School Board Notes 11.15.06

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

• District Likely to Postpone Closing More Schools
• Suggested Ways to Improve Student Assignment
• Committee Seeks Input at Community Meetings

District Likely to Postpone Closing More Schools

The board will likely hold off for now on closing schools due to declining enrollment until the district has had more time to develop a long-term strategy, according to plans discussed Wednesday at a meeting of the committee charged with developing that strategy. That committee is currently engaged in a major effort to gather input from communities throughout the city on what people would like to see in public schools.

While the board is likely to forgo a reprise of its sweeping effort last year to close and merge schools, there are a few isolated issues which might cause it to close schools.

The biggest issue facing the district with regard to closures is its legal obligation to provide an acceptable site for charter schools, Wynns said. There are currently five charter schools petitioning for a new site: City Arts & Tech, Metro Arts & Tech, Edison, Kip Bayview Academy and Leadership High School, which has been offered a controversial placement on the bottom floor of Burton High School. The district is obligated to find acceptable sites for these schools by April.

Wynns said the proposed Leadership/Burton proposal was the tip of the iceberg. "Almost every publicly enrolled school that isn't full is going to have to face the prospect of sharing its school. It might be a charter school, it might be a specifically designed district small school, but they're going to have to share space."

Suggested Ways to Improve Student Assignment

Discussion included some initial suggestions for ways to improve the methods by which students are assigned to schools. These included:

• Clearly articulate the goals of the assignment process and establish measures to evaluate success.
• Review and revise the admissions policies at Lowell and SOTA
• Review and revise attendance areas (zones that are loosely related to the neighborhood where students are encouraged to chose a school). Attendance areas are still on the books but are no longer actively being used in student assignment.
• Systemically address enrollment capacities at all schools, by addressing ways to balance over-subscription at some schools with under-enrollment at others.

Moves to revise Lowell and SOTA policies and to scrap attendance areas were part of a draft resolution that was to be submitted to the board last night but has been held until there is more time for discussion.

Committee Seeks Input at Community Meetings

The district's Parent Advisory Council began in August in an intensive effort to gather public input on a wide range of issues regarding student enrollment, recruitment and retention. The council has had 50 meetings over six weeks and spoken with about 400 people at sites throughout the city. It plans to continue this process over the next several months, especially in the Bayview and Western Addition neighborhoods. Other neighborhoods that have yet to be covered include Excelsior, Bernal Heights, Potrero, SOMA and Western Addition.

Structured as community conversations, the meetings seek to gather a wide range of input and opinions that include public school parents, private school parents, parents of small children and other community residents and stakeholders. The committee will be analyze and synthesize the input and submit it to the board in the coming months.

Community members interested in participating should write to pac@sfusd.edu to learn of upcoming meetings.