Recap: New Year, New Leaders

Tonight the Board elected leaders for 2015 — Dr. Emily Murase will be President and Matt Haney will be Vice President. Congratulations to them both!

Congratulations as well to the 38 teachers honored this evening for achieving National Board Certification this year. Achieving this certification is rigorous, particularly when you’re already working full time in the classroom. It was really wonderful to see teachers surrounded by their proud families (lots of parents of young children!), and to be able to recognize their achievements at the Board meeting. SFUSD now has the highest number of National Board Certified teachers in the state, on a per capita basis, and we are 13th in the nation. Truly something to be proud of –the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards calls National Board Certification “the profession’s mark for accomplished teaching.”   And there are 110 teachers currently completing the program for next year’s cohort! If all of them achieve National Board Certification, we’re going to have to rethink the awards ceremony and hold it in a bigger venue — a great problem to have.

The Board also heard informational presentations on our language pathways and on our participation in My Brother’s Keeper, a program launched by President Obama to support youth of color, particularly African American males. In San Francisco, in partnership with the Mayor’s office and the San Francisco Foundation, the school district will focus on males and females, and not simply African American youth, but all youth of color. We have hired a Special Assistant to the Superintendent who will focus on African American Achievement, and we have a team working on an African American achievement initiative that this new Special Assistant will oversee. I have not met our new Special Assistant, Landon Dickey, but he comes highly recommended and his resume is stellar — born and raised in San Francisco, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, also holding a Masters in Special Education, Mr. Dickey taught in the New York City public schools as a Teach For America fellow and also worked as an advisor to the Mayor of Boston. Vice President Haney has already announced that African American achievement will be a standing item on the Curriculum Committee agenda this year, so I’ll pass along information through the blog as the initiatives gain steam (right now they are plans and recommendations, which are important, but actions are more important).

Blog readers will also be interested to hear that Board members actually went out and knocked on doors in the Bayview last weekend to encourage families to sign up for Willie Brown MS. Working from lists of families of 5th graders living in zip code 94124 who are currently enrolled in an SFUSD school yet had not  submitted a 6th grade enrollment application, Commissioners and senior staff went out in pairs and knocked on doors. Commissioner Fewer was paired with Deputy Superintendent Guerrero, and she told me they were able to get four of the 10 or so families they spoke with to submit applications on the spot listing Willie Brown MS as a choice. The great news is that all of the families they spoke with knew the application deadline was approaching (it’s Friday, January 16!) and were either planning to submit an application or had already done so. It made me think that more robust door to door outreach in targeted areas could really pay off in Round I participation. (There is a caveat that prospective Kindergarteners are harder to target since many of the families who most need information about enrollment procedures and timelines are not necessarily going to appear in any of the district’s existing data sources – partnerships and data-sharing with organizations that serve families with young children are crucial in this particular outreach).  Anyway, it sends a powerful message when Board members are out there knocking on doors, so I think this actually should be an annual exercise.

Upcoming meetings: The Governor submitted his initial 2015-16 budget proposal last Friday, Jan 9, and we’ll be discussing it and its implications for SFUSD (neutral to positive) at the Budget & Business Services Committee on Feb. 4 at 6 p.m. And the next Student Assignment committee will be Feb 5 at 6 p.m.

FREE “Selma” movie tickets! 7th, 8th and 9th graders can receive free movie tickets for “Selma,” just in time for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday! Visit selmastudenttickets.com and select San Francisco to reserve tickets. Students must bring a student ID to receive tickets.