Tuesdays are always my long day — starting at the normal time but ending much later due to Board meetings. I feel guilty, too, since I didn’t post a recap after the April 23 meeting — so I’m behind as well as tired. Time to power through:

Developments in corruption investigation: In mid-2010, about halfway into my first-term, then-Superintendent Garcia and then-Deputy Superintendent Carranza grimly informed the Board that the district had discovered very questionable expenditures and grant reporting practices in the Student Support Services Department. In short order, district leadership moved to tighten up its practices and the case was handed off to the District Attorney’s office for further investigation.  Today, almost three years later,  District Attorney Gascón announced that four former and two current district employees will be charged with felonies related to the investigation, which is still ongoing. I’m grateful to the District Attorney for the hard work he and his staff have put into discovering the truth and bringing misdeeds to light, but it’s still a punch in the gut to know that this level of fraud was occurring on my watch — even though I nor anyone else in leadership couldn’t have known what was going on until whistleblowers came forward with key information. (Read the school district’s news release on the charges here).

SFUSD student with autism goes missing: I’ve also been very engaged with the search for a 9-year-old SFUSD student who is nonverbal and has severe autism. The little girl, Mikaela Lynch, was last seen running down a road leading from a house in Clearlake on  Sunday afternoon, and I am incredibly touched and grateful that half a dozen staff members from her school have gone to Clearlake to assist with the search.  Mikaela cannot respond to her name and is reported to be wearing little or no clothing — anyone with ANY information that might be helpful should call the Clearlake Police Department at the number listed on this flyer (which also contains photographs and other helpful information). The district is covering the cost of substitutes while school staff is participating in the search.

May 14, 2013 meeting: The Board voted to increase developer fees (money school districts may assess on property developments to offset increased financial demands on schools from new residential and commercial/industrial developments). Residential development projects will now be assessed $2.91 per square foot planned, but the Board at some future date will consider lowering that assessment for affordable housing that meets specific requirements. In addition, the Board adopted the LEA plan (recommended reading), which is required by the state annually to detail progress on closing identified gaps in achievement between groups of students –e.g., English-speakers vs. English learners; the plan must also spell out additional actions the district will take if progress is not made. Finally, we honored the Parent Advisory Council on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, and The Arc of San Francisco for its incredible partnership and support in the establishment of our Access SFUSD: The Arc classroom for students with moderate to severe disabilities ages 18-22. (Photo courtesy of Commissioner Kim-Shree Maufas).

Public comment: There was a group of Bessie Carmichael parents and students, accompanied by Filipino community leaders, to complain about leadership at the school; in addition a large number of teachers, paraprofessionals and their supporters in United Educators of San Francisco came to protest the Board’s decision to issue final layoff notices for about 140 certificated staff.

April 23, 2013 meeting brief recap:  I’ve been feeling guilty for a few weeks that I never posted this recap. At the April 23 meeting, the Board adopted a revised instructional calendar for 2012-13 (May 31 will now be a full day rather than a half day) and authorized the issuance of low-risk short-term notes that improve cash flow in anticipation of tax revenue. Furloughs for all employees in 2013-14 have been rescinded. The Superintendent also introduced  (as requested by the Board in the resolution passed in March of this year) a proposed Local Hire policy that will be considered in detail at a Committee of the Whole on June 4 and come up for a final vote at the meeting of June 11.

EPC has completed the Round 2 May Placement process and here are some preliminary results. We will see much movement at the K and 9^th grade levels.

• We processed 3851 total applications or amended requests, Transitional K – grade 12
• 1310 (34%) of the students received one of their choices

 

Grade	Applicants	# (%) received choice
TK	134	59 (44%)
K	1299	519 (40%)
6th	503	108 (21%)
9th	748	294 (39%)

 

Notification letters will be mailed out today.  Families will have until May 24^th to register at the school sites.

They may also submit a waiting pool request and medical and family hardship appeals by the 24^th.

The report will be discussed at the Student Assignment Committee tomorrow night, April 22, at 6:30 p.m. in the Board room at 555 Franklin Street.

First up, the inclusion policy. As my comrade (and chair of the district’s Community Advisory Committee for Special Education) Katy Franklin summed it up this morning, “When you work so long for something to change, and then after 10 years, it does, it’s a weird feeling of happiness, relief and exhaustion … Still much work to do, but this is a fantastic start.”  Yep — I got pretty choked up as we were voting but there was really nothing else to do but go ahead with the meeting.

