San Francisco Unified School District Board - workshop

Great. Thank you so much. We are starting the regular meeting at the Board of Education for September 1st, 2026. Now call to order at 6.41 PM. Roll call, please.

Okay. Roll call. Commissioner Alexander?

Here.

Commissioner Fischer? Here. Commissioner Gupta?

Here.

Vice President Hewling. Here. Commissioner Ray. Here. Commissioner Weisman-Ward. Here. President Kim.

Here. We are in a different location today at 727 Olden Gate Avenue on the 41st floor. And so And we have a different bike system. So folks, just be aware. The mic will just come to me. Yeah, that right. Okay, great. Great. I am going to go ahead and kick us off to item, our first item, the discussion item, which is our study session, part number two, and I will pass it on to that. Oh, gosh. Yes, of course. We'll first start with public comment. One minute, five seconds maximum. And then we will go from there. Super last. You can just come on up and then.

OK, so we have five members of the public who would like to speak. So I call on Reverend Brown.

Well, the President, members of the board, Adamson, Tennery. I've been here tonight because I'm doing a job. And in 1852, black folks were not welcome in this town. And it's documented. The very first governor, Peter Burnett, was an arch racist from Nashville, Tennessee. But his ghost is alive. Keep it doing well in San Francisco. Quiet. I must say, And obviously because of one great mind, Jonathan Cotto, who wrote a little book called Savage Inequalities. It was very prevalent in San Francisco. Why not all of us realize that as Thomas Jefferson so eloquently said, we should do today. Education is the foundation of our democratic republic. Unfortunately, if we have a measure put in action that will keep inner city schools unequal and those who are privileged having surpluses which will never get to be maintained. Thank you, that's been wonderful. Say it's important. So the NAACP is admirable to this measure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I have Mahdi Rahimi.

Good evening, commissioners. My name is Mahdi Rahimi. I'm the father of the first-grader at the Lawrence University School. And I'm passionate today to support the neighborhood of Blossom Halls. My family has experienced the anxiety of FFUSD enrollment firsthand. We didn't initially get any of our top school choices. We waited all summer long and finally got our first choice two weeks into kindergarten here. But I would take that uncertainty over a system that sharply restricts families' choices. SFUSD is a highly unusual district because families can choose among extraordinary range of language programs, age-related schools, and neighborhood schools. We should preserve that. And the supposed lottery is much more predictable than people think. 94% of kindergarten families who want their attendance area school today get that school or the one that they prefer even more. Outside just three schools, this number is always 97%. My ask is to please don't radically redesign a system that largely works and neighborhood plus all schools is the right answer. It guarantees every family, their neighborhood school while preserving their ability to choose other schools and special programs.

Stephanie Falkenstein. Hi, my name is Stephanie Falkenstein. I'm a parent of a fifth grader at Yadwell Elementary School. When I went to my first focus group on this topic, my son was three years old. He is now 10. many of the families involved have paged out of the district many percent of who they wanted to be versus what decisions they actually need for their families a lot has changed in seven years but the proposals have not my wish list realize that if you go with the zoned approach there are needs that need to be reached there needs to be regional considerations for example a neighborhood where less than 50 percent of households own a car cannot tolerate a three bus commute Be clear on the impact or intent of the lottery on school closures, which is definitely first and foremost a concern of our community. Understand that feeder middle schools matter. They all must be perfect. They impact elementary school enrollment. Schools see flight in fourth and fifth grade to chase a feeder spot at another school or get into a K-8. Okay, bring Spanish immersion to the northern neighborhoods and finally, Realize that the decisions made impact generations to come. Don't make likely, sorry, seek community engagement. Virginia Marshall. Good evening to President Kim, Board of Commissioners, Dr. Su, Reverend Brown, everyone.

Thank you. I'm Virginia Marshall. I see you as the best person ever. I've already spoken. This concerns us greatly, Superintendent Hsu, because we want to make sure that you all are fair, that you use equity, ethnicity, and that every school has potential teachers in every classroom. Every school has supplies in every classroom. Until you do that, don't even consider this. Why consider neighborhood schools If the school in my neighborhood and most likely in the western district of Rosa Parks are not supplied, why consider it? Every child superintendent student, every child President Kim, every student board of commissioners deserves a high quality education. Until you do that, this is just a waste of time. Then they can even get into the parking lot. This is a public school. You have security guards out there. So please don't let that happen again. This is a . We couldn't get into Foster Street. We couldn't get in here. Why? We are paying for children's security guards, not just for y'all, but for all of us. I devoted 36 years of my life to this district. I should be in the park in any school district. So should . So should . Please don't let it happen again. Thank you so much.

Julia Martin. Thank you. That concludes in person and I'll check virtual. Do virtual is open one minute per person limited to the topic tonight school reorg number two, you can raise your hands. And I'll start at the top. Can I start? Yes, we can hear you.

Hi everyone, my name is Adela Chisty and I have two separate issues and I'll be really fast. First, I used to be an SFUSD student myself. That was 30 years ago and here we are today. SFUSD should not serve pork at all. Pork has not historically been served since 2019 and simply labeling it does not make the menu inclusive. SF is a diverse city and inclusion should be assumed and not asked about. The second issue is that if the lottery is eliminated, that the district guaranteed neighbor school is a safe, well-resourced, and genuinely attractive to families, and that the district prioritize predictability, proximity, school quality, and meaningful choice altogether. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Ms. DeLue? Hi, thank you. I'm a 20...

Sorry, Ms. DeLue. Go ahead.

I just got turned off. Hang on. Can you hear me?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. I'm an elementary teacher at E.R. Taylor Elementary. I'm entering my 28th year there. We have traditionally had really high enrollment with waiting lists, but we're seeing a real trend in under enrollment citywide, as we all know. The concern is that this is creating a lot of split grades at schools, and currently this year I'm teaching a K-1 split, which I don't think is good for anybody. I do think the enrollment issue, somebody mentioned school quality. We know that's really hard to monitor and quality means different things to different people. But I do think figuring out how we can get our cohorts in the city a little more balanced so that we don't have some, like in cohort three where we are, there's about eight or nine schools that I was able to verify that have split grades right now in the K-1 or in the 1-2. um and um i think we just need to figure out and i hate to say this word and nobody's gonna find me popular but i figure out a way to close a few schools and consolidate schools so that we can have full enrollment and full classes at each grade level um so that we can really serve our students i think that's about it but i do think having tons of town hall meetings and trying to meet the people in the neighborhoods you know our city is really changing a lot over the past years um So neighborhoods that were traditionally more working class tend to be a little more higher income now. And so that's causing just kind of displacement of people that maybe liked their neighborhood school before, but now are aspiring to go to a different school across town. But I think is great. And thank you very much for doing them.

Brianna Batiste.

good evening board commissioners and everybody in attendance tonight apologies i couldn't be in person but my little one had his back to school night um what i would like to do is echo the sentiment of miss marshall and put a hold on anything that suggests neighborhood only schools because we all know all those schools are not equitably resourced throughout the district. They do not have all credentialed teachers. And so until each and every student has access to a high quality education with credentialed teachers, then we need to ensure that choice is top of mind and that we're honest with the school closure process. Because I'll reiterate, when I was choosing the school for my little one, it was very stressful and it should have been an exciting time because I had to figure out what school might end up closing. That should never be a concern for a parent entering into a school district. So just please keep that in mind and keep children at top of mind when you're making your choice.

Thank you. Rachel Jones.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you.

Perfect. I'm so sorry that I could not be there in person. I too had another child obligation that I could not move. i would move very seriously to have this board reconsider what they're actually putting on the floor to re-look at the fact that we still cannot build fully staffed district-wide systems of support we cannot even follow through on the safe and supportive schools policy you guys need to focus on restoring community voice oversight and invest in the equitable education. Our Black students and our Latino students are 39 percent of the enrollment that equate for 68 percent of the suspensions. Our Black students are only 19 percent academic outcomes of ELA meeting the mark. Only 11 percent in math. Our Latino students are only 26 percent meeting that mark and 18 percent meeting that math. I would implore the people that we have voted for at that table to not just look at the data that we already have, but to ask yourself a very simple question. Does this look right? Does it look like our communities are ready to absorb all of our district children? No, it doesn't. Because guess what? You haven't put the work in. And when you don't put the work in, you get what you pay for. And I'd like to leave you on a note. The resistance is watching. We're watching who is voting yes and who is resisting this decrepit idea. without putting equity into our schools. Thank you. Thank you.

Mariela Ornelas. Seven.

Hello, can you hear me? Hello. Good afternoon, I'll say it in Spanish. Good afternoon, President of the Board of Commissioners. My name is Mariela Ornelas and I am the mother of the school district. I want to talk about the school districts and, above all, about the impact that these decisions will have on our students. I understand that the school district faces difficult decisions and that it is necessary to analyze the enrollment and the capacity of the schools. pero le pido a la Junta que recuerde que cada estudiante es diferente y cada familia también y tienen necesidades diferentes. Los padres debemos tener una voz significativa y la posibilidad de elegir la escuela que consideremos más adecuada para nuestros hijos. Cuando se toman decisiones sobre las zonas escolares, les pido que consideren cuidadosamente cómo esas decisiones afectarán a las familias. Encontrando así la manera de que ellos se sientan seguros y apoyados. Por favor, no tomen decisiones basándose únicamente en números y mapas. Miren a nuestros niños que están detrás de estos números. Tenemos un sistema que apoye a nuestros estudiantes y al mismo tiempo respeten a los padres que tenemos también ese derecho. Muchas gracias.

Thank you.

Dear commissioners, dear commissioners and everybody there waiting for, they're here with us. I'm a mother of, as of USD, And I want you to reconsider about the decision about the school zones and the neighborhood schools. As you mentioned before, for us, it's very important that you are giving us the right voice and the right choice for our children to pick the right school for each one of our children. Because you know that our children are not just numbers. our children, everything that we do will actually affect STEM and affect people to find the right way to feel also safe and supported. And we want the system to actually help the students and the parents and actually respect the parents to pick what is the right school for their children. Thank you.

Thank you. How about Kelly?

