Parents, teachers fear kindergarten cuts could spell “death” for small school

Update: In a meeting on Thursday, Superintendent Matt Wayne said that Harvey Milk’s second Kindergarten class will be reinstated, so long as enough parents accept spots to fill both classes. Multiple parents at the meeting confirmed that Wayne said that down ballot choices, not just first choices, would be taken into account when assigning children to the school.

This week, parents across the city will be agonizing over which public schools they should apply to, ahead of this Friday’s deadline.

Each family can pick dozens of schools, ranking their most to least favorite. Then, they cross their fingers and hope that the district’s convoluted lottery process will grant them a top choice. But unbeknown to most, their decisions have ramifications beyond their own kids, and could even mean the difference between schools thriving or facing the long-term threat of closure.

The Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy is an elementary school in the heart of the Castro. During the pandemic, the number of students enrolling in its lower grades dropped significantly, but staff held out hope that the numbers would bounce back. A recent renovation gave the school a brand-new library and upgraded facilities and, before the 2022–23 school year began, some 246 parents listed Milk as one of their kindergarten choices, according to school district data.

But before the year began, the school district informed Milk that one of its two kindergarten classes would have to close. As part of the district’s extensive plan to cut costs, Milk’s 44 available seats were halved.

The reasons given were twofold. One: Enrollment the previous year was low. Two: In 2022, despite hundreds listing Milk as a choice for their kindergarten, only 16 listed it as their first choice.

Many parents, teachers, and other education staff at the school are frustrated that the school district only appears to be counting first choices when figuring out predicted enrollment. Doing so, they argue, means smaller schools are likely to miss out. They also warn that cutting kindergarten classes will have dire implications for schools with few seats, as low enrollment will likely ripple up the grades, ultimately threatening to make the school too small to operate.

Milk is not the only school to see kindergarten classes cut back significantly. In an effort to bring down its $125 million operating deficit, last year the school district began deciding classroom capacity centrally rather than allowing schools to define seats themselves.

Let’s take a look at where it made cuts.

“It feels like it is a slow way of closing our school,” said Vashti Ferguson, Milk’s remaining kindergarten teacher. Fewer students means less government funding and fewer parents who could help with private fundraising, she said. With fewer funds, the school may find it harder to attract more parents.

“It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Ferguson.

Teachers in higher grades may well lose their jobs, she added, when not enough students filter up from kindergarten to fill their classes.

In mid-January, the school district’s Interim Chief Financial Officer, Anne Marie Gordon, gave a presentation to parents and teachers at Milk about why their kindergarten class closed.

Gordon said that the school district was following the direction of fiscal expert Elliott Duchon, who was appointed by the state in 2021 to help bring down the district’s deficit. His advice was to raise each grade’s enrollment up to at least 90 percent. That meant closing some classes so that fewer empty seats remained.

And from a birds-eye view of the district, the changes are working as intended. According to an SFUSD statement, classes were 89 percent filled this school year, compared to 82 percent in 2021–22. This means resources are being used more efficiently. The statement adds that “in a year where school districts across the country faced teacher shortages, some of the hard decisions to reduce classrooms meant there were fewer classroom vacancies in SFUSD than there otherwise would have been.”

This is against the backdrop of diminishing enrollment across California. The number of students signing up to attend public schools in the state dipped almost 7 percent during the pandemic. According to Gordon, that decline is likely to continue for several years in San Francisco, so tough choices need to be made around which classrooms remain open.

But this, several parents argued, was missing the point.

“If we have one kindergarten, that means we have one first grade next year,” said one parent during the meeting with Milk. “It’s leading to, I’m going to say something dire, the death of our school.”

“One classroom per year is unsustainable,” said Joanna Lin, a Mission resident and the parent of a Milk kindergartener. “It sets the path for failure.”

“The school district could have instituted a minimum of two classes per grade, but it didn’t,” said Lin. She added that closing a kindergarten class at a larger school would still be hard, but would not pose the same risk to the school. Even if schools needed to be closed or consolidated, she said, that should be decided through conversation, rather than by allowing a school’s numbers to drop until it cannot support itself.

Visitacion Valley’s El Dorado Elementary School and Bayview’s George Washington Carver Elementary also both appear to have been cut from two kindergarten classes to one this year. Rosa Parks Elementary, in the Fillmore, went from two general education kindergarten classes to one, but retained other streams. Representatives for these schools were not immediately available for comment.

“Being a one-classroom-per-grade school is not a closure sentence,” said Gordon during the January meeting with Milk. “That was never the rationale.”

Gordon also defended using parents’ first choices in the lottery as a measure to estimate future enrollment, another point of contention.

“Just assigning 44 students” who did not pick Milk as their first choice “does not result in another classroom worth of students accepting and enrolling at Milk,” Gordon said. She added that acceptances at schools fall off dramatically after first choices, which makes predicting enrollment from secondary choices difficult. Parents who are assigned schools that are not their first choice often appeal to get placed elsewhere.

Still, only 57 percent of children were placed in their first-choice schools this year, making first choices an imperfect way of figuring out who will end up where as well.

Sarah Kern, who has been the school librarian for 12 years and had two children go through the school, said that relying primarily on first choices ignored the way that many parents interact with the lottery.

“When I was filling out the choices, I did what everyone else was told to do: List the most popular schools first,” said Kern. Bigger and better-known schools often attract more first choices, with smaller neighborhood schools coming lower down the list.

When asked for clarification on why only first choices were counted, district spokesperson Laura Dudnick wrote over email that “we count student applications only once for enrollment projections because they can only enroll in one school.”

“It is important to note that we are not making significant changes to the number of seats and classrooms in entry grades for next year,” added Dudnick. The school district is intending to make a shallower cut in the coming year, with 550 spots cut from elementary schools and 140 added to middle schools.

But while cuts are ongoing, it is unlikely that any closed classes will make a comeback. According to Gordon, the most likely route by which Milk’s second kindergarten class would return is if 44 parents listed the school as its first choice. That is not impossible; 36 parents put the school’s kindergarten class in first place in 2020, and 47 did the same in 2018. But given the lower figures over the past couple of years, it is not expected.

More immediately, parents and teachers are intending to protest the class cuts next Wednesday, in what they have characterized as an existential struggle for the school’s future.

“Our staff is more like a family than a group of people that work together,” said Kern. “At this point we are feeling like our family is being torn apart.”