Effective immediately, SFUSD will not be offering Transitional Kindergarten (TK) for the 2012-2013 school year. Only students turning 5 years old on or before Nov. 1 will be eligible for Kindergarten entry for the 2012-2013 school year.

In the Governor’s proposed budget for the 2012-2013 school year, school districts would not receive any funding for Transitional Kindergarten, and the state would not mandate districts to offer it.  Given that SFUSD cannot afford to offer Transitional Kindergarten if it is not funded by the state, SFUSD will not plan to offer Transitional Kindergarten for the upcoming school year.

While the California Department of Education continues to provide updates and the situation may change over the course of the next several months, SFUSD is moving forward on the assumption that there will be insufficient funding to offer Transitional Kindergarten in the 2012-2013 budget.  SFUSD is providing this notification so that families who were interested in TK can take action to make alternative arrangements for their children for the 2012-2013 school year.

The Governor’s budget is just a proposal. What if the legislature
still decides to mandate and/or fund Transitional Kindergarten for the 2012-2013 school year?
SFUSD will not plan to offer Transitional Kindergarten (TK) unless it is state mandated. The legislature is required by law to adopt its budget by July 1 each year though in some recent years the state budget has been passed later than this. Transitional K will affect Kindergarten spaces throughout the district and cannot be accommodated with such late notice. Additionally, families need to plan for their child’s educational setting months in advance. If it is state mandated, SFUSD will offer Transitional Kindergarten spots at two Early Education schools in 2012-2013:  Havard and McLaren Early Education Schools.

I am a parent who had planned on sending my child to an SFUSD Transitional K program. What do I do now?
If your child is in preschool, ensure your provider can maintain a space for your child. If your child is not enrolled in a SFUSD Early Education Department school (EED school) and is no longer eligible to continue in his or her current program, you may find out more information about eligibility for SFUSD EED placements by contacting Melissa Luc at (415) 750-8500.

• A resolution commemorating the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Unified School District’s PTA (the organization’s celebration of that anniversary will be held February 10 at Patio Espanol — more details here - PDF);
• Highlights of the school district’s (and its partners’) celebration of Black History month this February  – events include the African American Read In,  the African American Honor Roll celebration honoring 1,200 African-American SFUSD students with a GPA of 3.0 or better (February 29 at St. Mary’s Cathedral, 6 p.m. $10 donation requested), as well as the annual oratory contest sponsored by the San Francisco Alliance of Black School Educators (Feb. 25 at Thurgood Marshall High School, 8 a.m. to 12 noon);
• “Sunshining” of proposals and counter-proposals for contract negotiations with United Administrators of San Francisco and United Educators of San Francisco;
• Approval of the annual spending plan for the Public Education Enrichment Fund (PEEF) — Commissioners reviewed the plan at last week’s Committee of the Whole meeting, and heard testimony from members of the PEEF Comunity Advisory Committee suggesting that three activities (teacher recruitment, custodial services for early education centers and funding for the district’s new formative assessments) should be funded with other monies (district staff wrote a response to that report here). For more information and lots more documents, visit the  PEEF web site, which asks for a password but seems to let you in if you just click cancel. In the end, the Board appreciated the input but supported the original spending plan suggested by staff.;
• Review and approval of the district’s annual independent financial audit — there were two minor findings related to attendance accounting in the district’s early education and afterschool programs, but the independent auditor expressed confidence that the findings were being addressed, and commended staff for a growing string of clean audit reports;
• An overview of the Governor’s budget proposal released earlier this month – probably the only good thing I can say about this proposal is that it is very much not a done deal. For reasons I can’t quite explain, even the “rosy” scenario — where the Governor’s proposed tax increases passes — results in significant additional cuts;
• Public comment from parents and community members at Alice Fong Yu and Paul Revere,  and introduction by UESF leadership of the union’s bargaining team for upcoming negotiations. A commenter last week asked me why I haven’t devoted much time in the blog to the competing statements of Paul Revere parents, and the reason is:  I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to muse publicly on personnel issues. This whole episode has been ugly and disruptive for everyone involved and I don’t see how it helps for me to “report” allegations from one side or another.  I did feel momentarily shamed by the comment from one Revere parent who noted the district’s swift response to an outcry from Alice Fong Yu parents when they protested changes to their immersion program (after a meeting with the Curriculum Committee and district leadership last week, a deal for a pilot program was struck that will increase the population of English Learners at the school but maintain its essentially “one-way” immersion model — and tonight the community came to thank us for our swift reaction).  Why weren’t we able to resolve the Paul Revere situation in as swift a manner? the Revere parent asked.  The answer is complex — personnel issues usually can’t be resolved in one meeting and certainly not in public; and there is not the same unified perspective in the Paul Revere community  – teachers and parents have  been vocal about their divided opinions on which direction the school should go. Still, he’s right that struggling schools can’t easily summon 100 parents in matching shirts to attend a Board meeting, but their concerns are just as pressing.

