The griddle was sizzling and the coffee steamed on August 24 as the McDonald’s on 24th and Mission woke up with the rest of the neighborhood. For most in the breakfast rush it was just another Monday. But for some it was a fresh new start: the first day of school.
Ana Reyes, accompanied by her son Ethan Romero, 10, sat down to tackle a stack of hotcakes drenched in syrup around 8 a.m.
Reyes had missed the parent meeting Sunday at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, where her son is starting fourth grade. So Monday was to be something of a scouting session on the school’s new principal, Christina Velasco.
“The last director was very good, very intelligent,” Reyes said in Spanish. “I’m going with him today to see if they’re greeting the kids, to ask questios. We’ll see how it goes.”
Ethan will begin fourth grade while still readjusting to life in the Mission. He spent the summer in San Salvador, visiting the city and relatives his mother left behind when she migrated to San Francisco 20 years ago.
Reyes started sending her son to El Salvador when he was very young, she said, to show him that “here life is easier … there are lots of opportunities, if you know how to take advantage of them.”
Candy Tello, a few tables away, learned that lesson early. She was eating a quick breakfast with her son Noe, 3, who was about to enter San Francisco City College’s preschool program. His brother David had attended the program for three months before starting kindergarten at Paul Revere Elementary School last year. Tello was eager to get Noe started earlier.
“They’re great,” said Tello. “They do their best to work with the parents. They’re really well organized.” And she could afford it because tuition is based on a sliding scale determined by salary, Tello said.
But not everyone at the McDonald’s that morning was as excited at the prospect of starting a new year at one of San Francisco’s public schools.
One incoming ninth grader, who asked that her name be withheld because she’d had trouble in the neighborhood, was beginning high school at Philip & Sala Burton Academic High School — a school she chose in part because only a few students from her middle school, Martin Luther King, Jr., would accompany her.
“The school was ok, but there’s hella problems,” she explained. “There’s a lot of gangbangers.”
Her friend had been killed the previous summer just down the street from the McDonald’s. He would have turned 15 two weeks later. The killing scared her.
“I didn’t want to get into it,” said the 14-year-old.
Neither did Vanessa Dominguez. When she got to McDonald’s at 11 a.m. the morning rush had died down and she’d already completed her first day of eighth grade at Saint James School, a Catholic school on Fair Oaks Street. She transferred to Saint James last year — after a difficult first year at Everett Middle School.
“Private school is so different,” said Vanessa. “A lot of the people I was friends with were a bad influence. They didn’t want to go anywhere — but they don’t see it that way.”
“I think this year is going to be hard,” she predicted. “But I’m excited.”