A light agenda last night, with only two items of note: a final vote on the Public Education Enrichment Fund spending plan for 2013-14 and final adoption of the Superintendent’s proposed policy on inclusive practices. Lots of public comment, too.
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.
Rachel Norton 
I’m surprised that San Francisco, which supposedly favors arts education, is allocating money for a STEM program and not including the arts to make it STEAM. We should be bolstering student creativity so that all that know-how will translate into innovation.
NO — thanks for asking for clarification as you are correct that we cannot (and would not, as far as I’m concerned) divert SLAM funds for other uses. The $43k for RP came out of the third-third, just as the Superintendent’s STEM initiative comes from the third-third (Other General Uses) portion of the fund. I’ve edited the post to hopefully make that clearer.
Did I read that correctly: we re-allocated $43,000 from SLAM for Restorative practices? Does that mean that the voter-mandated SLAM funding can be re-allocated by the Board on request?