Rachel Norton: SF Board of Education

About that ‘costly gay support program’

February 8, 2010 · 2 Comments

Today’s Chronicle carries a provocatively-titled article about a resolution we’ll consider tomorrow night — calling the program under consideration a “costly gay support program.” I have lots of respect for Jill Tucker’s reporting but I think today’s article blew things a wee bit out of proportion.

The most important piece missing from today’s article was an amendment added by the Board’s budget committee on January 18 (I blogged about that meeting but was so blown away by the news that the district’s budget gap had increased to $113 million I didn’t even go into our longish discussion about the LGBTQ resolution).  I’ll get to the amendment, but first a bit of background about the resolution that is the subject of today’s article.

Authored by Commissioner Fewer, the resolution’s full title (take a deep breath): “In Support that the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Strengthen the Anti-Discrimination Program in Schools in Order to Effect a Healthier Learning Environment for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Questioning (LGBTQ) Students.”  It’s three pages long, so I’ll summarize by saying it would commit the district to funding a 1.0 position, curriculum materials and a new interdisciplinary class on LGBTQ history and literature. Much of this we are already doing, but with outside funding that is uncertain from year to year. San Francisco has a long, proud history of being a leader on LGBTQ issues, and yet at the budget committee we were presented with some pretty staggering statistics on mental and physical health issues our 3,000 or so LGBTQ students are experiencing in our own district. There’s always more we should be doing. Still, the cost of the resolution as presented to the budget committee was already over $180,000.

So, after a lengthy discussion, the budget committee (Yee, Wynns and Norton, with Fewer as an invited but non-voting guest) amended the resolution to add the following provision:

FURTHER BE IT RESOLVED: That the components of this resolution that have budget implications will be re-evaluated including the results of outside fundraising as part of the budget development process. Staff will present multiple recommendations for full and partial funding of the Program as a budget priority for the Board of Education for 2010-11, including at minimum a .5 staff person, website, and curriculum.

What this amendment means is that the “minimum” level of funding for this program will be a half-time staff person, maintenance of a web site we launched last year, and curriculum to supplement our existing health education curriculum to encourage LGBTQ youth and their peers to have a positive view of LGBTQ people.  The cost of all that comes to $60,000 annually. Additional components in the resolution will be subject to further review by the Board as part of the work to develop a 2010-11 budget, and staff will present proposals for partially and fully-funding the program during the budget development process. They will also continue to pursue outside (grant) funding for this program.

I have received a number of calls and emails today about this proposal*, prompted by the Chronicle story, and while I think the reaction is a bit overblown, I understand how crazy it sounds to create a new program in the midst of a massive budget crisis. But: what we are talking about is essentially a $60,000 program (the cost of one teaching position, without benefits) that will support one of our community’s core values — not to mention perhaps 3,000 students  in our school district. For example, there is a much higher rate of absenteeism, substance abuse and other risky behaviors among LGBT students in San Francisco Unified — so if the additional support provided by this program were to increase our average daily attendance by just a few days, it would pay for itself.  In short — I think I am comfortable with the minimum level of funding as spelled out in the amended resolution, but will reserve judgement about the rest of the policy components until we have more visibility about the cuts we’ll need to make to balance next year’s budget.

*Even my mother emailed me! For the record, she thought it was a very tough decision to make, and wondered how I was going to vote.

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PTA moms to Phil Matier: We’re outraged at proposed budget cuts!