Next up:  PEEF spending. It hasn’t happened for quite a while, but thanks to the Mayor’s decision in late January to appropriate the entire amount called for in the City Charter (in lean budget years the City can pull a “trigger,” reducing the appropriation by 25%), we have a lot more PEEF money to spend next year (for background information about the PEEF, go here, here and here).  In large part, the Board was fine with the Superintendent’s decision to put a large chunk of the additional money (about $2 million in the third-third or “Other General Uses” portion of the fund) into a new STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) initiative. Among other things, the money would go to hire a STEM Director, three program administrators and 14 teachers on special assignment to develop curriculum and support schools in expanding their STEM focus.  We also agreed with the decision to put $7.5 million in restored Sports, Libraries Arts and Music (SLAM) funds towards:

• Making sure that every school has a librarian present at least two days a week;
• Expanding arts offerings at the middle school level; and
• Expanding all SLAM offerings at Superintendent’s Zone and Intensive-tier schools (based on a cluster analysis of variables like academic performance and trends, human capital, and demographics schools in SFUSD are classified in four tiers — Challenge, Benchmark, Strategic and Intensive).

However, the Board spent almost 45 minutes discussing a proposal from Vice President Fewer to restore the level of funding for restorative practices to the original $911,000 proposed back in 2010 — the first year after the Board adopted its policy to add restorative practices to the district’s discipline policies.    The proposal represented a $43,000 increase to the Superintendent’s proposal to fund restorative practices at $868,000 — not a lot of money when you consider that the entire PEEF budget totals $50 million. Still, we had a robust discussion about where to find the money, and dug deeper into several line items   — we came away with a good understanding of some of the more obscure parts of the proposal. In the end, the Superintendent agreed to take the $43,000 from the STEM proposal and put it into restorative practices. 

The entire PEEF proposal–prepared prior to the Board’s amendments last night–can be found here.

7:30 p.m. update — mail arrived, but no SFUSD letter today. Monday  . . .

I’ve gotten a number of questions on this so I thought I’d post a quick update — I was told by Educational Placement Center director Darlene Lim that 14,000 placement letters were mailed yesterday as promised. I am hearing that many people have not gotten a letter today — I am waiting for a 9th grade placement letter myself but as of 2:30 p.m. my mail carrier hasn’t arrived. I have a very anxious 8th grader I’m trying to keep occupied!

Usually the district does a press release and press conference with highlights of the run, and that did not occur yesterday as checking and preparing the mailing consumed all of the department’s time. I was told by Ms. Lim that they expect to have highlights ready for release on Monday.

Anyway, so far as I know, letters were mailed on time and people should be hearing very soon. Good luck, everyone!

• Congrats to the 28 National Board Certified teachers honored tonight! SFUSD now has 231 NBCTs — the highest, on a per capita basis, in the state. This is a very rigorous certification to achieve and I couldn’t be more proud of our teacher corps for showing this incredible dedication to their profession.
• The resolution authored by Commissioners Fewer and Haney and now Supervisor Yee requesting the Superintendent to create and forward a local hire policy to the Board for approval passed 6-0 (Murase absent). “Local hire” means changing the district’s contracting procedures (within legal limits) to prioritize the hiring of San Francisco residents on facilities bond construction projects; the city passed its own local hire ordinance in 2010 requiring city-sponsored construction projects to eventually employ 50 percent local residents. The “invitation to a policy” we passed tonight also contains provisions asking the district to take steps to increase opportunities for women and people of color in the construction trades, again within legal limits. It represents the aspirations of the Board to go in a direction that would channel the economic power of our bond dollars for the good of San Franciscans, and provide more career opportunities for our students. The final policy will represent some trade-offs –administering and monitoring a local hire program will increase costs  and may decrease competition in our bidding process (though so far that has not been the City’s experience). In order for such a policy to meet its goals and still be workable from a construction management perspective, there will need to be “off-ramps” or “safety valves” allowing contractors who can’t meet the local hire requirement to find some other way of contributing to the goals of the policy. So there are a lot of outstanding questions and a lot of work remaining, but the aspirations of the resolution are good, and worthwhile to take on. Stay tuned for further developments. 
• We heard an update on the Lau Action Plan and saw some examples of the increased amount of data the district is receiving from the longitudinal study of our English Learner (EL) outcomes being conducted by Stanford University. Some of the data is very sobering (our Chinese-language-speaking ELs are becoming English-proficient much faster than our Spanish-language-speaking ELs; biliteracy pathways [also called bilingual programs] seem to be doing a slightly better job getting ELs to English proficiency than dual-language immersion programs. The good news, though, is that now we finally have a store of data that will help us analyze the effectiveness of our programs and continually question our assumptions so that we continue to make the best decisions for EL students, as required by the Lau v. Nichols court settlement we operate under.
• Staff also updated the Board on the draft Coordinated Early Intervention Services (CEIS) plan submitted to the state last week — required because we have been found to be “significantly disproportionate” in our identification of African-American students for special education. The fact that African-American students in San Francisco and many other places are disproportionately identified for special education isn’t really a surprise to anyone, but now that the finding is “official” from the state, the district must take specific measures; the CEIS plan — listing our findings on the root causes of disproportionality and steps we will take to decrease it –is the first step. Once the draft plan is approved by the state the district will be required to use 15 percent of our IDEA appropriation to fund the plan, which is restrictive but given the depth of the problem, probably justified.