Parents from Alice Fong Yu Alternative School (accompanied by former Board of Education member Dan Kelly, whose child attended the school) came to express their alarm with a plan to change the school’s immersion model. Originally, the school was “one-way” immersion (where every child comes in English-proficient and everyone is immersed in Cantonese and eventually Mandarin). A few years ago, the school began admitting English Learners as one-third of every Kindergarten class (to be admitted as an English proficient student at AFY, children have always had to pass an English skills test). Now, the district is proposing to turn the school into a true dual-immersion model, which would shift the incoming class composition to one-third English-proficient and two-thirds English Learner.

AFY is an award-winning school, one of the school district’s highest-scoring and most highly-requested, but its instructional model (requiring a large number of students who are already proficient in English) ensures that fewer students with challenges will enroll in the first place. AFY parents argue that changing the instruction model will cause the school to become less ethnically diverse; they argue that their school is successful and that changing the instructional model will endanger that success.

I don’t know that I think changing the model will make the school less successful, but I haven’t heard the district’s arguments for why this must happen now. As I understand it, research on one-way vs. dual- immersion programs is inconclusive; just as the research on whether English Learners do better in immersion as opposed to bilingual education is also inconclusive. But judging from the green shirt-clad crowd who came to support AFY, this issue is very important and not going away. I will be bringing the topic to the Curriculum & Program committee on January 18 at 5 p.m. for further discussion.

A group from Paul Revere PK-8th school came to speak in support of their principal (blog readers might remember that another group of parents has come to speak to the Board several times to express their unhappiness with the same administrator).

Other items of note:

• Superintendent Garcia told the Board and public that he has reviewed the Governor’s proposed budget (inadvertently released last week), and that it contains very bad news for SFUSD. Our deficit could grow to $40 million in 2012-13 after we had been planning for a worst-case scenario of $20 million. The news coincided with the release of initial contract proposals for bargaining with United Educators of San Francisco and United Administrators of San Francisco. Leaders of both unions were on hand to remind us that their members have already given — a lot. With the “sunshining” of proposals, bargaining can now begin, but I would expect it to take a while as there are no good agreements to be made.
• The Board honored members of the District English Learners Advisory Committee (DELAC); workers on the district’s building at 1601 Turk St. who went above and beyond to warn residents of a large, destructive fire on December 22, 2011; and writer Katherine Otoshi, who together with the Japanese American Citizens League, arranged for copies of her two wonderful anti-bullying books (“Zero” and “One“) to be donated to SFUSD elementary school libraries.
• Finally, the Board passed President Yee’s resolution affirming district support for an upcoming summit he has organized and will chair (possibly with Mayor Edwin Lee). The purpose of the “Pre-K – 3rd: Looking Back, Moving Forward”  summit is to create and to support a vision of a PreK to 3rd Grade which would allow many different entities and organizations working on early literacy to better work together and align their efforts. The summit will include a national speaker, Ralph Smith, Senior Vice President ofthe Annie E. Casey Foundation,  who is leading a national initiative to have all children read at grade level. It is scheduled for February 25, 2012, location and time TBA.