Good evening. My name is Haba Kelly and I'm the advocacy chair for the CAC for special education. But tonight I want to talk about on slide 28 or 29, the data shows that family choice and flexibility is critically important for African-American families. Hispanic and low-income families. So I am asking for you to please do not move forward with the neighborhood zone proposals without going back explicitly to these communities to solicit their feedback at a bare minimum. In particular, because last week the larger zone was removed without a lot of dialogue or explanation. So that is my request. And thank you so much.

Thank you. Randy Bowen.

Hi, good evening, Commissioner, Superintendent. My name is Brandi Bowen. I'm from Coleman Advocates. I just want to acknowledge that you all have a really big task ahead of you. I've heard a lot of you promise that We're going to see equity across every school as we go into this process. And I just want you to remember that a lot of the students who have been struggling academically are now going to be concentrated into specific areas and zones. And that's a huge trade-off. And so we really need to be thinking about right now as we're planning the zoning, assessing not only the programs that are available, but also the quality of our buildings there. I remember, and I don't know if this still persists, but at Carver Elementary, I remember that the school was using water bottles because of unsafe water and I'm sure that it's a lot more facility things that we need to be assessing and a lot more investment in planning for our MTSS structures across the district but especially prioritizing schools in historically marginalized neighborhoods to really have that academic intervention early on before we even set this process into place. Thank you.

Okay, that concludes our virtual.

Thank you. We will move on to item D, discussion, or sorry, item C, discussion, item one, study session, school reorder number two, passage of doctors.

Thank you, President Kim. And before I start, I just also want to acknowledge and thank our public speakers, particularly Reverend Brown and Marshall and all of our parents over there. I just want to emphasize that tonight is about building shared understanding. So to be clear, we are not proposing a final option. What we are wanting to do is share with our board and the community the tradeoffs that we have to face. and that these trade-offs are real and have real ramifications. But again, we're not about selecting an option today. Our team will continue to look at the connection between school portfolio and student assignment policy, something that we have not done yet before and we are doing now. And we will be bringing more recommendations and and seek your direction at the next study session on October 6. And then on October 13 at the board meeting, we will definitely seek your recommendation for next steps. So we still have more conversations, more data gathering, more time to process. I will admit that the one challenge that we continue to be faced with is how do we create strong schools for our students so that their academic experience is the center of what we are doing. And that this is not just a technical exercise. This cannot be about how nice or pretty the boxes on the map will look like. It really has to be centered on our students, on our young people, on how they are going to experience their academic career with us at SFUSD. So our school portfolio and student assignment policy are not just separate conversations and they cannot be separate conversations. They are really interdependent and related to each other. And the work that we're doing and the work that the staff is doing is truly linked. The other challenge that we are faced with in doing this work is continuing to hold the values of SFUSD. And we've heard from our public already of just we need to continue to remain student-centered. We need to be fearless as we look at the data and see where our students are thriving, where our students continue to struggle, how we can ensure that our students, again, have the best academic experience possible. As we dive into today's conversation, I ask that all of us, not just the commission, but all of us as a community, to recognize that this is really difficult work. We're going to be looking at data that's going to be really difficult. We're going to be asking ourselves some really difficult questions about our values and how we want to make this school district successful and available and thriving for all of our students. So I ask all of us to hold our students and our families at the center of our work and continue to lean into that when particularly the data is difficult. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Hongmei to take us through slides.

Thank you, superintendent. Good evening, commissioners. Good to see you. Just wanted to ground us moving into slide number two, again, on this schedule of board study sessions and be very clear, reiterate that the next step is for us to receive additional guidance and advice from the board so that we are able to truly align on a policy direction leading into October. I want to remind everybody that study sessions are working sessions. These are not meant to be decision points. It is really an opportunity for us to all be grounded in the information that we have built through data, through analysis, through input from community so that we are able to surface for the board information and analysis that you can work off of as we are setting this direction. There are two key dates that I want to bring to your attention. First is October 13th, where we will be asking the board and recommending a policy direction for the board's adoption. And then for in April 13th, for us to bring back to the board after another series of engagements and study sessions around what we would do to adopt, revise or revoke the assignment policy. I did want to point out and definitely in relation to what we have already heard, that program impact and placement decisions are very important to our community. And so there will be additional discussions and concrete sets of recommendations that we will bring to you starting in study session four in November. but we will be looking at all the levers that we will be discussing today, ranging from language programs to special education to middle school pathways and K-8s, as well as boundary shifts to bring a recommendation on October 6th. Next slide, please. So to ground us tonight, here are some of our asks as staff has put today's deck together. So the first is, you know, really for us to understand what are some of the values of the community, what families have told us based on the data that we have collected and which option protects what matters to you the most. The second is around testing each policy model against seek capacity. There will be a conversation around costs, benefit analysis, the trade-offs, and we will also be surfacing some of these trade-offs against the three models that we are evaluating, including where and how we are adjusting from the current status. Um, lastly, if there are any additional options that should come off the table and what analysis do you think we need to prioritize to bring back a draft version of recommendations to you in October 6th? I just want to say that taking an option off the table is also a piece of input that allows us to focus our analysis. It is not meant to be a vote. and that we want to be able to now in September to align on the problems rather than wait till April when we have a recommendation. Next slide, please. Now I just wanna walk you through what to expect for tonight. On the left is an agenda with the sort of sequence we have developed based on your input and feedback from the last study session, several chapters. So first we're gonna set the table, set the stage Sorry, mixing metaphors here, so that we are able to operate on a set of inputs that we have already received from you and from the community. We will then turn to the core of tonight's study session around the analysis. So what are the different options? How do they perform in relation to demographic information and data and enrollment trends? And we have also created a chapter on community engagement, where we can share with you some of our initial thinking and hopefully align on what we have already heard from the community, as well as some next steps. Again, where we seek your guidance, we've walked you through that already, some of it in the last slide. But really, again, at home, What matters to you the most? What are some of the costs that you cannot accept as part of the trade-off? Are there options that we can continue to take off the table? And what do you feel like is most critical to prioritize as we start building out our study session on October 6? We would also love for you to continue to think on what are some of the levels of inputs and perspectives that would be helpful to you to be able to reflect from families and community as you are thinking about direction that you will give staff prior to October 13. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jeff and Lauren to help us set the stage. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. For those who don't know me, I'm Jeff Kong. I'm one of the leads on the initiative. So we'll go to the next slide. We'd like to start with grounding again in what we hear from families. So we discussed this in study session one, but as we've learned, different families have different perspectives and it's really challenging for us to put on one page or one report everything that kind of the perspectives that we have on our system, both on the system we have today and any future assignment system. But one thing, a couple of things we do know is A guaranteed seat close to home and citywide access can now both be maximized. Those are really challenging to meet at the same time. Proximity only helps if the nearby school works for that family, which is another thing that we know, which assignment policy cannot change alone. I think this just kind of spells out what that we are trying to collect and gather and process all this different information, we will need to continue listening and engaging. And I think a theme from last time and a point that we've taken seriously is community engagement will both center focal populations, it will continue to do that, and it will extend to potential families and those who have not participated in our system. And we know that that's an important aspect of what we need to do is to continue listening. Next slide. So these two slides are kind of a thick read, but just wanted to really quickly go through what we heard from session one and things that are in motion from that. The first thing that we heard in session one is that the board asked us to explain why enrollment falls to the fifth to sixth grade. There are a couple of things here. One is assignment data does show that for those that participated, 100% of feeder requests were honored. It is working for them. And 95% of sixth grade applicants got a requested school. That's half of the story. And then for those that have not participated or didn't apply, there's more that we can do and that we're looking at, which is like disaggregating the transition grades from fifth to sixth. So what have we lost or what were the different gaps that we're seeing from that transition? Transition drops are a trend that we understand happen in different districts, but we'd like to understand more deeply our dynamics. And then again, back to community engagement, engaging with and understanding more, focusing on fourth and fifth grade families in our engagement as we think of a new system and fearing from them more about what's important and how they're thinking through their options. For special education, we heard that it can't be the exception, right? Like we heard comments that it must be, considered equally with our general education population. So staff are analyzing special education alongside general education in every option. We do have different seat capacities and everything that we're thinking through, but that's certainly something that we have already built into and will continue to build into the analysis. The third thing is that the board said the choice is not a goal on its own. We had posed that as a question, but access is the goal. And so we've adjusted kind of the way in which we started framing and looking at the optioning, which is really that it's proximity, predictability, diversity, and really looking at how we are considering access as a dynamic and something that we will look alongside, but not one of the key priorities. Next slide. The last couple of things we heard are not all choices the same. We both heard this in the board meeting as well as through feedback throughout afterwards. We recognize that a family choosing a citywide program may be traveling across the city or choosing a citywide program to stay close to home. So we understand those dynamics. Our action is to disaggregate our citywide data demand and look at those two patterns. So we're doing that. Large zones, what we heard is that it's not worth further analysis. So as we see today, we are down to three options and we're going to continue down that path. Really, I think the board had asked to start even more as we're looking at new voices, start with what families have told us and start with that deeply. So we talked about community engagement that we did in 2020 and 21. We also had come back to the survey that we gave the parents, which is a research report that was done on families who are applying to SFUSD We have those available. We will make those available on our new website around the initiative. And we are continuing to synthesize and story tell from that information as we go through the study session series. The last thing here is reach the families we hear from the least. And again, I think this goes back to the theme of what about new families? What about potential families, those not participating? We've heard that our engagement plans really will incorporate that. Again, we will continue to center local populations and others who are both who are in our system and those who have not yet participated. Next slide. We are one thing that we had also heard not only from the last session, but I think in conversations through this whole process is that The idea is that we all want all neighborhood schools to be strong. That feels like the theme across the board. It's really about, and so that is our starting point. I think what the ask was from our last meeting is, can you really define what that is? Can you get really specific as to what does that mean in terms of staffing floors or in terms of how we're budgeting a resource in each school? We can say what we can say today is that we do have right from legal requirements and what we can afford these are the things that we are like we do have our budget process and staffing models that are defined by ed code that is a starting point obviously what we are continuing to build on is not just defining what is a high quality school or a strong school but as you can see on the right it more than we've done in the past i think around this um assignment policy work is getting more specific around these types of programs, not just for general education, but for language pathways, for special education, what do we believe must be true for students to access these services across San Francisco in our unique system? I think getting really specific and more pointed as a team around that is the work that we're engaging in right now. It is not something that we have been able to bring today to share in detail, but just knowing that that's in process that we're in.

