After more years and community advisory committees than anyone would like to remember, San Francisco finally has a new policy for how students are assigned to its public schools. Last week the Board of Education (BOE) of the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) unanimously adopted the new strategy. Designed to support a set of ten important but challenging goals from increasing diversity, to expanding access to academic opportunities, to being simple, transparent, predictable and supporting choice, only time will tell how well the plan will encourage progress towards meeting these aims.

Some aspects of the new plan are very similar to the old plan. At all levels – elementary, middle and high school – families will have an opportunity to submit a list of schools ordered by preference; at the high school level, this will be required. The choice option also brings along with it a lottery process, given that at many schools there will continue to be greater demand than capacity. Finally, there will continue to be a set of schools and programs considered “city-wide,” (newcomer, language immersion, K-8, Lowell, and School of the Arts/SOTA), meaning that assignment to those schools or programs will have no attendance area preference and in the case of Lowell and SOTA, will continue to require a separate application.

That is where the similarities end. The differences are many. Most significantly are the introduction of and greater reliance on new attendance areas, a drastic simplification of the socio-economic criteria used in lottery process and the assignment of students requiring special education services within the Individual Education Plan (IEP) process.

New attendance areas will be drawn that associate families with a particular elementary and middle school, and feeder patterns will be created connecting elementary schools to middle schools, as well as pre-k programs to elementary schools. As soon as the attendance areas are created, which is presumably going on right now, families everywhere in the City will know both their “default” elementary and middle schools, achieving to a certain degree the measure of predictability so many families have been asking for. Again, that simplicity and predictability does not hold true for high schools, which only have a lottery process.

However, it’s not quite that simple, because along with the goal of achieving more transparency and predictability are the equally important goals of increasing equity of access to programs and diversity at and within schools. What this means is that while a family may know what its attendance area designated school is, availability at and actual assignment to that school will still depend on demand and where a child is positioned according to a set of preferences.

This is the new version of the old “diversity index” lottery system, much stripped down and hopefully more comprehensible. Whereas the old system used a variety of socio-economic indicators, the new system relies on the use of combined census tracks (CTIP) and the standardized test scores associated with them. The combined census tracks will be further grouped according to those scores, with the lowest scoring tracks designated as the CTIP1 tract, and the other four quintiles designated as the CTIP2 tract. CTIP1 tracks presumably reflect more educationally disadvantaged students, and therefore get a high priority in the process. One obvious loophole with this is that a certain number of higher performing students also live in CTIP1 tracts, so they will get an advantage by virtue of where they live as opposed to their individual need.

According to the adopted policy, for non-city-wide schools those preferences for elementary school first prioritize students entering Kindergarten and then kick in as follows:

1. younger siblings of students who are enrolled in and will be attending the school during the year for which the younger sibling requests attendance;

2. students who live in the attendance area of the school and are enrolled in an SFUSD PreK program in the same attendance area;

3. students who reside in CTIP1 census tracts;

4. students who live in the attendance area of the school;

5. students who live in attendance areas that do not have sufficient capacity to accommodate all the students;

6. all other students.

Middle school assignment is similar, except that families will receive an assignment right at the outset to the middle school their elementary school is a feeder for. Those wanting to go to a different school will be prioritized in a according to the following ordered criteria, with entering sixth graders given the highest preference:

1. students who received an initial assignment to attend that school;

2. younger siblings of students who are enrolled in and will be attending the school during the year for which the younger sibling requests attendance;

3. students who reside in CTIP1 census tracts;

4. students who live in the attendance area of the school;

5. students who live in attendance areas that do not have sufficient capacity to accommodate all the students;

6. all other students.

The high school assignment process will be entirely lottery driven, giving first priority to students entering ninth grade and then using the following criteria:

1. younger siblings of students who are enrolled in and will be attending the school during the year for which the younger sibling requests attendance;

2. CTIP1, with a minimum of 20% of seats reserved at each high school for students who live inCTIP1 census tracts;

3. all other students.

In addition to the somewhat strengthened use of attendance area and streamlined use of socio-economic indicators, the assignment process for students requiring special education services is much changed and drastically improved. Special education placements are legally required to be determined in the Individual Education Plan (IEP) process, and with this new assignment policy, they finally are.