Warren with Deputy Superintendent Richard Carranza at the 2010 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concert for SFUSD students (photograph by Charly Franklin 2010)

San Francisco’s schools have lost a great champion with the passing of philanthropist and Lowell alum Warren Hellman yesterday evening. From the school district’s press release:

“Warren was by far the most generous supporter of San Francisco public schools. He championed so many important opportunities for our city’s children. Not only did he personally give, but he inspired others to give; his contributions were multiplied millions of times over,” says School Board President Hydra Mendoza. “He will be deeply missed. We send our condolences to his family.”

Hellman led the campaign to create the Public Education Enrichment Fund, a City Charter amendment passed by voters in March 2004 that guarantees city funding for public schools and pre-schools through 2015. The fund includes support for arts, music, sports, and library programs in SFUSD.

He was also a major contributor to three successful school bond campaigns resulting in every one of San Francisco’s public school facilities receiving or slated to receive facilities upgrades, including replacing aging school buildings, improving accessibility for disabled students and modernizing classroom interiors.

“The district has lost its best friend. No one has singlehandedly done more for our schools than Warren. His legacy is in the generations of public school children who now have better school buildings and whose access to arts, sports and libraries has been sustained through local funding in spite of the economic downturn,” says Superintendent Carlos Garcia.

In addition to his leadership for local school funding propositions, Hellman chaired the San Francisco School Alliance Advisory Board through which he engaged other business leaders in contributing to school district initiatives.

A great music lover, he also sponsored an annual event as part of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, where once a year, thousands of sixth grade students in the city were brought to Golden Gate Park to enjoy a private concert just for them.

Beyond sending my condolences to his family, there’s nothing much else to say besides: Thank you, Warren, for everything you did for San Francisco. You will be greatly missed.

Qualifying an initiative for the ballot is not easy, so some of the measures we’ve read about will not actually make it to the ballot, but there are enough proposals in the works that political and education policy wonks are beginning to worry that the voters’ clear desire for a solution to our current problems will get lost in a confusing jumble of competing campaigns.

In the conference’s closing “State of the State” roundtable discussion on Saturday, CSBA’s legislative advocate Rick Pratt (soon to be the lead consultant for the Assembly Education Committee) didn’t mince words: “If all four [tax] initiatives make it to the ballot, none will pass.” And where would that lead us? Right back to where we are now, but a year later.

Here are proposals that received a lot of discussion at the conference:

• “Think Long Blueprint for California”:  Billionnaire Nicholas Berggruen has assembled a committee of former legislators and heavy-hitters, including former Governor Gray Davis and former Assembly Speaker and SF Mayor Willie Brown. Its not-yet-public initiative would lower the overall tax rate but vastly expand taxation to services, raising at least $10 billion annually. It would form a somewhat scary-sounding Citizens Oversight Committee (appointed by the Legislature), with powers to unilaterally place initiatives on the ballot. Additional revenues would go to schools, but for specific, constrained purposes.
• “2012 Kids Education Plan” : Ted Lempert, the director of the advocacy organization Children Now, has been working with stakeholders up and down the state to build a coalition of support for four principles that would form the backbone of an as-yet unseen initiative. These are: “a student-centered finance system”; “true transparency”; “significant workforce reforms”, and “new investments in education.” It sounds good, but the devil will be in the details.
• “Our Children, Our Future: Local Schools and Early Education Investment Act”: The California State PTA and the civil rights organization The Advancement Project filed this initiative on November 30 and are beginning the push to collect the hundreds of thousands of signatures necessary to qualify it. The law would raise $10 billion in new tax revenue for Pre-K-12 education, and require those funds to be spent “at the local school sites, where kids are, not district administration.” It would prohibit the Legislature from directing how monies were spent, placing the new revenues in a  trust fund. The initiative would require re-approval by voters after 12 years.
• Other miscellaneous tax proposals include an oil and gas extraction tax, and a “split roll” which would suspend Prop. 13 for commercial properties, allowing them to be re-assessed every year.

