Schools got closed in San Francisco again last night. After about an hour of passionate public testimony regarding the flaws in the process and the uneven impact on communities (especially African-American communities) as reflected by the schools on the list for closure, merger or relocation, the board deliberated and eventually made their very hard decisions.
Despite calls from the public to pause the process in the hopes of the passage of Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi’s proposal to advance a portion of City money allocated for the schools, a motion to delay the closure based on this proposal failed to pass and so closures, mergers and relocations were back on the table. (Mirkarimi’s proposal is still set to be brought to the Board of Supervisors Government and Audit Committee at 1pm, Monday January 23rd).
Luther Burbank Middle School, Cabrillo Elementary School, and Enola Maxwell Middle School were all closed. John Swett Elementary was merged into John Muir Elementary, which many feel is simply just another closure. The Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program (JBBP West) was merged with Rosa Parks Elementary, two very different communities and programs, which presents both challenges and opportunities.
International Studies Academy (ISA) will be relocated to the Enola Maxwell site and the Downtown High School will move to the old ISA site. Aim High will move to the Luther Burbank site. Because of it’s valuable Pacific Heights location, Newcomer High School will be moved to the current Edison site, but will be given a year to have community discussions regarding the move, and locations for Edison and Leadership High School, both charter schools, will have to be found.
Families who are now looking to find a new school have until January 27th to submit applications and also have new information to consider. Along with decisions about closing schools, the school board also voted in a new set of assignment priorities for students involved in the closure-merger-relocation process.
Students from affected schools will be given higher priority in the assignment process than other applicants, but will be tiered as well. Students from closed schools will have the highest priority. Those from merged will have the second highest. Those from relocated schools will have the third highest. To confirm your enrollment priority, contact the SFUSD Educational Placement Center (EPC) at 241-6085.
The school closure process has been exhausting and traumatic and it’s not necessarily over. The decisions made Thursday night were made to address the current year’s budget shortfall, but they don’t address the overall downtrends in enrollment and dollars. The point has been made over and over again, but it bears repeating—we need to plan how we’re going to work to reverse these trends in the mid to long-run and how we are going to address the current reality in the short-run.
A proposal to develop a Community Advisory Committee to provide input into these plans and decisions has been put forth by school board member Mark Sanchez and will be up for consideration at the next school board meeting. The degree to which such a committee can substantially address the procedural and equity problems we are facing is one of the many topics to be debated in the ensuing weeks.
Many variables are at play here, but one thing is certain—we can never let what we’ve experienced over the last several months happen again. The closure process is a destructive one that saps our energy at a moment when we need it most to keep developing the strong aspects of our schools. Closing schools is a drastic action that should be done rarely, not regularly.
It’s time to examine what went wrong over the last many years in our planning and decision making processes at both the level of the school board and the administration. This is not a moment to point fingers, but to look at what happened, what didn’t happen and what we need to do to move forward constructively. It’s time to tap into our pool of principals and teachers and have some honest and creative dialogue with the people who know our schools the best about how to combine programs and share space. It’s time for us to find more effective ways to work with City to get the many kinds of support our schools need and deserve.
We may have done what was necessary to balance our budget, but it came at a high price to our communities. Next year has to be different.
Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is the president of the board of directors of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco (http://www.ppssf.org).
