jan. 21: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (School closed)
• Jan. 24 Last day of fall semester
• Jan. 25: Semester break
• Feb. 7: Lunar New Year (School closed)
• Feb. 8: Professional development day (School closed)
• Feb. 18: Presidents Day (School closed)
• March 24 — 28: Spring break
• Mar. 31: Cesar Chavez Day (School closed)
• May 26: Memorial Day (School closed)
• June 13: Spring semester ends, last day of school

In a related matter, the board voted to close schools on the nearest Monday or Friday when Lunar New Year falls on a weekend. Currently, schools close only when the holiday falls during the week.

Board Chooses Firm to Head Superintendent Search

After receiving proposals from five executive search firms and interviewing three, the board chose to hire the firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates to lead its search for a new superintendent. The ad hoc committee charged with interviewing the firms had recommended two: California School Board Association which, according to Eric Mar, was seen as having a better sense of the board and of the district's diverse nature, and Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, which is a national, more experienced firm and was seen as having a wider geographic reach.

School Board Notes 12.5.06

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• Big Expansion of Language Programs Backed
• Move to Reconfigure Dream Schools

Big Expansion of Language Programs Backed

The Board of Education's Curriculum and Program Committee endorsed a resolution last night that would greatly expand the district’s language immersion programs and foreign language offerings. The resolution by Commissioners Dan Kelly, Eric Mar and Norman Yee would seek to provide every student the opportunity to graduate SFUSD with native-language fluency in English and another language. The resolution would "allow parents to decide what second language their children will acquire upon entering the district’s kindergarten."

The proposal calls upon the superintendent to coordinate a one-year study and develop a plan, to be presented to the board by October 1, 2007, that could be phased in over a number of years. The study would be overseen by a 21-member Blue Ribbon Task Force comprising parents, teachers, school planners, language experts, business organizations and civic leaders in consultation with the district’s bilingual community council. The resolution will be voted on by the full board at the next regular meeting, December 12.

The resolution did not lay out specifics for achieving its goal. Mar said one likely component would be to expand the two-way immersion programs that have been highly popular at the district, and to expand opportunities for such programs beyond fifth grade, at which most of the current programs end.

Move to Reconfigure Dream Schools

With Gloria R. Davis, a "Dream School," unable to recruit students to fill its upper grades, the committee endorsed a proposal to reconfigure the Dream Schools in a way that would relocate or phase out the high school portion.

The Dream School program, established two years ago, is aimed at reforming lower-performing schools with a highly academic curriculum, required student uniforms, a longer school day and Saturday schools. The idea at the time was for Dream Schools to present a unified program running from pre-K through 12th grade. The current Dream Schools are Charles Drew, serving K-3; Willie Brown Jr. serving 4-6; and Gloria R. Davis, which, now serves 7-9. Davis was envisioned as a high school that would run through 12th grade. But it has been unable to recruit new students to upper grades, or retain Dream School students once they reach high school age. Its ninth-grade class currently has 26 students and four teachers.

The district has been looking at reconfiguring the grades at several of the Dream Schools to phase out upper grades. Hoover Liddell, a former district leader serving as a consultant to the superintendent, presented several proposals that community leaders in Bayview and at the affected schools had developed. These included:

• Keep Drew K-3; Have a "Drew" campus at Brown for 4-5 and another campus at Brown for 6-8; and close Davis.
• Close Drew at its current location; open a Drew campus at Brown for K-5; and maintain Davis as a 6-8.
• Keep Drew K-3; Have Brown be 4-5 and Davis serve 6-8. In this model, the focus at Brown would be getting kids to grade level by fifth grade; at Davis, the focus would be on helping students qualify for admission to Lowell, a high school with a merit-based admissions process.

The resolution forwarded to the BOE, which will likely be voted on Tuesday, does not contain any specific proposals, however. Committee members asked staff to continue to work with the Bayview community and gather more public input, presenting specific proposals to the board for consideration at its January 9 meeting. At that point, it could make a decision before Round 1 enrollment applications are due.

School Board Notes 11.28.06

• Diversity Index Not Diversifying, Report Says
• Proposal Would Add Race/Ethnicity as a Factor
• Community Input Gathered for Long-Range Plan

Diversity Index Not Diversifying, Report Says

As the Board of Education considers changing the method of assigning students to schools, including adding race as a factor, it met as the Committee of the Whole last night and heard a presentation from the staff about segregation in the district.

The school choice process by which families list their seven most desired schools was meant to provide equal access to the best schools for diverse groups of students. However, data staff presented revealed troubling issues related to race.