Update: Just this afternoon, Governor Brown announced he has filed his own initiative. From the Governor’s initiative announcing his action:

My proposal is straightforward and fair.  It proposes a temporary tax increase on the wealthy, a modest and temporary increase in the sales tax, and guarantees that the new revenues be spent only on education.  Here are the details:

• Millionaires and high-income earners will pay up to 2% higher income taxes for five years. No family making less than $500,000 a year will see their income taxes rise. In fact, fewer than 2% of California taxpayers will be affected by this increase.
• There will be a temporary ½ cent increase in the sales tax.  Even with this temporary increase, sales taxes will still be lower than what they were less than six months ago.

More details on Brown’s initiative is here.

There really isn’t much to report from tonight’s meeting. We heard a brief presentation from the Youth Commission on the Immigrant Youth Summit organized by Youth Commissioner Happy Chang, a senior at Balboa High School. Everyone clapped for the passage of Prop. A last week, a $531 million bond issue that will help us complete the work of retrofitting and upgrading all of our school buildings (including a new Willie Brown MS in the Bayview).

A handful of parents came to again complain about the principal at Paul Revere and ask for her removal; two neighbors of the new Buena Vista Horace Mann combined campus came to discuss the worsening traffic situation around the school (Bartlett St., where many parents drop off their students in the morning, is a very narrow street, and double-parking and congestion have caused several near misses).

The Superintendent also introduced a proposal to rename John O’Connell High School Alternative High School of Technology simply “John O’Connell High School.”  In fact, according to the Superintendent’s resolution, the school has at least six different official or unofficial names:  John O’ Connell Alternative High School of Technology, John O’Connell Altemative High, John O’Connell Altemative High School, John A. O’Connell High School, John O’Connell High School of Technology, and John O’Connell Technical High School. The school has a highly-regarded new principal, Dr. Martin Gomez, who is trying hard to turn around the school. The name change, the Superintendent says, will help change the perception among Mission District families that the school is a credit recovery school — the use of the word “Alternative” in the name, some say, adds to that perception.

In other news . . . 

Last week at the Curriculum Committee we heard an interesting followup report on the district’s “Early Warning System,” which I wrote about last spring. Essentially, the high schools are now “flagging” students who leave the 8th grade with a GPA lower than 2.o, and/or an attendance record of lower than 87.5 percent, because those two indicators are strong predictors of students who will later drop out of high school. Focusing resources on these particular students allow schools to address their needs and specific issues.

Mission High is doing a lot of things right in this respect. Since last year, its “flagged” 9th graders (50 this year) have shown improved levels of achievement. The school attributes success to several promising practices, including assigning each target student an additional counselor as well as a faculty mentor (even Mission Principal Eric Guthertz has 10 student advisees).

It’s important to note that every middle school has students with these indicators, and they attend every high school in the district, in greater or lesser numbers.  In addition, Mission is not the only school making progress by focusing on students with risk factors.

About Prop H . . . 

There are still provisional ballots being counted, but Prop. H appears to have ended in a statistical tie, with the “Yes” side (at last count) receiving a slight edge with 89,517 votes vs.  the “No” side’s 89,136 votes. In response to questions being asked about the impact of this advisory-only measure, President Mendoza has issued a statement on behalf of the Board.

Still, there were a few items of interest on the agenda. First, an update on the strategic plan, and the priorities (long- and short-term) the Board jointly developed with the Superintendent and senior staff at our annual retreat on September 18.  At our 2010 retreat, there seemed to be so many essential, high-priority initiatives (the special education redesign, the quality middle school inititative, and the implementation of the SIG grants and Superintendent Zones, for example) that it was hard to narrow down the work.  But 13 individual priorities is too many for any organization, let alone a cash-strapped school district, so everyone recognized that we needed to reframe the work and focus on fewer, broader initiatives.  Staff then proposed three broad categories for our long-term work:

1. Create a strong instructional core;
2. Implement supports and interventions; and
3. Build a high-performing, school-focused central office.