Next slide. just ask process when we get to i have a clarifying question comment about that should i hold it yeah this uh like are we going to come back to this stuff so if you have a clarifying question yeah well it's sort of more like and i'm sorry i missed the last session but it was more the question around like did you all talk about how the enrollment system itself impacts uh predictability of enrollment which impacts budgets which impacts the ability to do what's in the left box here Right? If we have a more predictable enrollment system, we know a school's going to have 500 kids. They're much more likely to be able to retain staff. If that school ends up having 300 kids, they have to cut a bunch of teachers. It leads to more staff turnover and less stability for the school. I think that's a pattern or the combo class. All those things happen and we don't know. I think there's a value in the predictability that actually helps achieve this thing. That's one of our struggles right now. So I just wanted to, I don't know if that was part of the conversation, but I want to at least throw it in there.

Yeah, thank you. I think that does help. It's not on here, obviously. I think it is something that we can definitely elevate.

Yeah, can I just also ask a clarifying question around community engagement? I really appreciate the commitment to the engagement, but I have not seen any dates scheduled for community engagement. And I know there's an interest from board members and. participating in efforts to gather community engagement, not just have kind of to listen to the community directly ourselves, not just have staff relate to us what they heard from community and also to hear from community before we give a policy direction in October. So I would love to know when we're going to hear what the dates are for any community engagement efforts that we can And how can participate in them? I just like to 2nd, that as well.

That was actually my main question on this was. Hopefully, when we would have a schedule and making sure that we're trying to determine what matters most to families. To enroll in, or even to consider. As an option, and making sure that we're reaching out very, very broadly to, uh, to reach as many folks. As possible, like, I would also very much like to have that information before we're asked to make a decision on the 13th of October.

Thank you, I know, I think we will be touching on that or speaking as best as we can for that. Um, there's like, 32 and 33, um, and then another point rule. where we will pause on community engagement. But I think that's a little bit.

Can I just again be clear that on October 13th, we're not asking for a vote from the board. We're asking for another point of direction from the board. The vote will come in April.

Yeah, but I think that many of us would like to take into account hearing from community in determining what direction we would want to provide a brief.

Okay. Um, this is to show, uh, this, this slide obviously has an array of our, our current, our portfolio of programs across the district. Um, our programs are part of the fabric of our district. Um, each are designed around thoughtfully designed around what students need. And what we experienced, I think, from the zone policy and even the data we're going to show today is that any policy shift will likely have deep interactions with how we offer these programs, right? Whether it's the placement of them, the design of them, et cetera. So we're just naming, we're showing this to name the fact that where these programs sit and how they're structured is a really important part of this conversation. It's also very much something that's going to be more deeply discussed in November in detail at the study session and then share, right, like staff have a goal of really getting more specific in how we are dealing with these moves by December. We understand also and recognize that these two things are intertwined. So like if we're voting on or giving direction on something in October, please give us some indication or some impact of what it's going to mean for potentially a program or different types of program shifts. So we're going to start to introduce what those levers are today. We're not going to name or quantify what the program impact is just yet, but I think it's just to start with the fact that we have real intentional design and that there are trade-offs here and that I think the last thing is that this work is not just about making seats fit. I think ideally we are doing that in concert and in connection with like enhancing and evolving the programs that we have. So those two things, I think that's what's like the cross-functional challenge that we have is just making sure that our teams are working together to make those decisions together.

Yeah. Quick question about the language clarity. When we see portfolio programs And we have language programs, special ed, paid schools. Is this the extent of what we mean by citywide seats? Anything else that counts as part of citywide beyond those three?

We have a Montessori program, which is currently citywide. So one additional.

And then when we say portfolio programs. Because we're using the term portfolio and some places program and others. What do we mean by portfolio? Does this encompass all of the program?

I don't think so. I think in our next meeting, we'll talk a little bit about TK. So there are other strands that we'll pull in. It's just these are the ones that we'll talk about most today. So I want to make sure that they're really clear.

Okay, so when we talk about programs or citywide, we're mostly talking about these three things today. And then when we talk about portfolio, it's not just these that we're talking about, we're talking about things like capacity seats, building capacity, etc. Right. Okay.

Would it make sense when we did the ad hoc back in was it 2022? I think there was it was a year long ad hoc committee and the first session was spent on shared language and coming to shared definitions. If we're building on that, perhaps it would make sense to share that as an addendum, you know, and some of that shared language so that we're all I think that might be a good place to start. Maybe even sharing the slides from the book, posting them publicly somewhere so you don't have to go through board docs to find them all, because there's a lot of great research and material in there.

From the iHealth.

Yeah, that sounds good.

Yeah, we have the other website from the assignment policy where all that exists. We'll start, like, I think we can make over and make that easier to access. The last slide before we get in, last bit of framing. is actually i think lauren's really gonna tee us up for a lot of this but framing today's discussion we just wanted to be super clear if we haven't already this is a mapping exercise mapping meaning this is a place to to kind of put all the start to surface the problems it's a mapping exercise to surface the constraints the challenges um and the potential benefits that we can find um we are this is illustrative approximate like exercise their approximate views of seat shortages. So we'll be sure to give you clarity on what each slide is showing. So we are going to also show some simulations from Stanford, which are even further approximations. So these are like projections on things that we may not have real like sound player, like projections on things like what might choice models be for families. Like these are things that we can't just directly do. And so, not just yet, as we get deeper into this, we will be able to do, but not today, a detailed model of what will happen under exact like certain scenarios. It's not a recommended option. It's not going to have specific zone boundaries, John, that are like a solution set. These are illustrative and the zone boundaries are shown to kind of make the point of where the problem sits.

Okay.

Next slide. Amy Nunez, Right so as we're trying to think about the options that you guys wanted us to investigate we're going to look at two different things first we're going to look at capacity match. Amy Nunez, Are there enough seats for us to do this option, and how do we make enough seats if we don't see enough right now. Amy Nunez, And then we're also going to talk about the priority that you signal to us as important and how each of these policies does on those priorities, I want to underline what Jeff said that like. this is a really difficult problem. There's really difficult trade-offs and we're going to look at a lot of math. And I realized that like, it's hard to look at some of this data and all of the maps. And I just want us to be clear that they're illustrative only. We want to make sure that we're sizing the problem together and have a common language about the problem that we're trying to solve. But none of these are solutions and we should take all of the numbers here with like possibly a mountain of salt. I'm going to try and spend 20 minutes on data, please stop me for clarifying questions and then leave 40 minutes for discussion from the commissioners if that's okay. All righty. So these are the policy options that you guys indicated to us last time. Small zones in which a family is assigned to one of three to five schools potentially in their neighborhood and then can choose other schools throughout the district, city-wide primarily. Neighborhood with choice of all schools or access to all schools. This is where families are assigned to a local school by default, and then have the option to write any other school that they would like to be considered for on their application. And then the last option is neighborhood with only citywide programs. So you're assigned to your neighborhood school by default, and you can only apply to the programs that we've talked about as citywide. Those are language programs, K-8s, Montessori program, and we can talk about later how those are allocated across the district. All of these prioritize predictability and proximity. Diversity in each one depends on a different thing. In the small zones, it's how you draw the zones. In the second option, it is the policy details, how we're using tiebreakers, et cetera, and the placement of the different programs. And in this last one, neighborhood and citywide programs, diversity depends only on where the programs are. So, next slide.

I have a quick clarifying question. When it says what it prioritizes and the 1st, 2 say predictable in proximity and the 3rd, 1 says proximity and predictability. Is that does that order matter? Like, we actually say predictability is.

first you want them to be a second child i think we made this slide yeah i um i mean it was usually when they're listed and we did this a lot with 5101.2 is we ordered them and we listed them in order of priority and so i think this this was meant to show that yes i mean i think there's more of an indexing around um both are prioritized but proximity felt like the more right okay

another clarifying question i'm trying to i'm juggling a little bit to understand the difference between small zones and neighborhood plus city web because a small zone any school and family zone okay so there's a zone plus citywide designated programs but then it says local schools default or schools does that assume that the or schools would be is that neighborhood plus all schools is where you're looking at sorry neighborhood plus citywide programs

The issue is that it says local schools default for schools and programs.

So families can request schools and programs designated as sitting wide. The. How is that different from the small zones? So, in small zones, there's 3 to 5 schools, and we guarantee you a place at 1 of those 3 to 5 schools. In the 2 neighborhood options, we guarantee you a place at just 1 neighborhood option. But the middle option here is we guarantee you a spot at your neighborhood option. and then you can apply to any school or program in the district, regardless of whether it's designated as city-wide. The second option is only city-wide schools and programs.

I was getting confused by the, or schools and programs is, I was not doing well with my grammar.

Okay.

Sorry. No, no, no, that's me.

We're clear now, everybody, about the three choices?

Awesome.

All right, so capacity match, it's sort of a mathematical concept to look at whether the number of students match the number of seats in an area we have to sort of draw a line and say, here's the area we're looking at. Here's the students who live there and here's the seats that are allocated to that area. So we're just comparing the number of students who live there to the number of seats there. We sort of measure it as the seats in the area. compared to the number of students. A negative number is a shortfall, so not enough seats for the students living there. A positive number, you'll see it in green on the maps, is a surplus. More seats than students living in that area. And this matters because this was actually the holdup for me on large zones. We could not guarantee people a space because we did not do the exercise that we're doing now to show where we need to change our programming to make it. It is easier in a larger unit to make sure the capacity matches. It is harder the smaller the unit that you're getting down to. It doesn't necessarily mean a larger unit is better. It just gives us a little bit more flexibility on what we do to get to the right number of seats for the number of students living in the new ground. I wanted to say a quick note about seat counts. We'll look at them now, I think the next slide or two. But for SDC students, right now every school on this map has two to three classrooms held for SDC students. So we're not considering SDC students as assigned with general ed population. We're holding specific places for them. We'll consider that later as we talk about portfolio and as we think about how students access local seats in different programs. But just wanna make sure that we're clear Those seats are here, but we're not looking at them today. Yeah.

