(1st of 2 Parts)
On February 1st, the Proposition H Advisory Committee submitted to Superintendent Ackerman their complete recommendations for the first year of funding (2005-06) during which there will be a total of $5 million dollars available to the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). One half of this amount will be allocated to Sports, Libraries, Arts and Music (SLAM), and one half for general education purposes. (The other $2.5 million will be allocated for universal pre-school according to recommendations made by the First Five Commission. For readers who are unfamiliar with Proposition H, please see previous School Beat columns in BeyondChron, as well as the SFUSD web site for more information http://portal.sfusd.edu/template/index.cfm?page=initiatives.prop_h).
The committee met further on February 8th to make recommendations on how the money will be allocated as funding increases to its maximum amount; by year 5, the district will be receiving $40 million per year. In the following article, these recommendations will be outlined– first focusing on year one, and then on the rollout– as well as initial responses from the Superintendent, the School Board, and other community members.
After gathering information for two months and determining both existing resources and needs, the Proposition H Advisory Committee’s first task was to create a set of guiding principles. During this part of the process it was relatively easy for committee members to come to a consensus. It was an important step as well, because later, when actual recommendations for spending were made, these guidelines helped us prevent clashing ideas and disagreements from stalling the process.
In summary, the Prop H Committee guidelines are as follows: regarding Sports Libraries Arts and Music (SLAM), the committee agreed that every student should receive developmentally appropriate SLAM education during the school day. It was also agreed that funding for SLAM should be supplemental and at no time supplant existing funding. We agreed that where possible, spending decisions should be guided by Master Plans (a master plan exists for Libraries, but is in process for Arts and Music, and not yet begun for Sports).
For both SLAM and General Education (including Learning Support Services) the committee recognized the value of hiring additional certificated personnel trained to work in school settings with an emphasis on providing additional direct services. Further, it was decided that not only recommendations for the coming school year, but long-term benefits of Proposition H spending would be a focus, and that programs benefiting the greatest number of students would be targeted. The committee agreed to consider school-site autonomy and community input when crafting recommendations, as well as to focus on supporting programs and activities that help SFUSD move closer towards goals outlined in its 5-year plan Excellence For All.
As such, one of the guidelines clearly articulated is the basic principle that student access to SLAM and Learning Support Services are integral in meeting district goals for academic achievement. The committee further agreed that the distribution of funds would reflect the expanding schedule of money available. This means that while initial efforts would focus on complete and coherently staffed programs, as funds available increase, the schedule of funding would reflect school site flexibility and as yet undetermined needs. Finally, the committee agreed that resources from Prop H should be made available to provide support systems for administration, evaluation, and accountability of Prop H funding.
Subsequent to developing these guiding principles, the committee then moved to make specific recommendations for year one spending (2005-06). One overall primary recommendation the committee agreed to quite early, was that there should be a standing advisory committee who would make decisions about Prop H funding for the duration of the distribution (at least until 2015). Who this committee would be was left undetermined pending input from the district and the School Board.
The reasoning behind this recommendation is that since there are unfinished master plans for many of the areas to be funded by Prop H, specific long-term recommendations need to be crafted when those plans become available. It was decided that it was necessary to make some recommendations specific, and leave others more general in order to reflect the goal of including as yet unwritten master plans. While the amount slated to be distributed in year one was $6.6 million, by the time the committee considered specific allocation funding, it was clear the City budget was such that a 25% cut would be likely (this is an option for the City when there is a budget crisis, with the money cut from that year’s payments to be paid at a later date– see SFUSD web site for more detail). Thus, for 2005-06, the committee allocated only the $5 million likely to be available.
It should be said at this point that many of the committee members, including myself, entered the process with very definite ideas about how we thought Prop H money should be spent both in year one and later. Listening to the amount of resources available for important programs, we realized that while $40 million seems like a lot, SFUSD is a district that has been under-funded in critical ways for decades. So early on, we all realized that in order to satisfy the goals of each committee member (and thus their constituencies), we would need three times as much money and that compromises would have to be made.
At the end of the recommendation process, all of us had gotten some of what we wanted. All of us had also had to give something up. While the final draft of our recommendations might look as if a simple formula were followed, getting there and agreeing on all the constituent parts took a lot of work. Since the deadline for submitting recommendations to the Superintendent was February first, this meant that after the holidays, the committee was meeting at least once, and usually twice a week.
Discussions were lively, and frequently contentious. We were fortunate that throughout we managed to maintain a sense of humor, even though we often had to be reminded by Novella Smith– one of the early crafters of Prop H– that we were doing a good and enjoyable thing: deciding how to spend money rather than cut it.
(More tomorrow.)
Sally Payson Hays, Ph.D. is a public school parent, the President of the Monroe PTA, a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco, and a parent representative on the Proposition H Community Advisory Committee.