At the retreat, the Board was supportive, but asked a number of follow-up questions about how we will measure progress, prioritize short-term activities, and align our budgeting to activities that are achieving desired outcomes.  Last night, Deputy Superintendent Richard Carranza and Special Assistant Orla O’Keeffe (now tasked with managing ongoing strategic initiatives for the Superintendent) gave us an update on how the Superintendent is responding to those questions, with a more fleshed out series of annual goals to be presented in December.

There were also a few contracts of note:

• The district will lease the long-empty Nourse Auditorium (in the 135 Van Ness administration building) to City Arts & Lectures while the Herbst Theater undergoes construction.   The lease will generate $2,500 per month in income plus improvements like new seating and lighting to be made by the tenant.
• Goalview (the software the district adopted in 2007 for computerizing Individual Education Plans for students in special education) is being phased out for a less-expensive and less cumbersome product, the Special Education Information System (SEIS).

The Board will not meet Nov. 8 because of Election Day; instead we will meet on Nov. 15. That meeting will be the only meeting of the full Board for November. 

There is a lot of genuine anger and frustration around the City about our school assignment system. I’ve talked to hundreds of parents about this issue, first as a parent of young children trying to figure out my options, then as a Parents for Public Schools enrollment coach, next as a candidate for public office, and finally as an elected official. This issue is one that constituents want to talk about more than probably any other educational issue in San Francisco.

Proponents of the neighborhood schools  initiative say it “will bring quality neighborhood schools to all students,” and guarantee that all students will (assuming they want to) be able to attend schools closest to their homes. They argue that their initiative is a solution to the problem of family flight and will bring back the many affluent families who currently choose private schools.  I disagree, and I’ll discuss the reasons why in a moment. First, however, it’s important to remember that the school district has just completed a two-year process of redesigning the school assignment system (a process that was not yet complete when efforts to put this initiative on the ballot began), and the current policy balances the desire of many parents to choose which school is best for their children with the feedback from some parents who want to be guaranteed schools closer to home (as long as those schools are high-performing).  The current elementary school assignment process places a much higher priority on proximity to schools than we have had in over a decade.

This initiative is not the solution to the longstanding issue of too many families wanting to attend too few schools, and it’s not the solution to a persistent achievement gap.  Here’s why:

• The neighborhood schools policy statement will not appreciably impact the number of affluent families who currently choose private schools; nor will it address the longstanding problem of too many students requesting too few schools:  Over the last two decades, we have seen that parents are choosing from a limited, though growing, pool of schools. Prior to 2001, when the district first allowed families to choose from any school in the district, families were allowed to either attend their “attendance area” school OR participate in a choice process for a handful of so-called alternative schools. What we saw under that process was a high number of requests for a handful of high-performing attendance area schools, as well as a high number of requests for a handful of alternative schools. The number of requests for the rest of the district’s 100+ schools? Anemic.  Over the past decade, after the district began implementing a full choice system, the pattern has held, but we have seen improvement in the number of requests for some previously scorned attendance area schools (Miraloma, Sherman and Alvarado are examples — each of these schools was shunned by residents of its attendance area prior to 2001, and each is now on the short list of the most-requested elementary schools in San Francisco). In other words, the district’s experience with allowing parents to submit school choices, even with less certainty of eventual assignment to those choices, has broadened the field of schools that parents are choosing. In recent years, we have seen a modest increase in the number of K applicants as well as an increase in the number of K students eventually enrolling in our schools. Today, there are routinely more requests than seats at roughly half the district’s 73 elementary schools, which is still a problem but a significant improvement over the situation a decade ago.
• The neighborhood schools policy statement will not, by itself, improve schools that are not being chosen by parents. It will have no impact on the achievement gap:  San Francisco has had for many years, and continues to have, a very wide gap between the level of achievement of White and Asian students compared to the level of achievement of African-American, Latino, and Samoan students. Over the past two years, the Board of Education reviewed student achievement data from a variety of nationwide, regional and local sources, with the objective of determining how school composition influences achievement. We found that two principles held true: that schools with higher (40% +) concentrations of African-American, Latino and Samoan students tended to show the lowest achievement levels, and that Caucasian and Asian-American students do not evidence lower levels of achievement when placed in classrooms with lower-achieving students of other races.  Furthermore, we found that *all* students performed better in classrooms where there was no majority race.  In other words, student assignment policies that encourage racial integration do not hinder any student’s achievement and may in fact enhance many students’ achievement levels.  If every student were assigned to the closest school, some schools would be less segregated, while others would be more segregated. In considering these two facts,  the Board’s current assignment policy balances the desire of parents to choose which school is best for their children, as well as the evidence that integrated schools are better, on average, for all children.
• The neighborhood schools policy statement will not significantly address the problem of declining middle-class enrollment in San Francisco public schools, nor the overall problem of family flight from San Francisco:  It’s not news that San Francisco has one of the lowest percentages of children under 18 of any major U.S. city.  It’s also no secret that four out of five households earning over $100,000 per year send their children to private schools.  School assignment has played a role in each of these trends, but it isn’t the only — nor even the defining– factor. For years, the high cost of housing has been frequently cited as a contributing factor to family flight. More recently, the faltering economy and lack of jobs has also been cited as a factor.  Even though families cite the perceived quality of public schools as a factor in the decision to leave San Francisco , this doesn’t mean access to the nearest school is a part of that decision to leave. No one that I know of has conducted an analysis of whether parents who live near high-performing schools are more likely to leave, or if those parents are more likely to cite the lack of certainty in school enrollment in their decision to move elsewhere. If anything, I suspect that families who live furthest from high-performing schools are the most likely to leave the city . But as I said, I haven’t seen such a study. Affluent San Franciscans clearly believe that our public schools won’t do as good a job serving their childrens’ educational needs;  based on our choice patterns I can name several schools in affluent areas that would be a “sure thing” if neighborhood residents actually requested them (Dr. William Cobb ES is one; Glen Park ES is another). Most importantly, the newest revision of the student assignment system has improved the odds of K applicants being offered space in their attendance area schools (if that is indeed what they want above all — most evidence collected by the Parent Advisory Council, Parents for Public Schools and SFUSD staff indicates that parents want schools that work for their children — proximity is a secondary consideration). Consider that in the first round of the new assignment system this past spring, just 23 percent of Kindergarten applicants listed their attendance area school as a first choice. Just 24 percent of Kindergarten applicants listed the school closest to their homes as a first choice (in some cases the attendance area school is not the closest). In fact, just 14 of our 73 elementary schools received 50 percent of first choice Kindergarten requests for 2011-12.

Finally, the policy statement is poorly written and would carry with it a number of unintended consequences. For one thing, the policy statement assumes that it is possible for families to have both the certainty of attending the closest school, while also having the opportunity of attending a specialized program like language immersion if they would rather. It would be nice to offer families both certainty and choices, but the two are inversely related as long as all schools in the district are perceived to be of unequal quality.  That’s why the number of families not receiving a choice in the school lottery — about 20 percent — has stayed the same even after the new system was implemented; there are just too many requests for some schools and not enough for others, because some schools are perceived to be of higher quality than others.  Only the slow but steady work of improving instruction, administration and classroom supports will change that perception — student assignment schemes of any stripe cannot. Another (perhaps more minor) flaw with the policy is that it calls for a neighborhood-based assignment system to be implemented in the current 2011-12 school year. Does a yes vote really mean the voter is advocating for students  be re-assigned during the current year? Perhaps not, but there’s no way to know.  In any event, such an undertaking would be chaotic and disruptive, not to mention expensive.  