Considering we have a huge number of students that might split their day, students receiving special education service because a student is more than their placement, first of all. So a student receiving special education services. But we have a lot of students that might split their day between a special day class. My own son was a perfect example and general ed. And so I'd love to see the the math and i'd love to nerd out with you on the math behind that to make sure there's equitable access and we're not being overly restrictive when a student might fit into more than one category here i think that's a great call out and we'll talk about this but we might want to do like a special nerd out session on sdc math because it's super so thank you yes

um i appreciate the note about seat counts i think it would be helpful as we go and i think it's named for some maps but not others just naming are we talking about mass building capacity versus current assigned capacity and and actually if you could just define that for everyone listening i think that would be helpful because i think that actually has a big implication on some of the maps

And we've had policies in the past that have held some of our schools harmless as far as enrollment and specifically left space, knowing that students come in mid year how I'd love to see how that's addressed here as well.

Yeah. Okay, can I answer that question when we look at a picture of a map? Because I think it'll be clear as that. Okay next slide. This is just a breakdown of where our seats are right now in elementary school. So about 60% of our seats, 62% are in attendance area schools for general education. That is, if you live in the Sanchez attendance area, there are seats reserved for you in the general education program at Sanchez times the attendance area. 38% of our seats are split between language programs and citywide programs. The citywide schools here are our Montessori school and our 8K8s. All right.

So what about our other alternative schools? Like, like, sure. Where does where does that fit in here?

Make sure is counted here as an attendance areas.

Okay. It's not an alternative anymore.

No, this is in our policy that we have right now. We treated as an attendance. Okay. Can we see in the map? So this map is just helping people understand where the seats are across the city. So what we're looking here is at each attendance area and the number of seats at the full facility capacity of that building. So looking at. Down the side, I can see 66 that means that there's 3 kindergarten classrooms, 3 classrooms of 22 at that building. That's the full capacity of. You can also see dots here where you see our city wide programs in schools. So you can see, for example. One called out in the Stevenson attendance area, the furthest west stop. They're showing the capacity of our citywide schools and programs. SDC classrooms, again, are not specifically displayed here, but each school has two to three classrooms reserved for students, and SDC is in accordance with the programs that are in the schools. One thing that I should note is these attendance areas have not been redrawn since 2010. It is typical to redraw these after every census or more frequently than that some districts do. We have not done it since the last census because we've been considering how we want to change our policy. So these are not the most up-to-date attendance areas that could possibly be drawn. But it is how we're going to compare a boundary with the number of kids to a number of seats. sorry if it's somewhere on this page or i'm not able to read it but the color coding is that just the it's just the number of seats so parks and lau are two largest elementary schools they're the two dark dots in the upper right corner they both have 110 seats i think and then lighter is less milk is the smallest school here it says 22 seats thank you yeah um these

Do this is essentially zeroing out all programs? Yes. Correct. And then does this count? Sorry, I think I asked this question. I'm asking that because, well, I do want to have a record, but I also don't remember the answer. But does this include buildings that we know could be used as the school buildings if we were to repurpose them as school buildings? Okay. So, I guess the context there is, do we have any buildings that we could be using as school buildings? Have we invested some resources in those that would actually change some of the numbers here? Or is that just right now?

This is just the capacity of the buildings. This isn't showing that where the kids live.

Of our existing schools that are open, right?

So, like, I don't even need a lead.

Amy Nunez, Yes, right and when it only is not here, Chris do you want to speak to this, I think that there's several schools that could be schools, but all of those are facility projects there.

Christopher Jagardy, Are there are facilities that could be schools, they may have once been schools, but the window to be able to modify them to be accessible and currently approved would be between. three to seven years depending upon the facility and how much capacity they've had. So could we bring different buildings back on time as schools? Yes. But for example, just to get the permitting and the planning done, there's three years to go, right? That's not even construction. So that's when we say it's a bigger window. So there is more flexibility there, Commissioner Alexander, but it's more mid to long-term flexibility. So this is just the sites that are currently serving as schools.

I think it's just helpful context to know in part because we, you know, as you drive around some buildings like the CNI building, and you look at that and you're like, why can't that be a school? And it's just, I think there's a context here of like, it could be if we have the time and money for it. So I think that's just helpful of a benchmark.

I can ask a follow-up question. What percentage additional capacity are we talking? Is this like two or 300 potential seats in three to seven years? Or is this like,

15,000 like what just this a scale I feel like you're probably better prepared to answer that than I am I'm sorry order of magnitude it depends it depends upon the way you want to look at it yeah so currently we have the number of buildings that are currently in service as schools we currently have 19 000 empty seats In buildings that we're currently operating as it's gone up, but that is 14,000 it's it's 14,000 if we count how many classrooms are in service if we put all of our classrooms at their sites back in services and that's how. Because we tend to reach out this space over time, so an empty classroom becomes an office or empty classroom becomes an extra activity there. Right that's not unusual for a school as a long time teacher and principal I can tell you, I never had an empty room, even if I didn't have enough students, we find uses for them. So when you just say how many empty seats, do you have the answer is 14,000 how many students could you fit into your active school sites.

Sorry, my question was more around the additional capacity, just to kind of get an order of magnitude, so you know, then, depending on where they are, we can.

Patrick Corbett- kind of basketball experience, do you mean if we brought all facilities yeah we don't have okay I can't use.

Patrick Corbett- Okay, and to clarify what I was suggesting was it when we get to the following slides we'll see that in some areas of the city there's a shortage that i'm more interested in the shortage areas yeah.

yeah Thank you, yes, thank you well, but are we, including. Potential our current charter schools that are using Prop 39 funds to sit in existing SFUSD abilities in any of that facility analysis also?

The only one that I didn't think of that meets that criteria is at Bradford.

Well, the new school, like most of the KIPs of Prop 39 does too, so I mean.

So we'll confirm creative Irish.

I just, I do have a clarifying question about the census. So is there a concern that given that this data is. 16 years old that we're going to be relying on this data. So, the lines are 16 years old. The data is all sorry. Okay. So, but I guess is there a, thank you for the clarification. Is there a concern that we're going to be relying on the line? Are we relying on the lines in any way that would set us up to make decisions based on. So lines that should not be.

That's why we're showing you both the ones that they exist now and the Stanford lines of small villains and things like that, because we want to see a couple of different views of this so that we make sure that it's not the lines that are a problem. Does that make sense?

It still gives you population and demographic dispersal. Should the lines be adjusted so that some of the shading might change if you land on a plan? The answer is yes.

Thank you. That was where I was going, ultimately, to your question. I didn't ask it, so thank you. We will adjust them to make everything fit better in the future. All right, so next slide, please. Okay, so first map. This is, to Phil's point, all programs in a school. So this is the full capacity of the school versus all of the students who live in the neighborhood. So what we're looking at is all kindergarten applicants in a projection moved forward to 2033 by our demographer. versus our seats in the schools the maximum number of seats the entire facility capacity where we see deep red we see that we do not have enough spaces for the students in those neighborhoods and i'm going to call out four specific ones where i see a lot of red so i see in the webster mission bay area even though we just built a school because they are continuing to build housing over there the demographer projects that we will have still a large shortage 10 years from now I think in Bayview, if all of the students in all of those schools attended their neighborhood schools, then we would have a large shortage there, comparing all the students in the schools to the programs there. Another area of shortage is Visitation Valley, slightly smaller, and then central area, Westport, La Clarendon, Alvarado, and Milk neighborhood. We see a shortage there as well.

Yes, a clarifying question about... Yeah, under A, B, C, I guess A, B, and C, they're under regional counts. It's Webster slash, I assume, Mission Bay or something like that. But on one side, it's got a red one and a green zero. Can you explain for me, A, B, and C, how that works?

So the numbers in the middle column are the number of acne areas that we're talking about. So in Webster Mission Bay, that's just one large attendance area right there. It's the big red one on the right hand side. Okay. In Bayview, we're talking about four attendance areas, Malcolm X, Carver, Bretthart, and Throop. Okay. And then the seats is the number of seats, like the number of actual spaces in the school that we are short to fit the students who live there.

And we're actually saying it's one seat. Yeah, let me chime in about that, Commissioner Ray. That in the Webster Mission Bay, the one red indicates that one attendance area has a shortage, and then the green zero indicates that there are no attendance areas with a surplus. And that's just because the Webster Mission Bay attendance area, it's one attendance area. It's either going to be a shortage or a surplus. In this case, it's a huge shortage.

Thank you. It's just a number. So I'm going to build off of what Commissioner Alexander was building on what I was saying earlier of like, wow, that's so self-serving. And I think this is the reason why I asked about the capacity that we have in our buildings, because this is based on a projection seven years from now, right? So if we were to decide today to take a building online, seven years from now right it would actually address some of this potential right so the the matching here of our existing buildings to this map has that exercise been done it has not okay wait i'm sorry the mapping of our existing buildings

But there's a new demographic.

Yeah. So I, I'm completely making this up, but I think our CNI building is in the, in the West side, right? So if we were to spend the next 7 years, bringing that online, that would technically turn great. Between now and 2033's projection.

20 cook and new traditions.

So this is part of where I'm just curious what that analysis might look like. I actually don't know. Do we have buildings in the Mission Bay area that we own, property that we have? I don't actually know the answer. And I would have the same question for all the areas.

This is a really good question for like analysis you'd like us to do before the next study session because we haven't done it yet. But this is a great question.

I would like to submit that. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. I see the note being taken. So thank you. All right. Next slide.

And can we also add in there where we have charter schools co-located currently or where we have charter schools that are in using Prop 39 funds to be in our building? Yes. Yeah, thank you.