No student assignment system, including this newly minted one, is going to work equally well for all families for a variety of reasons. Nor, as has been explicitly discussed through the assignment redesign process, can a student assignment process alone address the significant challenges and goals of equity and quality that our district is facing. That being said, we now have a system that goes some way towards those goals and now the question will be how inevitable gaps in the process will be addressed and how well the new system will be implemented.

One way of encompassing all of these concerns and others is to establish how the new system will be monitored and evaluated. Refreshingly, the new plan has an entire section devoted towards monitoring and implementation. An important component of this is a monitoring group that the Superintendent is charged with establishing, a group that will be comprised of “experts with the skills, knowledge, and ability to review and analyze data. Before November 2010, the Superintendent will establish specific goals and an infrastructure for monitoring student assignment.”

Parents are not explicitly mentioned as experts, but they certainly should be considered that way and there most definitely need to be spots set aside for parents, guardians and community representatives to formally participate in designing the enacting the monitoring effort. As a reminder of the importance of community participation we only need to look back to the student assignment problems from a few years ago to understand both the need for transparency and evaluation and the significant role parents can play.

Some specific things to think about in addition to the larger goals of increasing access to all programs, decreasing racial isolation at schools and programs, reducing the achievement gap, and academic achievement for all students in the district are the basics around family satisfaction. How many families are getting the schools they want and how do we know? We will need to continue to improve the data that is being publicized, particularly disaggregating it in a way that clearly presents the significance of each of the priority factors from sibling preference to CTIP status.

We will need a serious evaluation of how well the CTIP approach works as opposed to similar strategies such as a families’ income level as determined by qualification for public services such as housing support.

Similarly, once attendance areas are drawn, they too will be objects of analysis and question, as will the role of transportation and how, especially with the current budget, it is or isn’t being used effectively and equitable.

The answers to these questions are all knowable, but for them to be meaningful, the answers and the process of getting to them needs to be as public as possible. Hopefully the effort to engage the community that we have seen so far will not only continue, but deepen.

We need this type of collaborative process not only for projects like the student assignment redesign, but for all other core matters in our school district. The current budget crisis has made that all too apparent. Over the last several weeks, community conversations have been held by the Parent Advisory Committee to the BOE (PAC) and Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco, who organized a series of informational meetings across the city and in multiple languages at which district staff provided detailed information about the current $113 million 2-year budget crisis and the proposals to meet that gap. The conversations also had as a goal to raise additional questions the community had and to provide an opportunity for suggestions from the community.

A summary of the comments, suggestions and questions was presented to the BOE this past Tuesday at a meeting devoted solely to the budget issues in advance of a March 23rd board meeting when the Superintendent Carlos Garcia is hoping to get approval for his budget action plan. The comments, questions and concern cover a wide range, but have a common thread about not really understanding the tradeoffs and options. Because we, the community, are seeing the cuts presented as a package, as opposed to being presented alongside the programs and positions that are being maintained, and also because we can’t see how these cuts will differently impact some communities as opposed to others, it is difficult at best to weigh them out and decide which are the least painful.

Echoing these concerns at Tuesday’s meeting were representatives of Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth, who spoke to budget cut guidelines they have presented to the BOE and a call they are making to slow the process down and develop and equity report, so that the impact of cuts across schools and communities can be better understood before they are made. Similarly, representatives of the San Francisco Organizing Project also spoke regarding an alternative budget that they have crafted, starting with the goal of not cutting any classroom staff and keeping all cuts as far from students as possible. They offered this not as a final solution, but as a starting point for looking at the budget crisis in a different way that might open up some different alternatives.

These are powerful, constructive statements from the community and present real opportunities for potentially identifying the lesser evils we are all looking for in these abominably scare financial times. They also represent real opportunities for deepening the productive community engagement process that has started to become a regular component of these moments of decisions, an outcome that can only benefit all who are connected to our school system.

The financial condition of California, San Francisco and our schools is about as volatile as it can be right now, and the desire to have an agreed upon strategy so that schools can plan as early as possible for the drastic changes they may be forced to make is understandable. But even with those concerns, it’s still too early to pass up the possibilities presented by the community this week. The cuts being decided on now will have lasting impact, maybe even more so with the new assignment system that will also change so much. Let’s make sure we’ve examined all the options and listened to every meaningful suggestion before we put those decisions into play.

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.