Anyway, all a student assignment policy can do is set rules and make sure that they are fairly applied to everyone. In our district, the policy the Board and staff spent two years developing also attempts to give everyone equitable access to disparate program offerings across the district, even while acknowledging that it’s a hardship for some families not to attend a school that is accessible to work, home or a reasonable commute on public transit. Our process was transparent and extremely public, including televised monthly committee meetings and meetings held in alternate locations — not just the board room.  When we finally voted to formally adopt the policy in March 2010, there was applause and very little public comment – a far cry from some of the other controversial issues the Board has taken up. 

The current system is not perfect, but it is flexible, and the Board has set up objectives and metrics to determine whether it is working as intended for families. We’ll receive our first monitoring report tonight,  and after that report we’ll begin to evaluate what, if any, adjustments should be made.   We’re facing some real budget challenges again this year, and in the judgment of all the board members, we’ve spent enough time on student assignment policy — it’s time to refocus on other initiatives that will improve schools across the district.  Prop. H is a distraction on an issue we’ve already exhaustively examined and it comes at a time when we can least afford distractions. Please vote NO on Proposition H. 

The major item of the evening was an update by the Early Education Department on the plans for Transitional Kindergarten. To review, last year the state passed legislation that gradually moves back the date of eligibility for Kindergarten from December 1 to September 1. Over the next three years, the date moves back one month per year so that by the 2014-15 school year and beyond, students will have to be age five by September 1 of the Fall they enter Kindergarten. Students whose 5th birthday falls between September 1 and December 1 will be eligible for a new, optional two-year program called Transitional Kindergarten (TK).

The content of TK isn’t really spelled out in the legislation other than to say it is a “modified kindergarten curriculum  that is age and developmentally-appropriate” and that TK “shall not be construed as a new program or a higher level of service” (because otherwise school districts would demand actual funding for the program). In fact, TK was largely conceived as a way to hold school districts harmless from the financial consequences of losing a chunk of potential Kindergarten students during the transition to a new eligibility date.  Enrollment of young fives in SFUSD schools varies a great deal by school, with three elementary schools enrolling no students who would fall in the TK window; others have as many as 13 (most elementary schools enroll between three and six TK-eligible students in Kindergarten).

Much of the presentation given to the Board centered on the experience in other districts which have already implemented some form of a TK program. LAUSD, for example, started its program with 36 standalone TK classrooms in 2010, originally funding those programs with Title I monies (Federal aid given to school districts to educate low-income students); Title I is no longer available for this purpose.  LAUSD’s program is the largest in the state, but San Diego, Long Beach, Santa Clara and others also have programs — SFUSD is participating in a statewide professional learning community with these other districts to share strategies and best practices.

Some of the lessons learned:

• Most of the districts serve TK students in standalone classrooms dedicated to just this transitional age group. However, districts have found this approach to be challenging because it is difficult to find enough students to fill the standalone classrooms without busing and other expensive logistics. LAUSD now recommends combination classrooms as the best model for TK.  Districts have also found that standalone classrooms cost more than they generate in per-student funding from the state.
• TK enrollment is very difficult to predict. Some districts found that students seeking TK programs were primarily low-income and/or English Language Learners; most found that boys were much more likely to enroll in TK classrooms than girls (often classroom ratios were two-thirds boys to one-third girls).  Some districts found that families preferred tuition-based preschool models for young fives, and had trouble filling their classrooms with eligible students.

As a result, staff is recommending an approach that could be described as “wait and see where kids land, then we’ll respond with programming.” Kindergarten teachers would be given additional professional development with the help of a TK coach, funded by a grant from the Packard Foundation. Schools with high concentrations of TK-eligible students would perhaps group those students into one classroom, with a modified curriculum; schools with just a handful of TK students might add in additional supports for them and allow those students to stay in Kindergarten for two years (the law says that schools and families can accelerate students into first grade from TK on a case-by-case basis). 