Alrighty, so this is taking out the students who prefer language programs and the language program space at all of the schools. So we're just looking at students who prefer a GE space like a neighborhood school GE space. and those spaces in each of the neighborhoods. You see the red gets a little less angry, but we still have some areas where we have a shortage of seats in 2033 versus the students or the percentage of students who prefer a neighborhood seat. So again, the Webster Mission Bay attendance area, one attendance area still has a shortage. Bayview-Hunters Point and Celsior Visitation Valley, these two neighborhoods, because many of the families there prefer language programs or prefer citywide programs. We don't see a shortage there anymore. Both of those become a surplus. And in the central neighborhood, we still see a shortage. Yes.

I'm just curious. I guess one thing that confuses me about this analysis is this is based on current or past choice selections, right?

This is just so great question, this is a paper exercise what people have selected and prefer to their number one choice in the past versus the seats.

I think it's a great analysis, I think, maybe a caution that I see is that if we go say to a neighborhood based system. Some of those baby families may then prefer a baby school, rather than a language partner so like we don't know that this will play out. Right. You know what I mean? Like, I think, so I think we have to always think about like, once we change the system, people, what people quote prefer, I think will change. We don't know exactly how, but.

And a follow-up to that is where we have tipped the scale, like where we have provided busing. That's what I mean. Buses. Compared to West Portal, right? Like if we, yeah, I think that's.

Can I actually just clarify Mr. Alexander's point? Correct me if I'm wrong in this understanding. So in the Mission Bay area, for example, is this saying that we are projecting that by 2033, the students who are there, who go to a school there, is resulting in that red? Or based on today's desires to have a kid at best in that neighborhood, it's red?

Okay, so in 2033, we would expect there to be 68 more students who prefer a GE program than there are GE spaces in that neighborhood.

But when you say that, do you mean prefer meaning presently?

We're assuming, projecting our current preferences to 2033. I can share. We took the number of kindergarten residents who live there now and looked at their choices in the last main round. And then we projected, we said, if that region is going to grow 5%, And there's 100 kids in that region. That means there'll be 105 kids in that region in 2033. Let's assume that they have the same, yeah, the same percent for GE versus language versus citywide. And that's what that's for. Okay, thank you. That's very nice. Yeah, and I guess,

Based on what Commissioner Alexander is sort of saying, I just want to push back a little bit on slide six. It says assignment alone does not change instructional quality, safety, or staff. And I actually think that that's exactly the challenge before us is to use assignment to change instructional quality, safety, and staff. And so for example, just taking Carver as an example, Right now it's under enrolled, so when there are combo classes, there may be a higher percentage of families that would then choose not to go to their AA. But under this map, based on the demographics, I would assume that it would be a fully enrolled, fully staffed school, which might dramatically affect quality, safety, and staff, and then also desirability. And so I don't... I think if we do our job correctly, that the preferences in the future will actually and will not mirror and should not mirror the current preferences because we will have equitably invested in all of our neighborhood schools and made neighborhood schools that are fully enrolled in staff. So that is the hope.

Which leads me to a follow-up question being, what does the map look like instead of using existing family choice patterns if we just look at where students live right now? Because, yeah.

I was going to say we can share the capacity. I don't think this slide deck includes what demographic, like for instance, FRL percentage in schools or racial demographics look like, but that's something we can produce.

I think that's going to be important data for us to see.

I'm going to move us forward. This is using totally different assumptions than the ones that we have used. The simulations that Stanford does, they also show shortages. So they're looking at 23, 24 applications and they're simulating people's choice lists and looking at what would happen in a neighborhood system where you can apply to all schools or where you can just apply to citywide schools in addition to your neighborhood. um they're also showing shortages in some of the same areas that we've picked up so just to Commissioner Weisman's point like is this only the neighborhoods like when you look at this in a couple of different ways you see the same pieces of the city lighting up those areas of shortage next slide all right wait can you just say why that is then so are you saying are you pushing back on the point we were making or are you just I guess I'm trying to understand what you were saying Yeah, so I'm pushing back a little bit. I think that there's still some validity to the fact that people might choose different things in different situations. But Stanford is able to simulate people's choice list with like, this can be in there and this can't be in there based on past choice lists. But those are also based on. what happened in the past, right? So we can't predict what the list will look like in the future, other than using past.

No, no, no, I think that's a good way to, I guess I would just maybe second, I think what Commissioner Fischer was asking was, it would be good to just always have a straight map of like, where do people live and where are the schools? Because that assumes, like if we just assume that we don't know what people's choice will be. So yeah, I think that would always be a great reference point for all these. Like I think, yes, let's do the predictions, but that's also have as a comparison, Just where do people live?

17 is a map of where people live. Okay. Yeah. That's right.

And one of the, Commissioner Alexander, in the last one, you know, the thing that I was curious about was, is it all the students or is it the students who currently attend public school? And I think to me, the one who attend public school, and if we are doing the analysis, which it sounds like we are, of why do people potentially, why do your families potentially have to help? And then if that gives us an idea of the families, we might be able to still keep in the system. I know there are some families who will always just sort of say, look, public school isn't for me. That is their choice. But for those who sort of said, but for this, I would have gone to public school. And if we could get some sort of sense, I know there's a lot of, I don't know. I don't know if it's analysis, conjecture, whatever it might be, but if there is a sense of here are public school students and here are those that we believe that we would still be able to keep within the system and where they are, I think that would be really helpful to understand as we do.

Did you flip that one? Sorry, and I should have said this more clearly and we can talk about it better than I can. We're looking here at applicants and enrollees. So we're looking at all the people who applied for kindergarten, including the ones who apply and then didn't attend and all the kids who didn't apply in the main round, but came later and then enrolled in school. So this is a pretty broad slice map and includes a lot more kids than actually like apply in the main round or that are enrolled in August.

Okay. My last question, that's such a lie. One question I have is, so I'm looking on like 16. Sorry, I'm going up a little bit. But let's take milk, for example. Milk has 22 seats for a full TK class. or sorry, K-9s, but they have just gotten this year a second TK class. Is the assumption then that the K, there's going to be a second K class that opened up?

Milk is the one that I was like, this is the hardest school on the map. Actually, there's only 11 classrooms. Some of the programming decisions, adding two TKs, we can't actually always keep two TKs in that building. We're going to probably move some of them to a feeder. Can we not do milk? Can you pick a different example?

Okay. Well, it's emblematic of my question of I remember during the that should not be named that there was a conversation about how there were certain buildings that could not be added an additional classroom because it required a retrofit or some sort of change.

Mira Loma is a perfect example.

And so my question is, are there schools that are like on the cusp there where if we made some slight revisions, capacity would go up a grade, right? So in other words, like I don't actually know based on this, like Argonne right now is 66. Can it jump to 88 if we made some revisions that are not maybe a full building scale capacity change? But like we bring back online.

I was actually thinking about this question today. I think there's like three or four schools on here where you could make some changes and get a larger capacity. Milk is one of them. If we move their TK classrooms to a feeder, we get a lot more capacity. Most of the schools, this is as good as we're going to get.

Okay. I guess my question there then would be, Are those handful of schools in a particular place that addresses some of the darker ones?

Yes.

Right.

And we will talk about that.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Great question. All right, let's go one more slide. Okay, so let's, we talked about neighborhood schools and where we see shortages. Let's look at zones and see where we see shortages here. This is just an illustrative map, much like the one on 16, showing you how we grouped attendance areas to try to fit the kids in neighborhoods into different district schools. These are illustrative zones made by our team. These are not the way the zones would look if we were to do zones. The next slide.

All right, again, we're seeing... Can I ask, since this material is public and on the website and not everyone is going to be watching this recording, can we please add to this slide somewhere somehow in what's published that these are not proposed zones?

Yes.

I mean, I know that you say it's illustrative, but can we be crystal clear that this is not a future map that people are going to see in the Chronicle? Yes. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. So we just spent some time on two versions of the attendance area maps. So all programs, all students, full building use is here on the left. The GE, where we're looking at the kids who prefer a neighborhood to the GE program and where the programs are, like where the GE programs are, that's on the right. So we just spent time on two of those. These are these applied to larger groups of attendance areas. The point here is we are still seeing a shortage across three of our neighborhoods, even in this less impactful GE comparison. So in the east side, in the center of the city, and in the south, still seeing those shortages of seats. Next slide. These are zones simulated by Stanford. They're trying to get within 15%- Okay, general education only.

is not a reality. It's like that is a parallel universe that we will not exist in. So help me understand the point of having that right next to the full building use. Like what's the point we're making there and why? I'm not making that connection. Sorry to be obtuse, but help me understand.

Point it badly. So this is looking at students who prefer a general ed seat where they live. So like, And where the general ed seats are so thinking about Sanchez, for example, which has one general general education classroom for neighborhood attendance area students and one citywide language program. Like classroom so like this is just looking at the students who prefer the neighborhood general ed classroom and where those general classrooms are in the city. This is holding constant all of our language programs as they are now.

And I wanted to say, I think the reason it's included is because the map on the left side is if every 1 of those seats, like, those language seats and Sanchez became zone seats, then that's what it's like. And every student who lived in that attendance area wanted to go there. TAB, Mark McIntyre, That is, I guess somewhat similar to what you were looking wanting to see like who lives, who all lives there and stick of their choices. TAB, Mark McIntyre, But that right side map is closer to the actual problem of capacity match in a neighborhood assignment system, because they are going to be even as choices may change in response to policy change like there's not going to be 100%. desire for neighborhood school or GE program. So I think the problem is somewhere in between the two, but the right side math is a little bit closer to the path we're trying to solve.

So then I think the follow up question I have, especially considering this data takes into account applications and enrollees, how many of our families put language pathways as a first choice, but then accept gen ed as their actual because they aren't offered the language pathway, right? Like, is there any correlation there?

It's a follow up that we can do. We tend to count first choice because it gives us a unique count of all the students. So every student has just one first choice where not all students have a second choice.

But maybe this is right. The larger point you're thinking here is that the language programs attract families to go to school outside the neighborhood, basically. Sometimes typically yeah often because they're so therefore that's where the problem is less in the right hand now, because some people have said, oh, I want a Spanish program or a change for him. So I'm going this other place or a, or whatever it is. So therefore I'm not. So now the problem is a little bit less of these schools because.

