Community

By Trevor McNeil

We need to enlarge our community - potential parents, missed families, new teachers, and outreach to all our city's diverse neighborhoods

Reach out to young families - housing costs are out of control in San Francisco. Family flight is real and tragic. If we can connect with potential SFUSD parents years before they would enroll (which too many parents still face considerable uncertainty and consternation about) we may be able to prevent families from leaving the city or seeking the burden of independent school tuitions. My fiancée and I talk about this issue regularly and if you look at the age of the people leaving the City, it is a common conversation that the District should at the very least acknowledge. Real talk about neighborhood schools - We need to have a review of our assignment system. I know. We just did that. But we need to have an honest conversation. What is the goal of the assignment system? What is the environmental impact? Who really is access/using the lottery system and are those the families the system itself is set up to empower? How would resource distribution look if we did the CTIP flip? And why on earth isn't the code we use for the lottery not open-source in 21st century San Francisco!???! Someone needs to honestly talk about what diversity really means and what the goal of this policy is. PR! We need to brag more. We have great schools and more people need to know about them. We need to explain more. There are policies, committees, funds, programs, and processes that even well-informed parents don't always know about. And then when you also consider the families that flee our district because of false rumors or young San Franciscans who don't count the schools as a reason to tough it out in our expensive city, public relations is about enlarging the scope of who we consider our SFUSD community. This is a school system for all our kids. All our kids get to learn and all our families are welcome. Teacher recruitment and retention - If 30% of our city's school-ages children are going to private schools, then the math leads to a realization that 40-45% of people who are teaching in San Francisco are outside of our school district. Who are these teachers? Most probably didn't want to teach in private schools and many might be of great benefit in our public schools. How do we recruit and retain the best possible teachers? Salary compensation is obviously crucial, but there are also "simple fixes" that can be considered. For example, private schools in San Francisco have a very established hiring calendar window and a large, all-school job fair. Our SFUSD doesn't. We need to enlarge our scope in order to ensure the best possible teachers in San Francisco are in our public schools. School site office hours - I am trying to run my campaign the way I would want to be on the school board. At the very least, I will be at a school site at least once a month to talk with faculty, parents/guardians, students, and administrators. This commitment to office hours across the district will only help me truly represent our various communities - San Francisco is a diverse city and a diverse school district with sometimes very different needs. There are priorities in public policy to be sure and justice requires special attention to specific schools, but everyone deserves to be heard and I will be a community-based advocate for all our neighborhoods. It is the only absolute promise I can make and I'm also sure it will also be one of the most rewarding parts of my tenure as a Board of Education Commissioner! Parent feedback, parent feedback, parent feedback - Aside from school site office hours I will make sure we are prioritizing systems for collecting parent feedback - even biannually - to best evaluate how well we as a school district are communicating, informing, and hearing the concerns of parents. I lead my students through a 'Survey Monkey' survey of my class once or twice a semester. Aside from being empowering, it helps me craft, recreate, and rethink the most crucial aspects of my program. Parents have questions and concerns that are at the same time perpetual as they at site-specific or based on a zeitgeist floating around the community. As a school board we should be aware if not responsive of those concerns. Similarly, I would like to make sure we are more proactive in gleaming opinions and feedback of those parents who haven't enrolled in our public schools but have instead opted to pay for private education. Why? What is the reason? It's not to say that these responses will alter program or funding priorities in any fundamental way, but even if it's just a small change in messaging that can keep some families in the city or empower parents who don't have time for PTA meetings or prevent a family from feeling like private school is their best option, then soliciting parent feedback could be an innovative "easy get" for the distinct to consider. More student advisory committees - To make learning matter, you need to involve students as much as possible. I would like to see more student advisory for curriculum, new policies (cameras in schools for example), and maybe one day part of a teacher evaluation/support. Obviously some of these committees would be very advisory, but I would like to empower some of them as long as the students are looking back on their experience rather than immediately reacting to a policy they don't like. That quick reactionary voice is important, but imagine how great it would be if we had a committee of recent graduates who are still in the area (SFSU for example) and can give us feedback about policies and curriculum.