February 7, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Crystal Brown and Linda Shaffer got up very early this morning to do a TV segment on the upcoming Town Hall Meeting. They were on message — nice work, ladies!  Watch the clip >>>>

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Funding our future: town hall meeting on budget cuts

February 6, 2010 · 6 Comments

Enterprising PTA members have organized a Town Hall meeting on February 25 to “begin the conversation” on proposed budget cuts to our schools. Local legislators, including Assemblymembers Fiona Ma and Tom Ammiano, as well as Senator Mark Leno, are scheduled to attend (Superintendent Garcia and Board President Jane Kim will represent the district).** Below, PTA members Holly Carver and Crystal Brown discuss their advocacy plans in a Comcast Newsmakers interview:

The meeting will take place from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on February 25, 2010 at Marina Middle School (3500 Fillmore St. at Chestnut St. in San Francisco). For more information, and to reserve free childwatch or translation, please visit the event’s web site: www.fundingourfuturesf.com

**State Senator Leland Yee, who represents west side neighborhoods in San Franciso and parts of the Penninsula, is apparently having trouble fitting the Town Hall meeting into his schedule. Constituents of Senator Yee’s might want to contact his office to impress upon him how important it is for every member of our local delegation to attend this meeting and hear from their constituents, because their votes on the state budget this year will directly affect the level of funding in our local schools.

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Zeroing in on a new system: a postscript

February 3, 2010 · 2 Comments

I have to apologize for leaving out a rather important detail of the staff’s proposal last night (that’s what I get for trying to get a recap posted instead of sleeping!). When I read over last night’s post, I realized that I mischaracterized Option B.
It’s true that Option B is very similar to Option A in terms of the order of preferences: sibling preference is first, then PreK applicants, then local preference, then CTIP (go back to last night’s post for a detailed explanation of this acronym). However, the key to understanding Option B is that the choice round is optional. Before the choice process even begins, families would have received an initial offer from the district for their attendance area school. If they choose to accept that offer and enroll at the attendance area school, they’re done — no lottery, no further action required. The benefits to this approach are obvious: predictability and the idea of “opting in” to the lottery instead of being forced to participate.
The principal challenges with this approach are twofold: first, parents of incoming kindergarteners would have to file some kind of “intent to enroll” application with the district in order to receive an initial offer to their attendance area school — otherwise, how would we know who they are? Second, as the PAC and PPS report pointed out, wouldn’t popular schools completely fill up with children from their attendance area, locking out others who would like to choose those schools in the lottery round? In the presentation last night, our staff liaison (Orla O’Keeffe) said that the district could choose to set aside some seats at popular schools for the lottery round, but that would affect the predictability of the outcome for families.

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Recap: Board zeroes in on a new student assignment system

February 3, 2010 · 41 Comments

Update: Please read the postscript to this post.  Also, last night’s presentation is posted.

A year on student assignment, and all I got was . . .Where to start? Tonight’s three-plus hour Committee of the Whole meeting on the student assignment redesign was full of new information and developments. So be warned, because this is a long post. We started with a presentation from our Parent Advisory Council and Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco, partners who have worked very hard over the past few months to conduct community conversations with almost 600 people, recording their reactions to the proposed options for a new student assignment system and their overall aspirations for their children’s education.

This was an incredible effort, and I know the Board is tremendously grateful to the hundreds of volunteer hours that went into doing this outreach — on a very tough timeline, I might add! The conversations were conducted between mid-November and early January, when families are busy with holiday plans and travel. But the PAC and PPS have really nailed community outreach, and the report they gave us tonight was eye-opening, and at times uncomfortable. Some excerpts: Keep reading →

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Just what is “Central Office” spending?

February 2, 2010 · 2 Comments

Jill Tucker of the SF Chronicle did a great blog post last week on just what is contained in SFUSD’s “Central Office.” For the uninitiated, people who want to avoid cuts to their favorite part of the school district’s budget like to rail against the “fat” in the district’s administration, or Central Office, budget. Here’s what it contains, according to Ms. Tucker’s analysis:

–107 people in the central office, costing $15.7 million, have jobs that range from the superintendent, to accounting, benefits, human resources, public outreach and board support staff. That’s just shy of 4 percent of the operating budget. (See the budget’s nifty pie chart on page 46.)
–81 people costing $9.5 million for other central administration/student support service folks, including the special education department, translation services, school health, and attendance accounting. (See page 47)
–And finally, the big-ticket category: 519 people costing $55.3 million. This central office group includes 303 district-wide custodians, 52 IT folks, 100 security personnel, the facilities department, purchasing, payroll, and other categories. Regardless of where they actually work, they are paid out of the central administration. (See page 48)

That means well over half those 750 central positions are either custodians keeping schools clean, security workers keeping schools safe or IT workers trying to keep the district’s thousands of computers running. Others are cutting paychecks, hiring teachers, assigning kids to schools and assessing children with special needs.