Right. And we know that language programs are an enormous value in our city as our K-8s.

We're getting rid of them. We're also not going to force people to go to them. Correct.

So that's why we're trying to solve for the rest of the kids.

That makes sense. Yeah.

But I think the follow-up question, like part of the reason I named this too is using my own example, full-time working mom, I didn't have time to go tour everything, right? So I prioritized like, oh, I wanted my kid to get into a Spanish immersion. So, and like things I heard from my friends at gymnastics class, right? Those were the ones I prioritized to tour, not my local classes. So if I was only touring programs that had language immersion and then I might be more likely to accept that if I didn't get into the language immersion program, it's all I knew. Right. And I'd be like, I might have language immersion one, two, three, but then the gen ed pathways behind it, one, two, three, or four, five, six. Right. I think like, that's what I hear a lot in from the families. So, so I think a lot of it has to do with just the PR. And just those schools being more well known because of the language pathways, it attracts families in general who don't necessarily end up in the immersion pathways or in the language pathways. Maybe that's a poor assumption on my part, but that's...

I think the capacity issue of like trying to make a guaranteed, guarantee a school to a person is going to be somewhere between those two maps because of what she does.

HAB-Jacques Juilland. Is is there. HAB-Jacques Juilland. So is this is it if we were to say slightly shift some of those citywide programs out of the current right areas like the central area into is a point we shift it from the central areas into something. Slightly to the side in areas that have capacity that then potentially we free up that general led space for area attendance. Okay.

You have anticipated the slide that's next. Okay.

All right.

Did you have a question?

Basically, the same. Thing is that I think you're trying to surface that. where we cite our language programs at schools that host both GE and language programs. Referencing GE not as in opposition to or distinct from special ed, but as indistinct from language programs. Citing choices for language programs affect our ability to guarantee neighborhood schools for families that prefer that. Perfect.

Better said than I ever could. Before we move on, these are simulated zones made by Stanford. So again, showing you a different view of this. They're using 23-24 data, looking at people's choice lists and sort of simulating what the choice list would look like if these were the schools that you could put on your list. Again, we're seeing areas of shortage, but they turn out to be in a different part of town on the west side. So I think that this is just like this map on the left is the best capacity fit. even though it's kind of crazy, there's like a five mile long zone here. So we're showing you at Stanford, showing us the best map for getting everybody into their local school or into a zone school. And then we're showing you like, not everybody over here on the other map is getting into their local school or their zone school, but it doesn't look quite as crazy. The problem being we want to guarantee everybody a spot. And so in both of these, we're not able to guarantee everybody a spot. All right, next. Okay, so we just spent a lot of time talking about shortages. They are a math problem. Thank you for bearing with me through that.

Okay, I'm sorry. Just to make sure I fully understand this, are those using the illustrative small zones that are outlined on page 20?

No, it's a different view of zones created by Stanford.

these are totally new proposed theoretical mathematical just to make sure you can do it so what they did is they took the student population and information from 2324 um including you know frl status and other things and then they use A computer algorithm that's above my pay grade to simulate hundreds of different draw hundreds of different zones. And then. That satisfied the requirement of being within 15% percentage points of the district average and also trying to be as close to matching capacity as possible. They obviously don't completely match capacity. If they had to loosen that up in order to produce. anything resembling a reasonable film map and then that's i guess so this shows how the boundary drawing can get you part of the way and then i guess that remaining red is what's left to be resolved beyond boundaries.

So just for clarity, when you're saying FRL, you're referring to free and reduced lunch?

Yes, I'm so sorry. Yeah, the percentage of students living in the zone who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch has to be within 15 percentage points of the district average, which is like 48% or 50%. And that's what's stipulated in board policy 511.2.

So just to clarify, for example, we've got zone three that's red and looks like it's uh maybe knob hill ish area and then zone one that is uh like north beach maybe Parts of Chinatown arena like those you could obviously change those lines it's red next to green to match capacity better, but then you would not be. Presumably not be within 15% of brainers. So this is this is not maximizing for capacity fit it's maximizing for essentially.

there's.

Equality of number of students who are of lower financial status across all zones.

Deborah is trying to do both, but they can't do either one perfectly in any of these maps. Okay, so when we see all these shortages, we have just two options really of things that we can do. One is Think about where we're placing programs. So where do our citywide programs like language pathways and K-8s go? What buildings are they located in? Determines whether we're able to offer space. We can also draw the boundaries and zones of attendance areas in different ways. But the reason why we showed you the red in a bunch of different cuts is because we can do this, but it doesn't get us all the way there. We can come up with overflow rules. I hear your question about like looking forward to bring other buildings online. That's not contemplated here as a solution. So, but these are just the ways that we can handle those red spots. Really difficult problem to solve. Let's look at the next slide. Okay, so we've talked a lot about shortages. I want to talk a little bit about priorities before I give you guys some time to discuss. You know what predictability, proximity, and diversity mean. This is a definition here. And then I'm going to push us on to the next slide. Again, I want to urge us to take all of these numbers with a grain of salt. Can I just ask a clarifying question?

Of course. For the definition of diversity, those are really about concentrations of poverty. But in the last study session, diversity was looked at as the number of schools that have one particular racial majority. why are these for the purpose of this study session different definitions of diversity than what we were looking at in the last study session and is defining diversity for the purpose of drawing diverse districts something that staff

uh seek more direction or or like are there trade-offs that we should consider and how we define diversity we will do much better than i will answering this question but one quick thing the fallacy is written around socioeconomic status and that is because like we are not legally able to use race to assign students to school. And so that's why that's the focus.

Yeah, I was going to add some texture to that, because I think the focus on high poverty schools and then students' different exposure to high poverty schools is really important, because basically there's just robust research that shows that high poverty schools are On average, less effective than low poverty schools, and I actually was just today visiting some research from your colleague commissioner Weissman word at Stanford Sean Reardon who in 2024, he led a study that that showed that. The association of racial segregation with achievement is completely accounted for by racial differences. Sorry, can you repeat that? Yes. This is a quote from the report that I was just looking at. It said, the association of racial segregation with achievement gap growth is completely accounted for by racial differences in school poverty. Thus, racial segregation is harmful because it concentrates minority students in high poverty schools, which are, on average, less effective than lower poverty schools. So that's why I think we focus on high poverty schools and students' exposure to them. Obviously, I personally believe there's a lot of value in Relationships across race, but ultimately students don't need a student of a particular race to learn. They need access to high quality resources opportunities and in local and high poverty schools. Those are less often found and I just, I guess I want to be very clear. I think last week I'm there or last time I didn't say it. I clearly enough. I just want to be clear for you all for anybody listening that there's nothing wrong with low income students or their families. They obviously care about their education. They can and do learn and succeed in our schools. And our high poverty schools are also filled with dedicated and talented educators. So I'm not saying anything about those folks. But despite that, high poverty schools are an impediment to us reaching our audacious academic goals as a district. And so that's why we focus on them. And how are you defining high poverty schools? We're defining them the same way Board 501.2 defined them, which was 15 percentage points above the district FRL average. So that would be all of 65% and above.

I have just a couple of clarifying questions. I mean, one question I have is, would we also want to add racial segregation as a definition just separate and apart from concentration of poverty, not because, I mean, just for the purpose of integration, right? Like, because you could have a school that is not a high poverty school that is still like essentially racially segregated. And we might say, even though students aren't exposed to high concentrations of poverty, we would not want that as an outcome, not necessarily by assigning students based on race, which is not permissible, but by just the way that we draw our lines. And then another question is when we're counting high free and reduced lunch qualifying students, because of course all students get free lunch in SFUSD, but by federal guidelines, if they lived in another state, they'd have to qualify and that's the qualifying line we're talking about. When we look at that, are we looking at the actual numbers of who actually would qualify for free and reduced lunch based on these family surveys after students enroll? Or are we looking at projected estimates based on like CTIP data, which actually doesn't account, is a guess maybe about the socioeconomic status of a family, but does not actually tell us the socioeconomic status of the family.

It's a good question. It's the form where we're using that like actual MFIF sort of data.

Thank you. Two questions. One, I guess because we're still in the post-COVID era where everything is free for all the kids. I'm not sure how many, I mean, I did fill out the form, but I think a lot of people are not completing that form. So I worry a little bit about how accurate our numbers are on FRL, if we're using that as a proxy, because they just, I would be curious, I know that they're like, you're gonna get a prize if you feel like they're desperately trying to get people to fill out the form and regularly people are not.

And some of our schools should be Title I but they're not because of people in police.

I worry a little bit about the accuracy of that data. The other question comes back to my question on using or not having an updated census that we're relying on. To Vice President Hinley's point, if we do want to look at other metrics for diversity, like if it's beyond just 15 percentage points of higher than FRL, it would seem like we would need updated census data.

Let me think about that. Okay. I'll bring something next time. Okay.

Yeah. So your data is updated. It's just a boundary.

The data is current and is based on the 2020 census, which is now 6 years.

Every every year kids have to fill out the form. It's just based on far out. Yeah, that's just based on that's all it's based on.

But but just put the same. Right? So, yeah, let's just talk about the census data.

I'm not sure, but you're talking about the, uh, that and if we're going to be, I am talking about that file data, which I think I worry about, but I also, I guess so. So we do have, I mean, obviously there's been fences since 2020, but then so we would we use that updated data to understand. the demographics of our neighbors.

I understand. She's saying if we were to draw new boundaries, for instance, hopefully we would use 2020 or even maybe 2026 American Community Survey data to draw the boundaries appropriately instead of based on... Right.

When we draw the boundaries in any of these, we will use updated data.

I actually have a specific follow-up question to Commissioner Weisman-Mords. What percentage of students did fill out the M5 last year and what have filled it out so far this year? Do we know?

Okay, but that's the problem. But I actually also don't think that we use myth of data here. I think we're using block group data. So we're looking at the block group in which the student resides. So like, what block do they live on in the census? And does the census count that block group as making an income below or above the poverty line? So I think that the census block group data that we're using is like much clearer and more specific. That's what Stanford uses.