The numbers of families who chose to participate in the choice process varies significantly by ethnic group. Five percent of Chinese-American students don't participate, compared to 15 percent of white students, 32 percent of Latino students, and 50 percent of African-American students.

In addition, the schools families chose varies by ethnic group. The most requested elementary school for African Americans is Drew; for Chinese Americans, Lawton; for Latino, Buena Vista; and for Caucasians, Lilienthal. Not one of the most requested elementary schools is common across all racial and ethnic groups.

The result, district data showed, is that the applicant pool for each school is not racially and ethnically diverse.

• 44 percent (43 schools out of 97) of the schools had applicant pools of more than 45 percent of any single ethnic group. The district considers any school that has more than 45 percent of any single ethnic group to be segregated.
• 22 percent (21 schools) had applicant pools of more than 60 percent of one racial or ethnic group.

"The diversity index is not designed to optimize racial/ethnic diversity and it doesn't, especially when the applicant pool already has high concentrations of single racial/ethnic groups requesting specific schools," the staff report stated.

The report also noted that 17 percent of the students who apply in the first round of the process do not go on to become SFUSD students, even though half of these students received their first-choice school. Attrition rates are highest among white families: 36 percent of white families participating in the first round did not go on to enroll in SFUSD.

Proposal Would Add Race/Ethnicity as a Factor

The meeting was called in part to discuss a board proposal to modify the student assignment method that would, among other changes, include race a factor. The proposal was withdrawn from the agenda at the last meeting because some board members felt further discussion was needed. At last night's meeting, Commissioners Eric Mar and Eddie Chin voiced their support for the proposal and urged that it be introduced at the next regular meeting, on December 12.

"This may not be perfect, but we have to move as quickly as we can and see if we can put ethnicity back in student assignment," Chin said.

The proposed resolution directs the district to take steps including:

• Add race and ethnicity as a factor in the student assignment lottery
• Create a working group to recommend changes to the admissions process for Lowell High School and SOTA High School that would ensure equitable opportunities for students with diverse backgrounds to attend the schools and increase the diversity of the enrollment
• Work with the Omega Group, a consulting firm, to examine current attendance area boundaries
• Review and revise the transportation system in a manner consistent with the goals of the student assignment method

Community Input Gathered for Long Range Plan

As part of its comprehensive plan to revise student assignment and stanch declining enrollment, the board initiated a community engagement effort headed by the Parent Advisory Council to gather input from stakeholders. The PAC reported last night on the results of its efforts thus far.

The PAC will continue to hold community meetings through December and January. It will analyze the findings and prepare a final report by early March. The staff will present a long-range plan to the board sometime later that month.

So far, the PAC has held 50 meetings, and spoken with 500 community members, including 100 youth. PAC members said it was premature to offer detail on the opinions they were hearing. They did report, however, that community members wanted a say in the process but that many people were skeptical their input was going to be used.

The meetings are small groups of about 10 people and involve concentrated, detailed discussions of what people want from schools and how people make decisions regarding which schools to attend. The groups have included parents of school-age children, including those who go to private or charter schools; parents of preschoolers and toddlers; teachers; youth; and San Francisco residents who are not parents.

The meetings will continue to be held for the next two months. Those interested in participating may contact any of the following people:

• Gentle Blythe, director of the Office of Public Outreach, at (415) 241-6565 or blytheg@sfusd.edu
• Ruth Grabowski of the Parent Advisory Council at pac@sfusd.edu
• Katie Albright of the San Francisco Education Fund at getinvolved@sfedfund.org

School Board Notes 11.27.06 - Superintendent Search Firms

School Board Notes 11.27.06

• District Considers Superintendent Search Firms
• California School Boards Association
• Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates
• Leadership Associates

District Considers Superintendent Search Firms

Three executive search firms pitched their services to a Board of Education committee on Monday to help the district search for a superintendent. The committee included board members Mark Sanchez, Eric Mar and Dan Kelly, and community members Jan Masaoka, Eunice Azzani and former Mayor Art Agnos. At its next regular meeting, December 12, the board will select one of the firms to lead the search for a new superintendent.

The three firms interviewed were the Executive Search Services of the California School Boards Association, an organization that lobbies for and provides services to school districts; Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, a national search firm specializing in education; and Leadership Associates, a California-based firm that specializes in superintendent searches.

All three proposed structures that involved first, a period of public engagement and intensive discussion with the board, then recruiting through a variety of means 25 to 50 qualified candidates, and finally, presentation to the board of three to 10 finalists.