Unfortunately, there is still too much uncertainty in the state budget picture, not to mention the looming prospect of sequestration in the Federal budget–threatening almost $4 million in cuts to district resources next year– to eliminate layoffs entirely for 2013-14.  In addition, the district’s School Improvement Grant (SIG)  is ending this year, meaning we lose $15 million in annual funding we have received each of the last three years. Other categorical funding grants are ending as well.  Finally, the Board continues to push the Superintendent to fully align our budget with the ongoing priorities in our strategic plan, especially taking into account the lessons we have learned with SIG (e.g., the value of the community schools approach, on-the-job coaching and professional development, and family engagement).  Realignment in an environment where resources are still scarce means tough decisions about program needs across the district.

It’s perhaps overly sunny to call it good news, but there are fewer staff getting notices this year than at any time since I took office in January 2009; 191 fewer certificated staff than last year. No multiple-subject (elementary school) teachers were noticed this year.  With that, here are the numbers:

Staff receiving preliminary layoff notices for the 2013-14 school year (FTE):

Pre-K-12 Certificated (teachers, social workers, counselors, nurses)– 118

Early Education Department teachers– 10

Administrators– 24

Paraprofessionals–43

In addition, the Board also voted to accept the Superintendent’s recommendation to “non-re-elect” 33 teachers across the district who would otherwise have been granted tenure if they were employed by the district in the 2013-14 school year. This is a very difficult decision, because by definition, a non-re-election of a probationary teacher can be made without any specific cause. A probationary teacher can (and many do) receive satisfactory evaluations and still not be re-elected, simply because the administrator supervising them does not feel it is a good enough fit to grant them tenure status.

The very difficult part for me  tonight was that 14 of the 33 were special education teachers — a job that is one of the toughest across the district, and of course a credential area that is perennially in demand. Being a new special education teacher is exceptionally difficult, and without adequate support it is more than likely a teacher will fail in some area or another. So the failure to “find a fit” is perhaps a greater failure of the district’s rather than the individual teacher; still, it is important to back up our administrators when they make the very tough calls we have been telling them they must make in order to continue putting student learning above all else.

Teachers who have been non-re-elected can opt to resign at the end of the year in order to avoid having “non-re-elected” appear in their employee file, and can apply for any future opportunity with the school district.

In the news:  Did you know SFUSD has the highest percentage of teachers who have attained National Board Certified status of any district in California? That’s right — 231, or about six percent of 3,600 teachers across the district–have now attained the prestigious (and rigorous to attain) professional designation.  The newest batch of teachers who have achieved this status in 2012-13 will be honored at the March 12 Board meeting.

We aim to please: A commenter recently asked for a copy of the bedrock principles of inclusion that were submitted as a proposed Board policy recently. Here they are.

• Progress on the Board’s evaluation of our new Superintendent;
• News on the Governor’s weighted student formula proposal (now called the Local Control Funding Formula, or LCCF); and
• A proposed local hiring policy that was discussed by the Board’s Buildings and Grounds committee this evening.

Superintendent’s Evaluation:  Since hiring Richard Carranza as our Superintendent, we (the Board and Mr. Carranza) have been working on the Superintendent’s evaluation tool. Evaluating the Superintendent is probably the most important thing a school board does, and since I took my seat in 2008 we have worked on various ways of evaluating the Superintendent — struggling to find an evaluation tool that acknowledges the difficulty of the job, represents both consensus and outlier views on the Superintendent’s performance and conveys the Board’s uniformly high expectations for the  management of the district. Board members have always provided confidential written evaluations of the Superintendent, and we will continue to do this. This year, however, and going forward during Superintendent Carranza’s tenure, the Board and Superintendent have established quantitative performance measurements that we will use to hold the leadership team accountable for progress on key priorities and incorporate into the Board’s overall evaluation of the Superintendent.  This is an important step forward in our commitment to transparency and the district’s stated goal to keep our promises to students and families. 

Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF): There have been many news stories in recent weeks about this proposal, and Sacramento insiders say the likelihood of its passing in its proposed form is unlikely. It’s true that the LCFF proposal — if it is fully-implemented — represents a big increase (almost $4,000 per student) in funding for SFUSD and other districts with large numbers of high-poverty, English Learner students. But in a briefing by our Capitol legislative advocates last week, members of the Board’s Rules, Policy and Legislation committee were told that the Governor’s figures represent a best-case scenario that isn’t coming true anytime soon. Though I am in favor of overhauling California’s school funding mechanisms, and believe in the weighted student formula approach, I’m not holding my breath.  To learn more, here are some good online resources:

• District-by-district funding estimates, CA Dept of Finance;
• School funding plan won’t be easy sell, SF Chronicle
• Study compliments and questions Brown’s funding formula, Edsource
• California School District Revenue and Student Poverty: Moving Toward a Weighted Pupil Funding Formula, Public Policy Institute of California.

Proposed local hiring policy: Last but not least, the Buildings and Grounds Committee had a substantive discussion of a proposal (PDF; as originally introduced, without amendments incorporated) by Commissioners Yee and Fewer (Commissioner Haney has also signed on as a co-author) that would direct the Superintendent to put forward a local hiring policy for Board approval. This has been somewhat controversial — partly because it requires a narrow, carefully crafted approach to construction contracting that does not run afoul of state and Federal laws, and partly because it is a hot button issue that inevitably raises issues of race and economic power. The City passed its own local hiring policy back in 2010, which will eventually mandate that 50 percent of jobs on City contracts go to local residents. The Yee/Fewer/ Haney resolution, as amended by the Committee this evening, would require that the district’s policy provide additional opportunity to minority- and women-owned businesses, strengthen the district’s internship programs for students interested in a career in the building trades, as well as many other objectives. There are specific policy prescriptions in the resolution that we have been advised are not possible within the current legal framework, so there is still a lot of work to be done to fulfill the spirit of the resolution while maintaining a bond construction program that is legally compliant and produces high-quality projects, on-time and under-budget. 

Tomorrow night: the Board votes on the Superintendent’s request to issue layoff notices to 114 administrators, classified staff and certificated educators.

Very short meeting tonight with only a few items of note, and all of those on the consent (routine) agenda. Normally, the first meeting in February is when we acknowledge the teachers who have received National Board Certification (we still have the most in California on a per-capita basis) but that recognition ceremony was postponed to a future meeting. So, after the Student Delegates’  and the Parent Advisory Council’s reports,  the Board went right to the consent items:

• Awarding a $44.6 million design-build contract to Overaa Construction for the  new Willie Brown MS. In 2010, the district closed the existing school and committed to building a state-of-the-art middle school in its place, with funds from the $531 million facilities bond passed in November 2011. Candidly, touring the former Willie Brown prior to its closure was one of the most upsetting and depressing experiences of my time on the school board. We owe students in the Bayview much better than what they were getting at the former Willie Brown MS and I believe our plan for the new incarnation of the school will deliver on that promise.  There has been some controversy over whether the Willie Brown construction project will provide jobs to local neighborhood residents, but the contractor has voluntarily agreed to 20 percent local hire on the project. The project will also come under the 2006 Project Labor Agreement with San Francisco’s building trades/crafts unions. This means the contractor will be required to pay prevailing wages and abide by other union-negotiated protections.  And contrary to what you might have read elsewhere, the district did conduct a competitive bidding process for bidders who qualified to bid on the Willie Brown MS project — a multimillion-dollar design-build construction contract. 
• Rolling over the First Student transportation contract until 2015.  The overall number of buses has decreased sharply in recent years so the overall cost of the contract will decrease, and since we are still in the middle of the implementation work on the district’s new elementary school attendance areas and middle school feeder plans it is not quite clear yet what a new transportation contract should look like. The current plan is to rebid transportation for a new contract starting in 2015. 

Commissioner Wynns closed the meeting with a tearful appreciation of former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who passed away of pancreatic cancer last week. I only met Supt. Ackerman briefly years after she left San Francisco, but I know she cared deeply for the achievement of the district’s most vulnerable students, and left the district in better financial and academic shape than it was in when she arrived. 

Finally: Happy Lunar New Year and President’s Day!  And Happy Valentine’s Day!