I think, I don't know if that's, I would ask our Stanford researchers the accuracy of that in San Francisco with such high density.

I will confirm with that. I have a meeting. Okay, thank you.

Should we talk about performance on high varieties?

Yes.

Alrighty, thank you. So, let's talk about predictability. I think the headline here is actually that we can make all of these systems 100% predictable. It's just the degree of program change that is different to reach that. So on the line right under predictability, you can see the percent of students assigned above building capacity. That's the amount of students we aren't able to fit because we don't have space. And so 1% of the 4,000 students on this map is like 40 students. So to make small zones work, we would need to change 120 students programming to make the kids fit into the zones. Same thing for neighborhood. These are very comparable to each other in terms of the amount of program change. For neighborhood plus citywide programs, we would need to change 6%, so 250 kids' worth of changes in terms of programming to make this work. That's a lot of program change to get to 100% of the ability. I know this is a super confusing concept. So clarifying questions here.

Yeah. So I'm struggling with this definition of predictability because when I think about predictability after based on conversation with families, I think about knowing where my kid is going to go to school, maybe when they're one or two, you know, and before they were well before they've enrolled in kindergarten. And so I think that's a little different. It's not like, cause I even hear our, I mean, we have a pretty good rate of our families getting a first choice school right now, but they still leave or make other options because of the stress and lack of knowledge. So to me, predictability is being able to know, hey, I live in this neighborhood, pretty sure my kid's going to be able to go to that school. So that, to me, the neighborhood schools are 100% predictable. You don't know that you're going to get a language program, but you're 100% predictable on some. So I think it's just a different, I would look at this a little differently than this In terms of thinking about as a board member, how I, my standard of predictability. Is not this 1 is what I'm saying? Does that make sense?

And I think community has different definitions of predictability too. And that's right.

You're doing it, but I don't know if that's like the. Yeah.

Sorry, I'm not. I'm confused, I'm not really following what you're saying about like, 6%. Program changes or something like that to get to 100%.

Uh, flexibility, can you of course, if you look at for neighborhood programs right now with our current mix of programs, Kate's language programs. 94% of kids will get assigned to their neighborhood school or something they prefer to that a language program. Okay. We need to move 6% of our programs to make seats available. Is that the 5.9 is what you're referring to? So there's sort of an inverse of each other. So 100 minus 6% is 94%. We need to make changes. 6% worth of 240 seats to make space. In our neighborhood schools. to get everybody in there and guarantee them a neighborhood seat.

And can I, I want to clarify that this is based again on those 23-24 real preferences. This is like, you know, assuming future families behave as very recent families have. And I guess the only other clarification I can make is, it's okay, it's not, it could, some of this could be resolved by boundary changes and other, and then some portion of it by program changes, like Lauren was saying in that previous slide, those two levers.

Okay. Next, proximity. We're looking at two metrics here. The average distance that families are traveling in all of these is shorter than the current situation. And the share of families within 0.5 miles in all of these is more than the current situation, but each of them sort of incrementally moving from left to right. Diversity in our current system, we have 19 schools that are high poverty schools. All of these increase the number of high poverty schools most likely that we will see. Again, brain of salt on all these numbers, small zones, increase that number of high poverty skills, the least in the middle is neighborhood. Neighborhood assignment with choice of all schools, and then the neighborhood and city wide is the largest increase in high poverty schools. There are some changes in policy that we could do that would impact these, but this is in general what we think would happen.

and just for accuracy we actually have 22 high poverty schools this is after no no it's okay it's because this is after main round assignment and doesn't account for two things that usually increase popular schools the exit of high income students after the main round and then the entrance of low income students who come and apply after the main round it would also be good to know if if you have a sense of it the range here like are we talking about

you know, five additional schools that are at 65% poverty, or are we talking about schools at 80 or 90%? You know what I'm saying? Good question. Just, I mean, again, and for the future.

Another question I have about the number of high poverty schools is, are we just talking about elementary schools here? Are we talking about all schools?

We're just talking about elementaries and K-8s here because that was the schools 5101.2 looked at.

And we're actually just talking about the kindergarten class because, yeah, obviously it's happening in the upper grades. Yeah, it will be digested.

And then another question I have is, my understanding is that the number of people who essentially miss the main round and then get essentially their last, not necessarily a choice, but get spots that are left over are families that are generally of lower socioeconomic status. And so the current lottery is in some ways funneling families into our least chosen schools, which often coincides with being high poverty and or low levels of student achievement. And so I'm curious whether this bakes in assumptions about people applying on time or not, because to me, one of the potential benefits of neighborhood schools is that the neighborhood school saves a spot for every student who lives in the neighborhood. And so you actually could potentially avoid disadvantaging families that don't have the administrative knowledge that there's some deadline and application and parent view and all these things, these hurdles that they have to do. If they show up the first day of school, there's a spot for them. And so they might not actually We might avoid some of the filtering systems that we have that are concentrating families in certain schools. And I'm wondering if the estimate of the number of high poverty schools takes those kinds of changes into account or assumes the same thing. That's a concern I have about neighborhood plus all schools is that it's essentially only benefits families who know that they have to apply for their neighborhood school on time. And families who might be in a great neighborhood school, if they don't know to apply on time, they're still stuck with only the open spots in non-neighborhood schools. And so we're still replicating that filtering feature.

Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, this only shows post main round assignment. So, I guess you could assume that in small zones and neighborhood and all schools, you would see that similar process of. Worsening segregation after after the main round. Neighborhood and city wide and where you write some neighborhood seats with, including some sought after ones and sit vacant until a late applicant came in is more likely to be high property that. that might take that money from more than 25 down. We don't have data on that, but like the intuition is not incorrect and something we can look at. Would you be interested in seeing more of it?

I would be really interested in that because I do worry about, like, I think about the fact that my kid was born At this, when I lived at the same address that I lived at when he applied for kindergarten, and I never got any communication from or the city, like, the city knew a child was born there and I never got any communication saying you have to enroll in kindergarten. You have to enroll this time. And this may be embarrassing to admit on the record. But the only reason I knew is because my work colleagues at the city had kids about my age and told me, but there wasn't there were no, like.

bus advertisements that i saw or like other things that would have alerted me that i needed to do that and so um but even so i think there's but for the grace of god this is a i just want to second the question too because i think this question like for me i was like oh neighborhood plus law schools looks like a good way to go maybe you can really consider but if but if that means that there's no seats saved for neighborhood kids after like March, that's really concerning for this reason. Like, I think, I mean, I could imagine a way of doing it where you still reserve some seats and have some seats available or something, but I just think that point of, cause there's so like, I work with a lot of homeless families through my work and there's so much trauma and people just go in July or whatever, and they're like, where do I go to school?

And then- Or people move to San Francisco and they don't have to pay for the address.

Yeah.

I'm going to push us forward in the interest of time, but I do agree that this is an important point. All right. Briefly, Rhys, do you want to do this one and the next one?

Yeah, just again, you spoke about why Concentrated poverty exposed poverty so important to pay attention to, and so you can just see that the differential poverty in our current system, and then we can also see in the three policies that are discussing today, the ways that we do or don't do much to to change that and so. Yeah, just something to to know you can see in the neighborhood and city wide programs. It's the worst because the small zones as well perform worse because limiting access and limiting choice means that families that receive, for instance, the C tip priority like. If you even if you have like a preferential access if you can't apply to a given school that you want or a school in the neighborhood over there you that's that and so basically prioritizing local assignment over choice in the context of residential segregation doesn't disrupt school segregation.

But can I just go ahead.

How does that how does that work if I mean again to this conversation we're having if.

if patterns change and more families who live in the area attend that school, wouldn't that change the... Yeah, I've looked at this a little bit, and I could share more at the next one if you'd like. We can look at, like, if every enrolled kid went to their local school, maybe the dream of the neighborhood school, what that would do, and then... That would be helpful.

Obviously, that's not going to happen, certainly not overnight, but I think otherwise we get stuck in this thing where, like, I think there's this dynamic where schools get perceived to be bad because they have a lot of low income kids. Then no one chooses them. Then they're under enrolled. Then their staff is unstable. They don't have a clear budget. And it kind of like, you know, and so for the families that live in that attendance zone that get another school, it's great. You get the one they want, but for the ones families that are stuck there, and I feel like we're going to keep having that problem unless we finally have the courage to confront it. And that's, I don't know.

That was part of, I think for me, assuming this data, if this is the data we're going to replicate with this system, I say none of these is acceptable is the way I look at this. This is what I'm talking about when I say we've got to stop making assumptions about the system. If we're going to do this, let's devise a system that blows up statistics like this. Otherwise, what's the point? continuing to put together zones, current system, small zones, neighborhood, all-school, neighborhood and city. These are options when it doesn't disrupt what we're asking to disrupt and what families are asking us to disrupt. We're not meeting Guardrail 1 with any of these options.

I'm assuming we're looking at this because of the context of the research that you're talking about.

Yeah, just this is just, I guess, simply performance on diversity.

Okay, because I will say this slide with a combination of the previous slide talking about how we define diversity as percentage of low income students in a school. I mean, I am going to fully off my memory here. So don't quote me on this, but I'm almost certain That the research that you're talking about that came out of Stanford was looking at percentage of students and a school and the concentration of that school as a proxy for talking about the quality of that school and that they were going to be looking at. But that that quality was based on the assumption that a high poverty school was going to be in a high poverty area. But in San Francisco, we're a very wealthy district with incredible amounts of wealth concentration. And how we and this is why I'm tying this to our resource conversation, because how we then invest in those school communities actually can have demonstrable impacts on how we define that school. Yeah. Right. I actually don't know if I, I mean, if that assumption in the way that I remember that research, this is a while ago that I looked at this, is looking at why they're looking at percentage of FRL within a school building as a proxy for talking about the resourcing of that school community. I actually think that those assumptions are kind of flipped here, where we are actually choosing to resource or not resource certain schools based on enrollment of that school, which tells me that all of this is actually based on a different set of assumptions in San Francisco, right? So this is where I don't, again, one, I want to double check that work, make sure that my thinking is accurate. But two, if that is accurate, then in many ways, this is kind of moot because we're talking about what actually changed, what we would want to see. our actual changes to the conditions of that school because we are changing the enrollment system right so yeah so i i want to just like push on that a little bit because again like i kind of had a similar reaction to commissioner fisher of like well none of these are great and then you look at the diversity scores and you're like oh that's not great but but i think it's again i need to double check my my assumptions about the research that's undergirding this but i i think that it kind of shifts the conversation in San Francisco. And so I just want to be able to understand that a bit more.