All firms agreed there should be significant public input in determining the qualities the district needs in a superintendent. But there were significant differences over how open the process should be. Making public the names of those under consideration would significantly shrink the pool of candidates, recruiters said. Some of the most qualified candidates might be happy to take the opportunity if it came, but wouldn't want to risk their current jobs to get it. Several recruiters cautioned against having Community Advisory Committees actually take part in the decision, as CACs were perceived as more prone than school boards to leak candidates' names.

California School Boards Association

CSBA conducted SFUSD's last search, in which the district hired Arlene Ackerman, who resigned from last fall amid controversy over her leadership. CSBA was also involved in recent searches in Los Angeles and Culver City, CA. The organization characterizes board involvement as "the heart" of its service.

CSBA's public engagement process includes Web-based surveys of community members, community meetings, site visits to schools to speak with staff and administrators, and meetings with other major city leaders. The organization then compiles a public report on its findings and, working with the board, begins a search.

Molly McGee Hewitt, director of the firm's executive search services, stated her commitment to providing candidates of diverse backgrounds. The organization prides itself on hiring of women and minorities. CSBA representatives cautioned the pool of candidates might be smaller if the interview process were open, or if a Community Advisory Committee — which could potentially leak candidates names — were involved. "It's more risky, but we can mitigate that somewhat by having them sign confidentiality agreements." Hewett said.

Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates

The firm, based in Glenview, IL, the only national firm to interview with the district, has done 500 school district searches throughout the U.S. It stressed its aggressiveness in seeking out the widest pool of candidates, a strategy based on calling 30 to 40 education leaders a day to ask for suggestions of who might be good candidates, and following up all recommendations.

The firm also underscored its commitment to long-term placements, saying most of its executives served 10 years or longer, compared with the average tenure for a superintendent in an urban school district of three years. "There's a correlation between the stability of leadership and the performance of students," partner Bill Attea said.

Attea said the firm would work with the board to structure a process that includes extensive public engagement. "We highly recommend that the board make the decision and does the interviews, with the community involvement on the front end of the process," he said. "You get a much, much stronger candidate pool." However, he said, the firm has worked on superintendent searches that ran the gamut, including those in which candidate interviews were not only conducted by CACs but were open to the public. Ultimately, Attea said, the decision would be up to the board.

Leadership Associates

Having placed 130 superintendents, Leadership is smaller than the other firms. But it stressed its local ties and its familiarity with California's unique budgeting and policy considerations as an asset. The members who would lead the search, Jim Brown and Larry Aceves, were formerly superintendents in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto and San Jose, respectively.

Leadership prides itself on the quality of its candidates — a quality it credits, in part, to a strict policy of confidentiality. The firm proposed a public engagement process of five days of public input, in which members would be at the district from dawn until dusk meeting with community members. However, the firm won't work on a search in which there is an open interviewing process. "If an open community interview is part of the process, we're not the right firm," Brown said. "People trust us when we go recruiting that this will be kept confidential."

The firm recently completed a search in Sacramento that it said was similar to that of that SFUSD, and is completing one in Pasadena, which had significant community interest and input. The firm also completed searches is Hayward, Monterey and Irvine that were unsuccessfully initiated by other recruitment firms. One of the most important factors in a successful search, Aceves said, is board members' agreement on what they are looking for. "If the board is not on the same page with one another, let alone the superintendent, it's not going to work," Aceves said.

School Board Notes 11.15.06

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• District Likely to Postpone Closing More Schools
• Suggested Ways to Improve Student Assignment
• Committee Seeks Input at Community Meetings

District Likely to Postpone Closing More Schools

The board will likely hold off for now on closing schools due to declining enrollment until the district has had more time to develop a long-term strategy, according to plans discussed Wednesday at a meeting of the committee charged with developing that strategy. That committee is currently engaged in a major effort to gather input from communities throughout the city on what people would like to see in public schools.

While the board is likely to forgo a reprise of its sweeping effort last year to close and merge schools, there are a few isolated issues which might cause it to close schools.

The biggest issue facing the district with regard to closures is its legal obligation to provide an acceptable site for charter schools, Wynns said. There are currently five charter schools petitioning for a new site: City Arts & Tech, Metro Arts & Tech, Edison, Kip Bayview Academy and Leadership High School, which has been offered a controversial placement on the bottom floor of Burton High School. The district is obligated to find acceptable sites for these schools by April.

