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.
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.
But, God help us, we’re told that district officials are defending this process. How parents divided their coins among the Lucky the Leprechaun or Trix Rabbit or Tony the Tiger baskets is actually a serious explanation the district was apparently ready to provide to affected public school families as to why their kids’ school was on the list.
Heck, that’s unfortunate. It means that school district officials are flunking the test when it comes to basic human understanding. After nine months of work, the district still cannot answer the most basic of basic questions for any affected family: How will closing their kids’ school improve their kids’ education?
Word to the wise: Aggrieved parents — and I am one — don’t care about your baskets. If you can’t look a parent in the eye and give them a straightforward and defensible answer to that question, you have no business moving forward with a plan to close and merge schools.
In so many movies, you’ve seen a character tell someone about to harm themselves or others that “you don’t have to do this.” That’s true here, too. To a point.
Does San Francisco need to contract schools? It does not. But if an honest and defensible answer can be provided as to how closing and merging schools will improve the educational outcomes for the affected kids, then it could — and even should. Like so many districts, San Francisco is shedding students. There are many understaffed schools. In the abstract, if not yet the concrete, getting the same amount of resources into fewer edifices sounds like a defensible plan; that’s why this whole move is called the “Resource Alignment Initiative.”
So whether the district has to do this is an open question. But it certainly doesn’t have to do this in a vague, hurried and slipshod way. It is now resplendently clear that closing schools is not a short-term money-saver. The district is facing a massive deficit, and members of the general public could be forgiven for thinking that the drive to cut schools is part and parcel of that. But it’s not: We wrote in July that, despite the overriding assumption that closing schools was a cost-based move, it was not: It will actually cost money in the short-term and lead to small savings, if any, down the road.
Coincidentally or not, the district has admitted this publicly in the wake of our article. In his weekend statement disclosing the delay, Superintendent Wayne overtly noted that closing and merging schools is not a dollar-driven move.
Fair enough. But that still prompts the questions of why this is being done — and why this is being done right now. These are legitimate questions. The district’s cost crunch is real. Things are bad enough that officials from the state of California are now directly involved in financial decisions; the district’s hands are tied, so it can’t easily reach its wallet.
And yet, Mission Local is told that the district’s state overseers are perplexed at the SFUSD’s drive to push forward a list of impacted schools before the financial analysis is even complete. This aggressive timeline is not one they are presently pushing.
That’s worth thinking about. If there’s a good-cop bad-cop scenario here in which the state is the bad cop — and will jump in and brutally enforce fiscal cuts the district is too lily-livered to enact — that breaks down here.
That’s because — again, for the people in the back — closing schools will not save money in the short-term, and doesn’t figure to save much money in the long-term. And if this really is about “resource alignment,” we should be honest about what those resources are: People. Educators, mostly.
Just about the only way to save money is to have fewer people. If the district has fewer educators in fewer schools, then it makes a mockery of the notion of “resource alignment.” That’s just “downsizing.”
Working on a process to close and merge schools isn’t the only big project the San Francisco Unified School District is undertaking right now. It is also doing the prep work to install an overarching new Enterprise Resource Planning system and working with the state to cut $100 million from its central office.
Notably, all of these plans are coming out of that central office, which adds a degree of difficulty.
That’s a lot to do. The district appears to be laboring greatly to convert oxygen to carbon dioxide these days, so it has been questioned, both internally and externally, whether it has the bandwidth to undertake these three major projects simultaneously.
Higher-ups, we are told, are optimistic. Nobody else is. That’s something to keep an eye on.
As is the actual rollout of whatever school closure and merger proposal the district eventually puts forward (assuming the votes materialize at the Board of Education). It’s one thing to come up with a plan — it’s another to enact it.
In San Francisco, politics runs in the tap water like fluoride. But the district’s higher-ups apparently do not seem to grasp this. Mayoral candidates Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí have both made it clear that they will stand with the affected families and fight closures in their corners of the city.
The district seems to have been blindsided by this incredibly predictable eventuality. The district that purportedly wanted to explain to aggrieved parents that not enough coins went into the Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs basket for their kids’ school to stay open generally seems to have been oblivious to the level of grassroots pushback that is likely coming.
The district really does appear to be like a bombardier in the clouds, oblivious to the damage they’re inflicting down on planet Earth. And, to boot, they’re late.
When’s that bomber going to get here?
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