Years in the making, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is just a few meetings away from adopting a new system for assigning students to schools. This past Tuesday, Board of Education (BOE) members were presented with refined recommendations from district staff regarding how to better assign students to schools and were also presented with the results from an intensive community engagement process regarding student assignment.

Over the past several months, the Parent Advisory Council (PAC) and Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco (PPS-SF) collaborated to convene community conversations with almost 600 people, most of whom were parents. As with past engagement efforts, this effort too reached community members who don’t regularly come to School Board meetings and more accurately represented families with students enrolled in SFUSD schools. The results of this outreach have been captured in a report detailing the findings, which in turn have been further distilled into recommendations.

The community report did not embrace any of the original assignment options, which were variations on local preferences (neighborhood assignment), the lottery system, and zones in which the city would be divided into large swathes, but in which for some reason choice was eliminated altogether) community report. Community concerns spanned frustration with a lack of time for organizing meetings (the timeframe spanned the winter break); insufficient levels of detail for evaluating any of the proposals; lack of specificity for some of the proposals, especially how academic achievement would be defined and used as an index for diversity; the absence of any real approach for special education placement; and a sense that the real problem that should be addressed is making every school in the district a high quality school.

The latter point regarding school quality is most important. Parents and community members raised a host of questions related to this, including wondering way teacher and administrator placement were not being addressed at the same time student placement was being worked out. Perhaps more significant were comments pointing out that years have been spent crafting and agonizing over student assignment policies, but that there has not been a commensurate effort addressing school quality, which is really the more significant issue.

In addition to hearing the results of the community conversations, the BOE were also presented with results of a community survey and town hall meetings conducted by SFUSD staff, along with recommendations from staff regarding a refinement of the original six assignment proposals. At this stage, we now have Options A and B.

Option A is very similar to the current assignment system: families submit an application with their choices, if the family doesn’t get one of the choices, then the child is assigned to the closest school to the family. In Option B, families start out with an assigned school, and if they would like a different school, they can submit an application with their choices.

The factors for assigning students when families are trying to exercise choice are either local preference, e.g. students who live in the attendance area of a school (note that attendance areas are going to be redrawn no matter what assignment system is developed) or academic achievement. Academic achievement is used by identifying census tracks that are low achieving (CTIP-1) and high achieving (CTIP-2). Students living in one type of area get a preference in another. This is immediately complicated by high performing schools that are in low-performing census tracts and vice versa. The February 17th meeting should have more details about how this would actually work in practice and will hopefully answer this and other questions.

Other major concerns with the proposals from Tuesday night, including an insufficient plan for special education assignment (replicating the general assignment policy as opposed to providing individualized placements); transportation implications; and potential costs associated with any proposal.

On February 17th staff will present a more complete picture of how the plan will work and on March 9th there will be a second reading of the proposal for the Board to vote on, when they will presumably adopt an assignment policy. At this point the greatest benefit of either Option A or B is that they are more straightforward then the current system and that once a system is agreed upon, it can be implemented and our energies and imagination can be turned towards ensuring that all schools in the city serve all students well.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.