Wynns said the proposed Leadership/Burton proposal was the tip of the iceberg. "Almost every publicly enrolled school that isn't full is going to have to face the prospect of sharing its school. It might be a charter school, it might be a specifically designed district small school, but they're going to have to share space."

Suggested Ways to Improve Student Assignment

Discussion included some initial suggestions for ways to improve the methods by which students are assigned to schools. These included:

• Clearly articulate the goals of the assignment process and establish measures to evaluate success
• Review and revise the admissions policies at Lowell and SOTA
• Review and revise attendance areas (zones that are loosely related to the neighborhood where students are encouraged to chose a school). Attendance areas are still on the books but are no longer actively being used in student assignment.
• Systemically address enrollment capacities at all schools, by addressing ways to balance over-subscription at some schools with under-enrollment at others.

Moves to revise Lowell and SOTA policies and to scrap attendance areas were part of a draft resolution that was to be submitted to the board last night but has been held until there is more time for discussion.

Committee Seeks Input at Community Meetings

The district's Parent Advisory Council began in August in an intensive effort to gather public input on a wide range of issues regarding student enrollment, recruitment and retention. The council has had 50 meetings over six weeks and spoken with about 400 people at sites throughout the city. It plans to continue this process over the next several months, especially in the Bayview and Western Addition neighborhoods. Other neighborhoods that have yet to be covered include Excelsior, Bernal Heights, Potrero, SOMA and Western Addition.

Structured as community conversations, the meetings seek to gather a wide range of input and opinions that include public school parents, private school parents, parents of small children and other community residents and stakeholders. The committee will be analyze and synthesize the input and submit it to the board in the coming months.

Community members interested in participating should write to pac@sfusd.edu to learn of upcoming meetings.

School Board Notes 11.14.06

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• District to Eliminate JROTC
• Burton Fights To Keep Leadership Out
• District Puts Off Proposal to Consider Race
• Officer Cites Incidents of Weapons Possession, Other Crimes

District to Eliminate JROTC

After heated public testimony and intense, sometimes angry debate, the board voted Tuesday to eliminate JROTC programs from the district. The program will be discontinued at the start of the 2008-09 school year. Until then, students can continue to enroll and receive class credit.

Commissioners Mark Sanchez, Dan Kelly, Sarah Lipson and Eric Mar voted to cut the program, while Commissioners Jill Wynns and Norman Yee voted against it. Commissioner Eddie Chin was absent from the meeting but sent a statement expressing opposition to the measure.

Some 1,600 students are currently enrolled in JROTC, which includes drum corps, flag corps, drill team and color guard. For now, the students in the program will be absorbed into the regular district curriculum during the day, including physical education classes for ninth- and 10th-graders and regular electives for 11th- and 12th-graders. The board said it will investigate other offerings to replace JROTC’s after-school activities.

Members of the public both in favor of and against the resolution thronged the meeting, while JROTC students staged a noisy demonstration outside. Many students who addressed the board gave emotional testimony about personal experience with the program. Several spoke of how it had kept them out of gangs and gave them motivation and self-esteem. They said it was the only after-school program available to them and that without it they’d be on the streets.

Superintendent Gwen Chan added her voice to the opposition. "While it’s not my wish to meddle in board policy, my heart is heavy with the possible decision to phase out JROTC," Chan said, adding that her years in the district had shown her the value of the program. Student delegates Diana Suen and Lea Elliott also opposed the measure, and said the Student Advisory Committee strongly supported JROTC.

Supporters of the measure offered equally impassioned testimony. One youngster told of a friend and another of a cousin who had been involved in JROTC, later enlisted in the military, and ended up in Iraq. Supporters said that JROTC was, if perhaps not an overt recruiting mechanism, a tool to create future soldiers and enlistees.

Yee proposed an amendment to make the elimination of JROTC contingent upon developing and implementing an alternative. The measure failed, however, with opponents expressing the concern that any efforts to launch a replacement program would be undermined by those who sought to keep JROTC.

During one particularly heated exchange, Commissioner Wynns accused the measure’s supporters of not really wanting to adopt a replacement program. She went on to propose an amendment that the district cut off all relationships with other groups that "discriminated," including those who gave scholarships specifically to students of color — the "logical extreme" Wynns said, of eliminating JROTC because of its relationship with the military, which discriminates against gays and lesbians.

Kelly called the amendment insulting, saying it "confuses discrimination with affirmative action." He also accused staff of dissembling about how students where assigned to JROTC. Kelly said he continued to receive reports that students who didn’t ask for JROTC were assigned to it and that counselors often placed troubled students in JROTC as an alternative to counseling.

