innovation

By Trevor McNeil

There's no reason San Francisco- vanguard of progressive politics & the heart of 21st century innovation- can't have the best public schools

Fix the substitute system - working with our substitute union representatives we can easily figure out a better system than we currently have for assigning substitute with specific language capabilities or curricular expertise to match with a school's need. There's no reason a substitute with a chemistry credential should be placed in a Kindergarten classroom on the same day that there's a high school need of a chemistry teacher. This happens all the time and while it might be a "small" issue, the schools that are less-likely to have regular/known subs or have the greatest mid-year needs(i.e., in need of long-term sub) are those very schools our efforts towards equity are seeking to serve. Wifi in schools - Now. There is no excuse for a lack of the more-basic 21st century needs in our schools. Silicon Valley is full of wealthy partners eager for good PR and new workers -- while we should always push for a stable tax-base these companies pay into, for one-time capital improvements as simple as school-wide wifi, there is really no excuse that we can't get our schools wired over a few months rather than the few years the District currently projects it would take to meet this goal. It's not that wifi is the most important thing for schools - it just seems emblematic of some smaller issues we teachers on the frontline see and get frustrated that there aren't smaller, simple solutions for. Simple problems and easy answers aren't sexy for a school board race, but they add up and can create great things for a city and a city's schools. Virtual school tours - Working parents can't visit every school their child could apply to. That's a fact. The choice-emphasis in our currently lottery system favors parents who have the time (and the language privilege) of being able to research the great schools in our system. It would not take a great deal of bandwidth or coordination to 1) translate school-site websites and 2) get the principal or a parent to videotape a tour of the school to at a minimum offer prospective families a chance to get a sense of the school. Our current lottery system favors families who know the school's they're choosing and choose lots of schools --- our district's stated goals of seeking equity demands that we consider these approaches to addressing possible deficiencies within our current systems. Big-picture assessment - We need to do a post-recession analysis of how the school district behaved during the Great Recession. When did we discover we didn't have adequate funding? When did we tell administrators, parents, teachers, and political leaders? What faced cuts? How did we behave? If/when there's another recession, what steps can we take to make sure cuts fall as far away from the classroom as possible and the community is heard as much as possible? Re-imagine different learning styles - Everyone learns differently and San Francisco is ground-zero for the dreamers, the creative thinkers that didn't fit into "normal boxes" of standardized curriculum. Civil rights and human rights dictates that special education is a vital population to identify and support in our schools. But there are other styles of learning - from dyslexia (which I have) to other "non-IEP learning differences" that don't get much support in our public education system. There is a way to empower students and teachers to value lots of different talents while recognizing learning differences outside of legal, cumbersome processes. Thousands of San Franciscan families know what my parents went through when they realized their kindergartener was dyslexic but there wasn't a clear pathway towards supported success in their neighborhood public school - that should never be a barrier to success in the city of St. Francis! Efficiency audit - There are a lot of systems that can easily be transferred to the internet. Why is it that happening in 21st century San Francisco? If moving repair requests online helps get a drinking fountain fixed a day sooner, we should do it. If the time we offer school visits doesn't work for large swaths of families, we need to rework it (doodle anyone?). There is a long laundry list of little fixes that people like me, who work everyday on the front lines of our public schools, understands frustrate teachers, impair administrators, and can even endanger studetnts. I think a honest broker on the school board going through all our practices and thinking if there are efficiencies to be found and whether or not such an improvement would improve the school site experience, we should get it done.