The San Francisco Unified School District is finally overhauling its loathed lottery system for elementary school enrollment. But even in the early stages of its replacement, parents worry it’ll have a worse outcome than the status quo.
Last week, the school board voted to overhaul the lottery in favor of a new plan to guarantee every child a spot in their neighborhood elementary school, with the option to apply for limited spots in citywide programs like special education, K-8 schools and language immersion.
Details of the new enrollment policy will be developed over the coming months and voted on in April.
But a range of San Francisco groups with very different views on education are speaking out in opposition to the plan.
Some are calling it segregation, charging that neighborhood schools will enable parents who live in wealthier enclaves to circle the wagons and keep children from poorer areas out. Racial justice organizations like Coleman Advocates, NAACP and Chinese for Affirmative Action, among others, have come out against the plan.
“This school board did not stop to look and listen to the Black and brown community,” said former NAACP president the Rev. Amos Brown. “They rushed the decision through, and it’s done.”
The current lottery system, like many previous SFUSD enrollment plans, was meant to overcome residential segregation. But, over time, the district found that parents learned to “game” the system, resulting in even more segregated schools.
The district says it now intends to distribute funding and resources in a fair way that will make all neighborhood schools into “great” schools, across the board. There is currently no plan for how this will happen, but Hong Mei Pang, the district’s head of staff, said a plan will be developed alongside the final enrollment policy, which is slated to go into effect for the 2028-29 school year.
The San Francisco Parents Coalition, which has advocated for more parent choice in schools, is not happy. “I’m thrilled that we have district leadership that believes that our schools can be great,” said Rebecca Kee, the group’s executive director. “But where they lose parents is thinking they can do it quickly without costing years for our most underserved kids.”
Few parents seem to believe that a fair distribution of resources will actually happen.
Philippe Marchand, a parent of three SFUSD students, says the board’s promise to invest in all schools equitably is about as empty as the slogan that Froot Loops is part of a balanced breakfast.
“The value of the claim is entirely contained in an accompanying action that might or might not be taken,” said Marchand, sounding like a statistician. (Marchand is, in fact, a statistician, as well as a PhD data scientist and teacher.)
District staff have also said that fully implementing a plan to equitably resource schools, once it exists, would take five to 10 years, with the likelihood that it’ll take closer to 10.
“That’s ludicrous,” said Roberto Guzman Rivera, who has three kids at Guadalupe Elementary School in the Excelsior, where he serves as PTA president. “If they’re doing it, we need it now. We need to see the changes.”
The pushback was anticipated. The new system — which was not only the board’s choice, but the option recommended by SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su — did not poll well with parents.
Su admitted that some district staff also had doubts. “You can’t school-assignment your way into having a great school,” deputy superintendent John Davis said.
But Su argued that the neighborhood school system will force the district to distribute resources fairly between schools. “This district and I will fully own that, and have historically made a lot of promises to our families and continually broken them,” Su said. “But hopefully you’re seeing a shift in the tides.”
SFUSD has been under pressure to provide fair education for lower-income and minority students since the 1960s, though the definition of “fair” has always been contentious. The district’s proposed budget cuts in January of this year, for example, disproportionately affected schools with low-income students.
While many agree that students with limited English skills or learning disabilities deserve more resources, there’s no consensus about how much money should be spent on historically understaffed and underfunded schools.
Vanessa Marrero, the president for the San Francisco chapter of Parents for Public Schools, which organizes parents to advocate for public education, said that the entire city is segregated — economically, racially and socially — in ways the school district now needs to take into account. Her group called on the district to pause development of the new enrollment policy for more community input.
“We’re open to consultation with the school district, but what we are not going to accept is segregation,” Marrero said. “We’re not going to accept inequitable outcomes.”
SFUSD’s Pang said that the district is committed to working with families and educators, and that the next phase of this process will include looking at citywide transitional kindergarten, language-immersion applications and special education. And, she said, the district will grapple with how to provide equitable resources — and even how to define what that means.
“We recognize the concerns around how we will provide a schooling experience that meets the needs families really are asking for, particularly in neighborhoods that are historically underrepresented,” she said.
But parents like Guzman Rivera, meanwhile, are circulating a petition asking that SFUSD come up with and begin implementing an equity plan now, before changing the process for school enrollment.
Among their demands: fully staff special education, provide a fair appeals process for parents dissatisfied with their assigned school, and expand Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese programs into more neighborhoods.
And, petitioners say, do not adopt any new implementation plans without their input.
“When they make decisions,” said Jenny Garcia, whose daughter attends Guadalupe Elementary School, “they don’t think about the kids and how it’s going to affect them.”