Nancy Waymack, SFUSD’s director of policy and resource management, said the district did sometimes place students in JROTC if they stated "no preference" in selecting physical education programs (JROTC is considered an alternative to P.E.), but that students could ask to be switched out of the program.

Burton Fights To Keep Leadership Out

Families and teachers from Burton High School appealed to the district to halt a last-minute plan to move Leadership High School into the Burton’s bottom floor. Leadership, a charter school, is currently in a building that is seismically unsound and the district is required to find it alternate facilities.

Burton representatives said they had only learned at the beginning of this month of the plan, which calls for Leadership to move in to the school after Thanksgiving. This comes on the heels of a staff consolidation that led Burton to lose 10 teachers six weeks into the school year, after enrollment proved much lower than expected. The loss of those teachers caused some 800 students schedules to be changed.

Students said the move would cause further chaos, provoke fights between members of rival schools and interfere with preparing for final exams. Burton representatives also said the move would cause it to lose its computer lab and 20 classrooms, requiring many teachers to roam among available rooms. The classrooms are already overcrowded, according to students and faculty. English teacher Cari Bruzelius said she had close to 40 students in several of her classes. A P.E. teacher who asked not to be identified said she had 54 in most of her classes.

There are also several disparities between the schools that speakers said would be hard to reconcile. Burton, has 1,220 students, requires students to wear uniforms and has a closed campus. Leadership has 360 students with a much lower student-teacher ratio, does not require uniforms and has an open campus.

The district had tried to move Leadership into Balboa High School earlier this year but dropped the plan in response to public outcry.

District Puts Off Proposal to Consider Race

The district had been scheduled to introduce for first reading a measure that would make significant changes to the student-assignment process but decided to "indefinitely postpone" the issue when it became clear the meeting was proceeding late into the night.

The measure, authored by Norman Yee and Sarah Lipson, will likely be introduced at a meeting in the near future. If accepted, it would then be forwarded for review to all of the committees of the Board of Education, before going back to the board for a final vote.

The measure proposes several major revisions to the way students are currently assigned to schools. These include:

• Recommending changes to the admissions processes for Lowell and School of the Arts high schools, starting with the 2008-09 school year, to increase the diversity of students at these schools and ensure "equitable opportunities for students with diverse backgrounds."
• Pre-assigning students living in extreme poverty (measured by whether they live in public housing) after younger siblings and students with program need, starting in 2008-09.
• Adding race and ethnicity as a factor in the student assignment lottery, to be used in a "narrowly tailored manner" to help desegregate the schools.

Officer Cites Incidents of Weapons Possession, Other Crimes

Lt. Colleen Fatooh, the San Francisco Police Department’s liaison with the school district, detailed recent arrests that have been made on school campuses and where they occurred. The instances included assault with a deadly weapon, gun possession, discharge of a firearm, battery, grand theft, robbery and, in one instance, kidnapping.

Among the most serious incidents were:

• Visitacion Valley Middle School: assault with a deadly weapon
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School: assault with a deadly weapon (firearm)
• James Lick Middle School: discharging a firearm
• Washington High School: Five assaults with a deadly weapon, one strong-arm robbery
• Balboa High School: possession of a dangerous weapon
• Lincoln High School: assault with a deadly weapon (firearm)
• Mission High School: robbery/kidnapping
• O’Connell High School: assault with a deadly weapon

School Board Notes 10.24.06

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• District to Implement Family Diversity Curriculum
• District Financials Presented
• Recommendations for Improving Bilingual Education

District to Implement Family Diversity Curriculum

The board unanimously passed a resolution to incorporate discussion of family diversity and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) tolerance into health education for K-8. While the district currently has a policy to include discussion of these issues, a lot of schools have not been consistently teaching them, according to reports from educators in the district.

The resolution adopted Tuesday seeks to:

• Ensure approved materials are available at every school, and for every student.
• Integrate the family diversity curriculum into the overall program, so that it is taught throughout the school year and reinforced, rather than just discussed once.
• Establish a task force to recommend teaching materials to support this curriculum. The task force will make a report to the board in May 2007.
• Establish a system for each school to document that it is teaching the lessons as intended.

SFUSD includes many children from alternative families; the resolution was designed to ensure these students feel safe and welcome, according to its authors, Commissioners Dan Kelly, Mark Sanchez and Sarah Lipson.