So, who or what do you want to cut to get the district back in the black?

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Obama set to overhaul NCLB – NY Times

February 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment

The lead story in this morning’s New York Times is a peek at the Obama Administration’s plans for NCLB (No Child Left Behind, now re-christened ESEA — the Elementary and Secondary Education Act). First passed with great bipartisan fanfare by the Bush Administration in 2000, NCLB sought to focus attention on achievement gaps between different groups, and require all schools across the country to close those gaps by 2014.

Well, here it is a decade later, and we’ve certainly focused on achievement gaps in the past decade, but the goal of bringing all children to proficiency still seems far off. In the meantime, the law has labeled thousands of schools as “in need of improvement,” and come under a great deal of fire for being all stick and no carrot (because it set penalties for failing to reach “adequate yearly progress” but offered few additional resources to help schools get there).

So it comes as a relief that, according to the Times report, the Administration seems willing to abandon the 2014 deadline, as well as other provisions:

Keep reading →

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Tuesday’s meeting on student assignment will be big

January 31, 2010 · 4 Comments

Heads up to everyone who’s been keeping an eye on the Board’s effort to redesign student assignment: the Committee of the Whole on Tuesday evening (posted agenda is here) will represent a major step forward. First, the Parent Advisory Council and Parents for Public Schools will present findings from the community conversations they’ve been conducting since November. Then, the staff will present a preliminary recommendation for a new system to the Board, and ask for feedback on the proposal.

The first reading of the proposed new policy will occur at the Feb. 9 Board meeting (generally first readings of new proposals come up late in the evening, with a total of five minutes allowed for comment from any members of the public. In other words, that meeting won’t be the best time to come and share your views!).

At first reading, the proposal will be forwarded to several Board committees, and after those committee hearings are completed it will come back to the full Board for a second reading and final vote — most likely on March 9.

So Tuesday evening’s Committee of the Whole will be everyone’s first opportunity to hear the policy recommendation developed through all the work of the past year. The meeting will be held at 555 Franklin St., starting at 6 p.m. These meetings are generally televised on Channels 26 or 78 and streamed online at SFGov-TV.

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Californians would pay higher taxes to support schools – poll

January 28, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I’ve recently discovered John Fensterwald’s blog The Educated Guess, which is a good source of education news through a California lens. Yesterday, he posted a nice summary of a new poll by the respected Public Policy Institute of California. The poll found that most Californians would pay higher taxes to support schools, and that an overwhelming majority opposed cutting education to balance the budget. Mr. Fensterwald says:

Gov.  Schwarzenegger should keep those numbers in mind, because they’ll only go up  in coming months, as school districts lay out next year’s severe budget cuts and, in March, when they send out layoff notices to teachers.

The governor  can say, “No problem. No taxes needed, because I pledged in my State of the State address to protect K-12 schools.” But if that’s so, then why are districts startewide talking about, in various combinations, knocking five days off the school year, expanding class sizes in elementary school to 28 to 30, eliminating summer school and about every discretionary program left and asking staff to take additional pay cuts?

Why indeed? God help us if the Governor actually decides to CUT education!

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Download the budget presentation from Jan. 26 meeting!

January 27, 2010 · 1 Comment

As promised, the staff has made an electronic copy of last night’s budget presentation available. Download it here.

The presentation lists the Superintendent’s proposed cuts, detailing specific programs that will be cut, and the savings from each. It should help people gain a deeper understanding of what’s being proposed.

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