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SFUSD’s delay in announcing public school closures is a disgrace

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Many years ago, the comedian George Wallace ridiculed the notion of the U.S. military developing a faster bomber. Was this, he asked, a problem? Have the many people the United States has bombed been waiting outside and asking “When’s that bomber going to get here?” 

In related news, the San Francisco Unified School District was, tomorrow, supposed to release its preliminary list of schools that will be closed and/or merged — the moment of truth in a nine-month ordeal. Mission Local has learned that, on Friday, the district realized it would have to delay this announcement. A planned Monday statement from superintendent Matt Wayne instead dropped over the weekend when the news of the delay got out and questions were being asked. 

And now public school parents are more irate, not less. When’s that bomber going to get here? 

No need to mince words: This is a disgrace for the San Francisco Unified School District. And not just because, after nine agonizing months, public school families have been left to twist in the wind for however many more weeks. That’s part of it, but only a tiny part. 

Rather, this entire process has been a disaster, and it’s questionable that the district can get its act together and make things right — let alone by next month, which is when Superintendent Wayne said is the new deadline. Mission Local has learned that, last week, the district presented Board of Education members with an inchoate plan calling for the closure/merger of 10 to 14 schools. This was done prior to the completion of either the district’s equity audit or its financial analysis. What’s more, the  methodology behind the closure decisions was opaque and the strategy to implement this plan in the face of inevitable parent — and political — blowback was jarringly lacking. 

If the district moved to, say, close a K-8 in the Excelsior or an elementary school in Chinatown, what would its next move be when the elected representatives for those districts, both of whom are running for mayor, scooped up this political football? It appears that nobody at the district thought about that one. 

School board members pushed back, and, to paraphrase the “Hamilton” number, informed the district that it didn’t have the votes. So here we are. 

Everett school
Escuela Secundaria Everett. Foto de Lydia Chávez

If you are a public school parent, you received a survey over the summer in which you were asked to weigh in on the pending closures. This was not a straightforward survey, however: Parents were asked to imagine that they had 12 coins, and could divide them into buckets marked “equity,” “access” and “excellence.”

As you would expect, most every parent who bothered to answer the survey likely attempted to allocate these coins in whatever manner they interpreted would lead to the SFUSD central office passing over their kids’ school. But there’s no satisfying and intuitive way for a parent to engineer that outcome. And there is no satisfying and intuitive method to reverse engineer the tangible list of 10 to 14 schools presented to school board members based upon how desperate parents allocated their coins to the Cap’n Crunch or Count Chocula or Toucan Sam baskets. 



Source: missionlocal.org

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