District Financials Presented

For the first time in many years, the district was able to submit its unaudited financial statements for 2005-06 to the state ahead of the statutory deadline. Getting the documents in on time lends credibility to the district’s finances, avoids a $10,000 fine and allows the district more time to begin addressing problem areas, said Chief Financial Officer Joseph Grazioli

Grazioli went over information he presented to the board’s Budget Committee last week. He outlined some areas for concern, specifically:

• Costs of the so-called “Fund Five,” which governs special education funds. It will be very important, he said, for the district to try to control costs in this area and keep down encroachments (money from the general fund that must be used to cover shortfalls).
• Child development's $3.7 million encroachment, rather than the $700,000 budgeted.
• Student nutrition's $800,000 encroachment, rather than the $0 estimated.
• The district's unfunded liability in workers compensation of $26 million (Commissioner Jill Wynns noted it would take long-term planning by the board to address this problem.).

Recommendations for Improving Bilingual Education

Reporting from the Committee as a Whole meeting in which the Bilingual Community Council addressed board members, Lipson outlined several areas of need in bilingual education and teaching English language learners.

These included:

• A need to meet regularly with the BCC (Before last month, it had been two years since the BCC addressed the board.).
• A need for an articulated process to measure whether programs were being implemented and if they are succeeding.
• A focus on credentialing and recruitment of qualified bilingual teachers
• An overall master plan for bilingual education.

School Board Notes 10.18.06

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• Budget Committee Recommends Cutting JROTC
• Lunar New Year Holidays Proposed
• Financial Reports for 05/06 Completed

Budget Committee Recommends Cutting JROTC

The Budget Committee gave a positive recommendation a plan to phase out JROTC, by a vote of two ayes (Commissioner Eric Mar and Commissioner Norman Yee) to one nay (Commissioner Jill Wynns).

JROTC costs the district close to $1 million per year over and above what the U.S. military, which subsidizes the program, reimburses the district, according to figures presented by district staff. The costs represent salaries and benefits for the 15 instructors who lead the program. The U.S. military pays for half the salaries and all the materials and equipment needed, another approximately $750,000. It does not pay for employee benefits.

The motion before the Budget Committee contained one major change over measures previously considered by the Board. It looked at phasing out the program but did not discuss a replacement program. Instead it looked at the cost to absorb these students into existing district classes – physical education and electives – plus provide similar after-school activities, such as drum corps, flag corps and color guard. The total cost was estimated at slightly less than it costs the district to run JROTC.

The resolution calls for no new students to be enrolled in JROTC after the current semester, no credits other than PE credits to be rewarded for JROTC after the current school year and for the program to be phased out entirely by 08/09.

Member of the public, Alan Lesik, thanked the district for releasing figures as to the program's cost. "We are choosing to spend $1 million on this program. There's a sense in the community that it is free."

Wynns voted against the resolution because, she said, the real budget impact could not be known without looking at a replacement program. "All the rhetoric around this has been about finding a replacement program," she said.

Committee members said more detail needed to be presented in terms of how the funds would be redistributed, so that the schools who currently have JROTC instruction would get additional funding to cover the lack. Although he voted in favor of the resolution, Yee expressed concern that the replacement program "might not be one the one that works or is best for the kids but the one that fits within this budget."

Lunar New Year Holidays Proposed

The Committee gave a positive recommendation to a plan to give a day off for the Lunar New Year holiday, observed by a majority of the city's Asian population, even in years when the day falls on the weekend. Schools are currently closed for the holiday when it falls during the week. The new proposal would also give a day off – the nearest Monday or Friday – in years the holiday falls on the weekend. The cost of doing so would be $207,000 every year in which this is the case. There are only two such years coming up in the near future, 2010 and 2013.

Financial Reports for 05/06 Completed

The district completed its unaudited financial reports for fiscal year `05/06. Board members congratulated the financial office for presenting them on time, which they have had trouble doing in previous years, and which will assist the district in current budget planning.

Most of the budget corresponded to that which had been projected in June, but there were some surprises, particularly when it came to encroachments. Encroachments occur when funds earmarked for a specific purpose are not enough to cover the program, and so general funds must be used to cover the shortfall. Encroachments in the area of child development were expected to be $1.5 million and turned out to be $3 million. Encroachments in student nutrition were expected to be $0, and turned out to be $770,000. In addition, Chief Financial Officer Joseph Grazioli was facing an unfunded liability in worker's compensation of about $26 million. "It's going to be almost impossible to reach that in future years," he said.

Presentation of the reports and analysis as to what they mean to the district will be presented at the next board meeting.