It’s important to remember that TK-eligible students are already here, being served today in our Kindergarten classrooms. While parents might have been hoping for an additional preschool-like option for their young fives, the current staff proposal is to keep things more status quo — TK-eligible students would apply to Kindergarten like all other students, go through the same student assignment process, and land in the schools they would have attended should the state never have mucked around with the eligibility date in the first place. Once they land, however, they do have the option to stay in Kindergarten for two years, and presumably some modified curriculum and staff development would be in place. Yeah, I know — some of you are thinking that “presumably” is perhaps too large a leap of faith.

The Board’s reaction to all of this was doubtful, and a bit apprehensive — while there’s absolutely no money to create a new standalone program, we also don’t want to give TK-ers the same old Kindergarten, only two-years of it. And it doesn’t feel fair to Kindergarten teachers to say “Oh by the way, now you are teaching TK as well as K — good luck with that!”  At the same time, I’d like to avoid the logistical issues of trying to find places to put standalone TK classrooms — there is space at some under-enrolled schools, but it’s not clear families will want to enroll their kids at schools they haven’t traditionally requested for  Kindergarten. In addition, would we offer busing to kids to get to TK programs (when we are cutting busing for our traditional K-12 programs)? How would we deal with the inevitable requests for transfers out into more desirable Kindergarten placements after the first year of TK is up.  Basically, the only thing that is clear is that there are still a lot of questions. Staff said they hoped to have things more fleshed out by early November, when the enrollment season for 2012-13 kicks off.

The Board also took up a Student Advisory Council resolution in support of free Muni passes for all youth under 18 in San Francisco. The resolution mirrors one currently under discussion by the Board of Supervisors, authored by Supervisor David Campos. Supervisor Campos’ resolution calls for SFMTA, SFUSD and other city agencies to work out a pilot for such a program, including how to pay for it and how to implement and administer it. Board members agreed in principle, but did discuss our inability to contribute much in the way of funds towards free Muni, at least not without a serious discussion of what we would be giving up in order to pay for it (the estimated cost of providing free public transportation to all youth under 18 is $5 to $6 million annually).  So for now, the school district supports Supervisor Campos’ plan in theory, and pledges to participate in the planning for how to implement it.

Coming up this week: a Committee of the Whole (Oct. 18) on priority-setting for the 2012-13 school year; and the first annual report on the outcomes of the new student assignment process (Oct. 19).

• Remember when I wrote that SFUSD is over-using the California Modified Assessment for students? Turns out it is a statewide problem, according to an article in the Sacramento Bee last weekend. The article was prompted by complaints from Doug McRae, a retired administrator with the California Department of Education.
• In 2007, San Diego commissioned a review of its special education programs, just as San Francisco did three years later. Voice of San Diego has now launched an in-depth investigation into San Diego’s move toward inclusive practices — much the same transition we are trying to initiate here in SFUSD.  The first installment in the multi-week series indicates the work in San Diego has been rocky — general education teachers haven’t received as much training or support as many feel they’ve needed,  while some special educators have been frustrated by what they see as their colleagues’ unwillingness to change. It’s very useful to have the lessons of San Diego so that SFUSD can hopefully avoid the worst pitfalls.

There were also some great blog posts/news articles about how the late Steve Jobs created technology that has really benefited children with disabilities, particularly the iPad.  This one, by Tim Carmody in Wired, is the best. 

Finally, hot off the presses, Governor Brown came through and signed SB 946 (Steinberg), which introduces a limited mandate for health insurers to pay for autism treatment — at least until the Federal health care bill is fully implemented in 2014. This is great for families who have been struggling to pay for autism treatment, or fighting with their insurance companies because autism treatment should already have been covered by California health insurance policies under AB 88, the state’s mental health parity law. It’s a big step forward and should provide the state budget with some relief, because schools and regional centers will no longer be the payers of last resort for autism treatment.