About 100 concerned parents crammed the library of Mission High School on Wednesday night, hoping that their input could have an impact on the proposed public school closures in the 2025-26 school year.
“I’m against closures or mergers or co-locations,” said Luz H., a parent of an eighth-grader attending an Excelsior public school. “I think the children are paying for bad management of the district.”
Last week, the school district officially kicked off the discussion on school closures in a virtual town hall. It is a conversation triggered by a seven percent drop in enrollment between 2012 and 2022, and the event at Mission High was one of eight in-person community meetings the school district held recently to seek community input on criteria for closures, mergers and co-locations. The session was led in Spanish, with English interpreters available.
Some parents and community members fear that new immigrants and minority students will be overlooked in the restructuring, some worry about the uncertainty that will follow structural reforms, and some are concerned that school districts will rely on academic performance in determining the fate of their schools.
“I don’t want to close schools. I don’t want more students in the classroom,” said Maria Nuñez, a parent of Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8. But if some schools do need to be closed, she hopes that the school district could “include all voices, voices that are different, the Latino people, Black people, everyone.”
Also, “if they need to cut, cut [the school district’s] central office first,” Nuñez added. “Too many people working there; we need more people working in the classroom.”
Nuñez was far from the only parent who holds long-lasting grievances towards the central office. A parent spoke into a microphone that, “How are we do the alignment, if not do that in the central office first?”
“I’m here to advocate for my two kids,” said Blanca Catalan, a parent at Raoul Wallenberg High School. “They have established relationships with their teachers, it’s easy for them to ask questions. If they are moved to a bigger school, they won’t be able to do that.”
Similarly, another parent stated her concerns that students might have difficulty adjusting to a new school, as well as what a family could do if the new school is farther from home. “You guys didn’t think about that,” she told the school district staff present.
“When they use academic indicators as a primary factor for closing, it would disproportionately impact the schools that have higher enrollment students of color,” said Efrain Barrera, a parent at A.P. Giannini Middle School and a Latino Task Force director. “Because we know that, structurally, they are the students that are historically underperforming, and that means that they will be more directly impacted as a result.”
Several people at the same table as Berrera shared his view. One of the group’s dozens of post-its read, “Schools who don’t do good academically should not be turned away.” Members at each table wrote down their views on post-it notes and collected them all on a large piece of white paper, which was eventually handed over to the school district as reference.
Some parents and community members questioned the grounds for the school closures: Decreasing enrollment in San Francisco public schools. “I don’t believe numbers like that are real numbers,” said a parent, who won applause from the whole room.
Enrollment at the school district has decreased from 52,989 in 2012-13 to 48,907 in 2022-23 and is predicted to lose another 4,600 students by 2032, because of declining birth rates and population exodus, according to the school district.
On Barrera’s desk, another post-it read, “start with better enrollment process.”
Some parents also said that a survey the school district sent out last week for community input on school closure criteria has a terrible Spanish version, preventing monolingual Spanish-speaking families from taking part in the discussion. A school district official promised to get the problem fixed. In some cases, the moderator also dodged some parents’ questions including the number of schools that would be affected.
A similar situation also happened during last Thursday’s town hall. Superintendent Matt Wayne said “I see there’s questions about which schools and number of schools; right now, we’re focused on the criteria.”
“This is the beginning of the process … to me, that’s a success, when people are asking tough questions, because that’s what real community engagement is,” said school board vice president Matt Alexander. “The board is really pushing staff on this to do real, authentic community engagement.”
The school district is set to come back to the same eight locations for another round of community meetings to discuss the weight of criteria in late April and early May. The next meeting at Mission High is on May 4, between 1 and 2:30 p.m., primarily in Spanish.
After that, between July and October, in Phase 2 of the Resource Alignment Initiative, the school district will make initial recommendations and partner with third-party organizations to assess their equity and environmental impact.
In Phase 3, between October and December, the school district will share the recommendations with the school board, which will vote on the list of schools that will be merged, co-located or closed.
The loss of faith of families in sending their children to our public schools is a direct result of the endless mismanagement of the top administrators. When we see how educators were abused and robbed by the payroll scandal? When we know that the board retroactively approves massive contracts to outside consultants? People do not trust this superintendent and with good reason. The efforts to manufacture consent by coming into the community with a supposed “fact base” that omits a shocking amount of facts, repeating we “must” close schools to be financially prudent is just laughable. The latest hire of yet ANOTHER well paid, top-level “Executive Director” who is charge of strategy and “coherence” is very telling when that person was very openly PRO charter school is his own bid for school board before the pandemic. This person also could not seem to coherently answer pointed and important questions at the legally required District Advisory Committee. To close schools based on faulty data, when SFUSD has shown TK enrollment is actually up, is beyond short-sighted and shows a deep lack of creativity, honesty and respect for our working class.
Ms. M
I taught there 25 years ago and at that time the President of the School Board, Keith Jackson is now in Prison for agreeing to arrange Contract Murder.
Central offices were bad then too and the teachers ??
The teachers were the best people you can find on the Planet.
I’m sure they are now too.
Same with the cops.
An SF don Quixote like me never lacks windmills at which to tilt …
The real reason for the decline in enrollment is the fear the SFUSD Board put into parents until the worst of them were recalled. Since then the Board has accomplished nothing (and won’t until the rest of the psychos are replaced) and the administration had further shown their incompetence. Of course people who can afford to are moving their kids to private schools or leaving the City. This is entirely on the SFUSD administration and Board.