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School Board Notes 10.10.06

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• School Violence On the Rise
• Burton Teachers, Programs Dropped Due to Poor Enrollment
• Special Program Will Serve Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students
• Board Supports Proposition 1D

School Violence On the Rise

School Resource Officers (police officers assigned to schools) have been busy this year, responding to a rash of assaults and robberies, according to Lt. Colleen Fatooh, SRO liaison with the district.

There has been a wave of incidents in which students attack and beat up a student while another student associated with the attacker records the incident on a cell phone camera, presumably for bragging rights. "We've had five or six this week alone," Fatooh said. But, she added, "At least these kids are getting caught so the victims aren't afraid to come to school." She also said there have been numerous iPod robberies and an increase in fights, especially among young women.

Providing the Board with a breakdown of last year's arrests, Fatooh reported 219 school-related arrests -- involving incidents involving students that occurred either on school grounds or between students traveling to and from school – last year, mostly for robbery, battery, vandalism and aggravated assault. There have also been weapons possession incidents. Forty-four percent of those arrested were African-American, 8 percent were Latino, 6 percent were Asian, 9 percent were Caucasian and 13 percent were Pacific Islander.

The incidents occur not just at school but also largely at bus stops and on MUNI lines. Certain lines are particularly problematic, Fatooh said. These include: the San Bruno Avenue corridor, the stop at 16th Street and Utah headed to Potrero Hill, the 47 line and Van Ness corridor; the 22 Fillmore bus and the 16th Street stop specifically, and the J Church line.

Commissioner Dan Kelly said he was concerned about the disconnect between the number of students arrested at school and the much lower number that came before the board for expulsion. Is the staff failing to take administrative action, or is the easy presence of officers raising the level of response to schoolyard fights, he asked. Fatooh said officers had neither the time nor desire to arrest kids for schoolyard fights. "These are not little incidents. We've had a couple of kids go away in ambulances," she said. "When there's a clear aggressor and someone has to go to the hospital or is beaten up pretty bad, that's when an arrest is made."

Board member Mark Sanchez asked that the district look at how Community-Based Organizations such as conflict resolution programs could work with the administrators and SROs to address some of the less-serious problems and reduce the reliance on police.

Burton Teachers, Programs Dropped Due to Poor Enrollment

Several teachers and programs were cut at Burton High School virtually overnight seven weeks into the school year, several Burton families reported. Students received notices today that their schedules had been revised, some of their teachers moved to other schools and some of their programs cut entirely, said Burton student Filmer Yu. Students arrived in class to find instructors they'd never seen before. Among the programs cut entirely was an orchestra that grown to include some 150 kids, who would show up at 7 a.m., an hour before school began, to participate, Yu said. The instructor, who had shared time between Burton and Visitacion Valley Middle School, is now exclusively at Visitacion Valley.

Burton is one of 15 schools with enrollment well below what was projected in the spring. It is 254 students short of what it was expected. District staff said making the projections was often difficult and was unclear on the reasons for the shortfall, other than that parents had chosen to go to different schools or to leave the district entirely.

Special Program Will Serve Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students

The District is in the process of implementing several programs for deaf and hard of hearing students, according to a report presented by program administrator Pam Macy. Among the goals are to developing a continuum of services (toddler through 12th grade) for deaf and hard-of-hearing students that will include magnet programs for these students. Magnet programs were launched this year at Cesar Chavez elementary, Claire Lilienthal elementary, Lafayette elementary, Aptos middle school, Lilienthal middle school, and John O'Connell High School.

The department is also implementing a new toddler program for 18 to 36 month olds, which opens October 2007 at Tule Elk Child Development Center. It is also looking to implement pre-K programs by next August, but the locations have not been identified.

Other goals include streamlining enrollment so students can access the magnet programs and recruiting staff trained in serving this population. The Special Education department will continue to hold quarterly meetings to gather input from parents. The next meetings are December 12, March 6, 2007 and June 5, 2007.

Board Supports Proposition 1D

The Board approved a resolution in support of Proposition 1D, a state measure to appear on the November ballot that would grant over $7 billion for K-12 educational facilities. The Proposition could provide almost $20 million of support for projects in SFUSD's 2003 Bond Program, as well as $30 million for the proposed 2006 Bond Program. Proposition 1D allocates funds for such purposes as earthquake retrofits, playground safety, asbestos removal, and updating old structures.

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School Board Notes 10.05.06

Programs for English Learners Falling Short, Committee Says
By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

The Bilingual Community Council delivered a pointed critique of the district's services for English Language Learners, saying the many of the programs and practices the district claims to have are not being borne out in the classroom.

