Middle schools have come front and center in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Over the last several months proposed feeder patterns from elementary schools to middle schools have been dissected and debated in the community, among administrators at school site and district levels, and among Board of Education (BOE) commissioners.

The variety of issues involved in this task overlay and complicate the achievement of an overarching goal – how to make student assignment at this level both equitable and clear in a City that is increasingly bifurcated in terms of access to and control of resources. That challenge is made all the more difficult by a host of hard realities, including but certainly not limited to the fact that:

• Not all schools in the district offer the same breadth and quality of opportunities in core academics and extra-curricular options;

• Not all communities are equally poised to fill in gaps for their schools, from fundraising to volunteering;

• Not all students can get to any given middle school in the City, which is significant, given that there are far fewer middle schools then elementary schools and school transportation will be reduced in the future.

These issues will not be solved by a new assignment system, but it could be argued that our current choice-based assignment system unintentionally exacerbated and masked them. Assignment is only one piece of this whole puzzle, and though it is one that we as families spend so much time on at key points in our children’s education, it’s important to remember that how kids end up at a school is just one of the issues we need to concern ourselves with.

What happens at all of our schools, no matter where they are and which students are there, has got to be just as much a priority for all of us. Redesigning the assignment system is our starting point right now, but if we are attentive, we can use this process to highlight the many aspects of all of our middle schools that need to be addressed.

At the February 1 Committee of the Whole meeting of the BOE, SFUSD staff presented a new version of the middle school feeder plan. Clearly significant attention was paid to the need to create, expanded and stronger connections from immersion elementary schools to immersion programs in middle schools, a discussion that has been going on since before many of our children were ever even enrolled in Kindergarten.

The latest version of these feeder patterns can be seen in both a table and a map form, along with the background presentation by staff, which also includes proposals for implementing the plan and suggestions for the ordering of “tie-breakers” to determine which students get assigned to over-subscribed schools.

Leveraging and extending elementary level immersion education is an important goal, but of course it’s only one program, and only addresses needs for a portion of our district’s students. As Commissioner Maufas pointed out at the discussion, what about the language opportunities students not in immersion? When and how will we see those programs built out for the many thousands of our students?

This question represents a larger one – what educational opportunities are we able to provide all of our students, and how can we best position them to take advantage of those opportunities. The new assignment plan potentially offers a means to begin to address just that. If the overall feeder patterns are to fulfill the promise of the “virtual K-8” system that they have been packaged as, there will have to be much closer cooperation between connected elementary and middle schools and elementary schools feeding into the same middle school.

These closer connections could shed greater light on how differently our schools are faring. There will need to be honest discussions around equity issues of program placement and quality across the City, otherwise we will end up with a further entrenchment of the disparities that we are all too painfully aware of in our school district.

Just as it was this fall when it put the then proposed middle school feeder pattern on hold, community feedback will once again be essential, not just about the assignment piece, but about what will be necessary to provide at each school to make them all meet our expectations.

Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the Parent Advisory Council to the BOE will be working together once again to hold community meetings across schools and neighborhoods to get feedback about the proposal. The findings from these meetings will be presented in time for a hoped for decision by the BOE in May.

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.