San Fran schools are total failures as education facilities. Want to learn about sex, drugs and hate? This is the place. Racist teachers. Racist admissions standards. Declining enrollment that will continue for the next ten years, at least.
Instead of closing unneeded schools. Instead of creating a learning environment, the bureaucrats want another $1 billion in bonds to fix the schools. As they do that the cost of housing and goods and services will increase to pay for this corruption. At the same time families will accelerate their fleeing this collapsing city. Maybe the bonds are a good idea—it will force creative, decent families and businesses to leave quicker. This, making the collapse of the City sooner.
“Board of Education president Kevine Boggess noted at an Oct. 11 meeting where facilities findings were presented “that $1 billion feels like a small number based on the size of need,” and asked staff how the district can commit funding to all school sites.
A facilities master plan, which typically covers a 10-year period, would address those specifics, SFUSD chief facilities officer Dawn Kamalanathan said.
A master plan is not yet available but district spokesperson Laura Dudnick noted that “SFUSD has some of the oldest buildings west of the Mississippi.”
They sure know how to waste money in San Fran. Think parents want a comfortable classroom or an educational classroom? The Educrats have chosen comfort over quality.
S.F. school district to propose largest bond in city history
By Allyson Aleksey, SF Examiner, 2/8/23
San Francisco Unified School District plans to present voters with a $1 billion general obligation bond as soon as November, the largest bond in The City’s history.
Since 2000, local schools bonds across the state have enjoyed high passage rates. That trend began to decline in 2020, though, and weak voter confidence indicates that a new bond’s passage won’t be a slam–dunk.
According to a district-wide facilities condition assessment that analyzed 148 public school, charter school and administration sites, SFUSD needs $1.7 billion to fund building repairs and upgrades over the next five years.
Board of Education president Kevine Boggess noted at an Oct. 11 meeting where facilities findings were presented “that $1 billion feels like a small number based on the size of need,” and asked staff how the district can commit funding to all school sites.
A facilities master plan, which typically covers a 10-year period, would address those specifics, SFUSD chief facilities officer Dawn Kamalanathan said.
A master plan is not yet available but district spokesperson Laura Dudnick noted that “SFUSD has some of the oldest buildings west of the Mississippi.”
“Our goal is to provide comfortable and state-of-the-art learning spaces for all of our students. (Oct. 11) assessment findings will inform a Facilities Master Planning process that will outline priorities for capital improvements, and ultimately be the basis for an upcoming General Obligation Bond measure,” Dudnick said.
The assessment scored building conditions, and identified Rooftop Elementary and Middle School’s Mayeda campus, Mission High School, Balboa High School, Everett Middle School and George Moscone Elementary School — all deferred from the 2016 bond — as having the greatest need for improvements.
Local school bonds, even as high as $1 billion, enjoy high passage rates in California. In an April 2017 survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, voter support for local bonds was high, “with 68% of adults and 58% of likely voters saying they would support a local bond for school construction.” San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed Prop A, the $744 million school facilities bond, in 2016. During that time, SFUSD’s student population grew “for the first time in a generation,” according to the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association.
The 2016 bond aimed to funnel $100 million toward construction of the SFUSD Arts Center and the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts at 135 Van Ness Ave., and $100 million for the construction of two new elementary schools prioritizing the Mission Bay and Bayview neighborhoods.
Bond money that was earmarked for the new Ruth Asawa School of the Arts campus was redirected toward more immediate needs, specifically to address facility issues at Buena Vista Horace Mann school. Parents of the school filed multiple Williams complaints since 2016 with the school district over poor building conditions, including collapsing ceilings and unusable restrooms.
Erika McDonald, former vice chair of the Parents and Teachers Association of Buena Vista Horace Mann, wrote on Medium on July 11: “Teachers, parents, and staff have long advocated for better facilities (at BVHM). Many have made phone calls, sent letters, emails, and given public comment at school board meetings. After years of nothing but excuses from SFUSD, members of the school community began filing Williams complaints.”
Districts aren’t beholden to the voters to complete promised projects and redirection of funds is allowed to a degree, explained Laurance Lee, member of the Citizen’s Bond Oversight Committee.
“It’s allowed, legally. There were quite a few (school) sites that sought funding, but there was a change in what was seen as possible. I have personal concerns about how costs continue to grow. Here we are, less than half the schools that were on the list were funded. It leaves a bitter taste in people’s mouths,” Lee said.
When asked what projects the district prioritized over the 2016 bond’s lifetime, Lee said, “That was asked of (the Facility and Capital Planning department) many times, especially from people who were criticizing the district based on geography or sense of equity.”
Buena Vista Horace Mann School received $40 million from the 2016 bond for sorely needed modernization updates, but not until Williams complaints were filed by parents.
Bonds operate more on a “public trust mechanism,” explained Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who specializes in education finance. This means that voter confidence is crucial.
“How local voters perceive the school district and whether they think the school will use the money wisely is an important factor,” he said.
But Lafortune said that “spending money down can take a while, as is the case with bonds.” The pandemic halted things, too — deferments and disruptions in other districts have been tied to “rising construction and material costs,” he said.
The district will have to contend with slipping voter confidence when introducing this bond. Following a bitter recall election and leadership changes last year, a San Francisco Chronicle poll found that only 11% of residents surveyed viewed the school board leadership as “excellent or good.”
But in its favor is evidence that improved building and facility conditions are linked to greater student outcomes. Lafortune studied the effects of school repairs and upgrades to facilities on student outcomes in Los Angeles following a series of similar bonds to the one SFUSD is proposing.
Los Angeles Unified suffered from poor student achievement and chronic absenteeism and did not invest in facility maintenance — through general obligation bonds — until the 1990s, he said.
“Unsurprisingly, if you hadn’t invested money in maintaining buildings or building new ones, and you have overcrowding, the facilities (will be) in exceptionally poor condition. (LAUSD) in the late ’90s and early 2000s committed on this path to rebuild and build a lot of new schools,” Lafortune said.
New schools naturally led to less overcrowding — and over the six-year study period, Lafortune and researchers found diminished rates of absenteeism.
“We found that there was a modest improvement in academics and student attendance, the students that moved into these new buildings went to school more often. But there was a much bigger impact when it came to student test scores in math and English,” he said.
Money that would be used to maintain buildings could be redirected toward classroom materials or ongoing instructional expenses, too. A facilities bond’s passage could free up more resources that would help the district meet its ambitious student achievement goals.
Giving San Fran any money for anything is helping them by allowing them to continue their failing philosophies. Cut them off. Maybe one day in the future they will realize they are the problem and the solution has to come from them – or the city will sink in its own sewage. Maybe then more logic will return and so, hopefully, will San Francisco.