Reporting to the Board meeting as the Committee of the Whole, the council said the district's ELL programs are ad hoc and disorganized, lack leadership, and are plagued by inadequately trained teachers, insufficient staff and poor instructional materials. The Council's report came after months visiting elementary, middle and high schools.

As part of an anti-discrimination settlement in 1, SFUSD is under a court order to develop and monitor programs that provide meaningful education to English Language Learners. It's Lau Report, last published in 2005, is designed to document what the district is doing to comply with this order. But the BCC was scathing in its appraisal of the Report, saying much of what is written there is not actually being implemented in the schools.

There is no Spanish bilingual program at the high school level at all outside of Newcomer, where students only stay a limited time, council members said. Middle schools also have a marked lack of resources.

Schools are operating without direction, each inventing it's own way to deal with English Language Learners, according to BCC members' reports. "This is a bus that doesn't have a driver," said council member Pete Cayeros. "I'm blown away by the energy, creativity and dedication of these people, but we just don't have a system in place, and the direction and the accountability and assessment to drive what's going on."

One of the biggest problems, council members said, is that programs teaching English Language Learners do not teach enough of the core curriculum. Educator Luisa Esquero pointed to one type of instruction cited in the Lau Report called Native Language Content Courses, in which student receive instruction in core subjects like math, science, social studies and language arts, in their native tongue until they begin to gain proficiency in English. "I'm sorry to say, but that's not what we have anymore."

Staffing has been a systemic problem. Many of the teachers are not adequately credentialed. Councilmember May Huie said she'd been to several schools where teachers actually were credentialed to teach ESL, but didn't speak students' native language and had no paraprofessionals to help. "In these cases, the assistant becomes the person sitting next to the student in class," she said.

"The schools are doing the best they can at the site level. But it's an overwhelming task," Council member Tina Alejo said. "I was at one school that had only one ESL teacher for all of its students, and a large number of (those) students coming in."

The BCC's report also cited a serious lack of continuity among programs to serve English Language Learners. "Programs are deleted, added and changed, and it's not based on what's working or isn't working, it's based on staffing and budget needs," Huie said.

Huie said it was vital for the district to gather data and develop an assessment program that will give its leaders some idea which ESL programs are failing and which are having the most effect. Based partly on the BCC's findings, the district has initiated an effort to work with the Information Technology and Multilingual Departments in an effort to devise a data-gathering system, said Christina Hiroshima, staff liaison with the BCC.

Board members listened soberly to the BCC's assessment. Commissioner Eric Mar pointed to the fact that some reports show the achievement gap between English Language Learners and native speakers widening in the district.

"We know we have issues in human resources, credentialing, facilities and content, tracking systems and assessment," Board Member Eddie Chin said. "We need to take the initiative to open up the dialogue between principals, IT, central office, HR, staff and the Board to fully engage this issue."

Some board members cited the difficulty of finding bilingual teachers who were certified both to teach ESL and core curriculum subjects. "We simply don't have people coming out of college with these credentials," Board member Mark Sanchez said, adding that retraining existing staff and offering financial incentives might be other ways to address the issue.

The board members called for making ELL a priority issue and developing better, ongoing communication with the BCC, which had not reported to the Board in two years.

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School Board Notes 10.03.06 - Candidates' Panel

By Nicole Achs-Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• School Board Candidates Share Their Views

Fifteen candidates vying for three open seats on the Board of Education staked out their positions at a forum Tuesday hosted by the League of Women Voters in cooperation with Parents for Public Schools, San Francisco Education Foundation and San Francisco School Volunteers. The candidates are running for four-year positions on the seven-member board. The election will be held Tuesday, November 7.

The moderator posed four questions, and each candidate gave a one-minute answer. The questions concerned how the candidates would ensure quality teaching staff, close the achievement gap, revise the student assignment process and address the issue of school closures. They each had the opportunity to present a one-minute closing statement.

Following is a summary of each candidate's statement, along with their answers to some of the questions. The candidates are presented, as they were at the forum, in alphabetical order.

A full, videotaped version of the forum will be available on cable channels 26, 27 and 29 throughout the month of October. The video can also be ordered through the League's Web site starting Thursday (www.lvwsf.org).

continue to read a summary of each candidates' statements

Joel Britton

As the candidate the Socialist Workers Party, Joel Britton he offered a "revolutionary alternative" to education and said he would work to uphold the platforms of the party, such as abolishing the death penalty, defending a woman's right to chose, and pushing for the unconditional withdrawal of American troops from Ir