Great to see the remaining parents in San Fran upset about the rotten, radical, bigoted, education their children are receiving. In less than ten years the district has lost 10,000 students—now the district will have to close schools.
“The change is an attempt at equity, but could instead disrupt school-specific plans that teachers, administrators and parents have crafted over the years: Where one school might have chosen to use funds to hire more teachers and reduce classroom sizes, the district will now instruct schools to have a standardized number of staff, potentially resulting in larger classes and staff cuts, parents and teachers said.
“When you said you know the concerns, why aren’t you talking about cutting 555 Franklin [the school district’s headquarters] before you touch any school?” said Bernice Casey, a parent at Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School. Around her, some parents and teachers waved signs that read “Equity not equality!”
K-8 parents, teachers, students, angry over staffing cuts, raid SFUSD meeting
by YUJIE ZHOU, Mission Local, 3/5/24 https://missionlocal.org/2024/03/k-8-parents-teachers-and-students-angry-over-staffing-cuts-raid-sfusd-meeting/
More than 100 parents, teachers and students gathered Monday night at a San Francisco Unified School District meeting to voice their concerns on potential staffing cuts at the city’s eight K-8 schools.
The district is giving schools less discretion over their budgets in an attempt to ensure all campuses have similar amounts of staffing, parents and teachers said.
The change is an attempt at equity, but could instead disrupt school-specific plans that teachers, administrators and parents have crafted over the years: Where one school might have chosen to use funds to hire more teachers and reduce classroom sizes, the district will now instruct schools to have a standardized number of staff, potentially resulting in larger classes and staff cuts, parents and teachers said.
“When you said you know the concerns, why aren’t you talking about cutting 555 Franklin [the school district’s headquarters] before you touch any school?” said Bernice Casey, a parent at Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School. Around her, some parents and teachers waved signs that read “Equity not equality!”
Claudia Delarios-Moran, the principal of Buena Vista, said that the K-8 model “wasn’t considered” when the district chose to make staffing cuts. She and others argued that the K-8 model mainly serves newcomers, English language learners and unhoused families. Buena Vista Horace Mann, Delarios-Moran said, needs more staffing, not less.
The school district’s plans show Buena Vista Horace Mann losing one fourth-grade teacher and one fifth-grade teacher, said Delarios-Moran. Its middle school would lose one teacher each in physical education, English, Spanish and math. It would also lose an instructional coach position, according to Delarios-Moran. The size of each class from fourth grade to eighth grade would increase from the current 22 to 33 students.
About 74.6 percent of the families who have children at Buena Vista are economically disadvantaged, according to Casey, who only learned about the impending cuts last week, during a Feb. 29 school meeting.
Casey and her comrades from Buena Vista led the charge against the district with angry comments that almost overwhelmed the district advisory meeting, which was supposed to focus on a presentation measuring the efficacy of the K-8 model and, potentially, decide the fate of that model.
About a quarter of those who spoke up were students, including toddlers. “Students, I’m so proud of you because I really feel like you’re living out the values that you’ve learned over the years at Buena Vista Horace Mann School,” said Delarios-Moran. “You’re being active in your community. You’re standing up for yourselves and for your classmates, for your families, your younger sisters and brothers, your cousins, your neighbors.”
At the Bessie Carmichael School PreK-8 Filipino Education Center in SoMa, the two social-worker positions would be reduced to one which, as many of those who spoke at the meeting said, would be inadequate for a school that has a significant number of families experiencing homelessness, food insecurity and other trauma.
“Students as young as first grade experience mental-health concerns such as anxiety, depression and self-harm, whereas our middle school student challenges are well-known,” said Kate Calimquim, one of the two social workers at Bessie Carmichael, which is one school but two campuses separated by a 12-minute walk. Calimquim said that she was “the sole social worker” earlier in the year, and that it was “not practical or sustainable” to have a single social worker for both campuses.
Rooftop School TK-8 in Twin Peaks would lose one of its kindergarten positions. “There seems to be a deficit mindset with the whole setup of what we’re discussing around resource allocations, and that needs to be addressed,” said Darren Kawaii, principal of Rooftop School.
He also pointed out there was so much inaccurate data in the slide deck used in the presentation that the committee should not rely on it to decide on the K-8 model or make future decisions on the allocation of resources to K-8 schools.
Nevertheless, SFUSD Superintendent Matt Wayne insisted the district needs fewer schools, “to be able to provide the opportunities we want for our students.”
A young child present booed.
K-8 schools relieve parents, in part, by ensuring they do not have to apply for middle school, a burden. Advocates say that staying at the same school for almost a decade leads to closer relationships for teachers and students alike. Often serving immigrant students, multiple K-8 schools offer language pathway programs that include Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin and Spanish, and gradually increase the proportion of English through the years.
The school district, for its part, acknowledged those benefits. But it also countered that some K-8 schools lack economies of scale, have high staff turnover rates and prevent students from getting access to opportunities available at larger middle schools, among other drawbacks.
Parents like Casey are also worried about the sustainability of Buena Vista’s language immersion model. Buena Vista’s younger students receive 80 percent of their instruction in Spanish, which gradually decreases to 50 percent as they grow older. Students accepted to those programs usually include two-thirds who are bilingual or native Spanish speakers, and a third of English-only students. Other K-8 schools provide one-way immersion programs, or teach world language in elementary schools.
“Now the district is, basically, from where I sit as a parent, not allowing my family to have the school that we signed up for, which is a bilingual, bicultural, immersive experience, K through eight,” said Casey, who wants her younger children to enjoy the same environment that her older child did. The staffing cuts, she said, could prevent that.
SFUSD enrollment across all grades has decreased by more than 4,000 students since 2012-13, largely due to local demographic shifts; it will lose another 2,700 students from transitional kindergarten through eighth grade by 2032, according to the district. In the 2023-24 school year, however, seven of the eight San Francisco K-8 schools had more enrollment than the state average.
“I don’t want 33 kids in my class,” said a child wearing a pink beanie. “Because I think my teacher will get really stressed out and they might wanna quit and lots of kids might not be listening. Also I don’t want teachers to get mad, raise their voice, stuff like that.”