Let us dig into this one more for the next one.

Can we move on?

Can I just ask, I guess, a question?

Yeah.

I think, President Kim, what you're going to say basically is like, for example, if you look at the current system, 45% of students who are black are in high poverty schools. But we know that like we talked about how 30% of those students are in six schools and those schools are largely under enrolled. So in a different system, maybe the percentage 49% is higher, but those 49% are all in fully in the FAP schools. So it's a different experience, like just because it's maybe a higher percentage of students In high poverty schools doesn't necessarily mean that they actually are experiencing fewer resources in those schools. They might be experiencing more resources in those schools, which I think is important to name. And the thing that I think about the system that I think about wanting to disrupt is that. for you to me in many ways the lottery sends a signal to families that choice like the for some neighborhoods your school's not good and so what we're going to do to remedy that is give you a choice to leave your neighborhood maybe even a bus instead of saying we are going to Like the answer to your schools not being good is to make your schools good.

Yes.

Is to actually invest in and equitably build up your school. And there's so many programmatic ways we can do that. So many budgeting ways we can do that. And also one way to do that because dollars follow students is to put students in those schools and make those schools more resourced. So that to me is the exciting thing about kind of so we can disrupt. That's not necessarily me on this slide. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Let's start.

Definitely well said. Just briefly on this one as context, I know that you guys don't want us to prioritize choice. We've heard from some representatives of our African American community about how important choice is to them, so we want to show this as context for all of them.

That's not a correct statement. Okay. Sorry, Lauren, and I know you want to move on, but to say that we don't want choice, I don't think that's fair or accurate. That certainly doesn't represent my views. Especially until we've accounted for what we've just been talking about here. I have more I'll say on this later when we actually get to you asking for our feedback. But no, I mean, I think, and in fact, what I've heard in all of my community engagement since our last meeting was people are mad at us for limiting choice, especially when we haven't accounted. All of this that we're talking about is theoretical. until we make this the floor. We talk about floors versus ceilings in a lot of our other progress monitoring. This is all theoretical and choice has to be, choice is what gives families agencies until we can prove and we don't have any trust in the community that we're actually gonna do this at the same time as changing the enrollment system. So no, choice still must be at the top until we actually fix the other stuff.

I mean, respectfully, I do think that the direction of the majority of the board of the last study session was that there was not a majority that wanted choice added as an additional criteria. And for me, I would say that one reason for that is that I do not see choice as a good in and of itself, because under our choice system, we have had more segregated schools. Our student achievement gaps by race have only increased. And so to me the goal is not in and of itself to give more families choice it's to give more students better outcomes and we have been waiting for we have been you know putting our thumb on the scale in favor of choice to the detriment of student outcomes so to me i don't think this choice actually is in and of itself a benefit to students. It has actually proven to make our problems worse with respect to student achievement gaps.

I would say it's the chicken and the egg, right? Because families are choosing what they perceive as better because of our under-resourcing of certain schools. And Commissioner Alexander mentioned this very eloquently with the doom spiral earlier. So the point that I'm making is, This entire conversation is theoretical, and we are gonna be in the same position here. We cannot, we've said this before, so I'm repeating, we cannot change these systems until we account for the resource problems. Otherwise, families will revolt.

I mean, like- I mean, I will just add, I mean, I think, unfortunately, if we say we are prioritizing choice with 19,000 empty seats, we're also then saying we're prioritizing under-resourcing our schools. So, you know, if it's then a choice between offering families choice or under-resourcing our schools, then, you know, and that's just the reality of it, then, you know, we do need to figure out how do we better resource our schools and then be able to create those communities. So that's the reason I chose

choices i made last i think the enrollment system does provide the floor it provides the floor of minimum enrollment every school is actually normal yeah i i would just want to say i wasn't here last time so i firmly agree with everything commissioner healing vice president healing just said tonight i i've seen how destructive this choice system has been for you know 20 15 20 years whatever it is i mean i think because what it's done is created the doom spiral because and it does benefit i mean there are families that benefit from it right if if you live in an attendance zone of a school that is under enrolled badly resourced high staff turnover, you can then choose to go across the city to another school, right? So it, so it saves a few families, but it lets all of us off the hook to actually improving that school. And then that school has fewer students. So then we're like, oh, well, it's under enrolled. Guess we have to do a combo class. Oh, well, it's under enrolled. Guess we can't have a social worker. Oh, well, it's under enrolled. I guess we can't have an art program. So then that school it's, that's what creates the doom loop. So I'm okay. I think access, like you all, sounds like you all said access was more important than choice. That's how I feel. I'm like, families need access to a really good school. And most families, if we were to resource those schools and have kids in them, which is part of the thing, we have to have kids. We can't resource schools with no kids. Then we're going to end up with people having access to a good school. And I think that does mean less choice. But again, the choice isn't even real. It's like people don't feel like it's a choice. They feel like they're entering a lottery. You know, they feel they don't know what the outcome is. And I think, again, this is the thing like when families go into this, they're stressed because they don't know the outcome. Even when they get we see the data, a lot of them get what they want. But but the whole process drives people away because they don't know they're going to get what they want.

And I think that the idea that choice is particularly important to certain communities is actually at odds with the community feedback data that was shared in the first study session. where like Bayview listening sessions, the family said, actually, choice isn't what I prefer. What I prefer is a quality school. All things being equal, I would want my neighborhood school.

So that's my point. We're saying the same thing. We're saying the same thing. What I'm saying is we cannot take choice off the table until we provide that resource parity at our schools. That's all I'm saying.

The resource parity comes from assigning students based on where they live, though.

So maybe what I'm hearing is that there might be a sequencing issue here. So I was just talking to John here of just, we need to start moving on how do we improve student outcomes for some of these hard to serve schools. If we start with that now, and as this process is moving forward, we're going to get to a place where the board's values, which is what I'm slowly hearing, Like the board's values is that you want to have strong schools for all of our students. You want to make sure that we're, we, the student experience is going to be the center of the work that we're doing. And by doing that, oh, by centering our students, we then make sure that they do not need to make this false choice of choosing a school that's five buses away from their home, because they can choose a school that we have been working for the past year. to improve the educational experience at.

Yes. I think the one change I would make there is you still use the word choice.

Well, I think that's what I mean.

But yeah, because I go back to using, I think Foundational are just talking about slide nine. Right? Like, I think how we, I'm trying to answer your question here. What is it that I need to know by October to help provide guidance on a policy direction? And to me, having greater clarity on slide nine of how we are defining a strong school can help me better articulate then why I would stand behind a certain enrollment model. But without knowing that, it's hard for me to say any one thing is going to be best. And what I would say is like, I don't think that this is what was the intention behind what's in these boxes, but if that's, I don't know if that is how I would define a strong school. Right. So, because what I want to know, again, it's not on the record here, is like, what are we saying as a guaranteed minimum for staffing or coaching support at the school that we believe is gonna lead to greater outcomes for kids? And that's only possible if we have, again, I'll use the same example here, two sections per grade level in every classroom for every school in SFUSD, right? Like that would tell me that if we can guarantee that at Carver and Malcolm X, because they're gonna be fully enrolled and we know that we're gonna guarantee two courses or two sections in every grade level, Okay, I can stand behind that, right? But I don't know that. And so I actually don't know. I mean, this is where I believe talking about our portfolio, both in terms of footprint and programs in the context of how we define a strong school, I kind of need that information to be able to have confidence in a policy direction of enrollment.

I would like to. I'd like to pop in on some of this. For a long time, including for the reasons commissioner has ever stated, I have been a proponent of moving away from the lottery because lots of people won't even apply. They won't even consider us. And we should be able to represent and provide schools for. Everybody all families in this district, no matter who they are, or what they are, or any other feature that I would like everybody to want to be able. Or at least feel that is an option. I think that would make us the strongest by far throughout the school district. But I don't think that we can lose sight of the fact that 2500. Kids are being bust out of certain areas of the city to other areas of the city and their personal experience. is leading them or their perceptions and our personal experience are leading them to do that. I do think that contributes to the very problems that we're all talking about. So that's why we have to address many other things as well. But I am worried that I'm worried that if it's just perceived as as us talking about this, even just say the large zones, right? That was taken off the table in the last session and I didn't disagree with that because I've seen maps of large zones. It seemed totally like. Most people would never want to deal with those zones, but I don't think that we really. uh brought that discussion to um like to say the you know 2500 students families who are sending their kids somewhere else potentially very far away and uh especially like without even the community engagement schedule and plan i feel like it seems to folks we've already taken stuff off the table that may make sense to us but may not be something that they feel makes sense to them or that they've had any participatory voice in And so I would just like to press for us actually going and talking to folks and truly hearing them out. It makes sense to explain why enrollment is making the recommendations that you guys are making and what you've seen and so forth. But I don't think that's been socialized broadly and I think that people's just sort of lived and perceived experiences are going to make them very mistrustful of what we're doing. If we can't.

Push to get to community engagement and I want to close here, but before we close, I want to hear any other feedback that you guys have on these questions. So. Anything that you cannot accept about 1 of these models, any model that you would like us to stop considering. or anything that you really need us to bring you for October 6th so that you feel comfortable providing direction? Yes.

You're not going to love my answer because I'm not sure that I have an answer. I'm like, okay, I'm ready to move this model aside. But I think just relating to my colleague's point earlier about I think it's Well, it's one of the, it's related to these questions. I think what I would want to know, it goes back to that page nine, slide nine. So the definition, President Kim was asking more about the definition, but for me, it's not such a definition, but like, how do we actually operationalize that? Like, what is the plan to operationalize the definition? Right? Because if we don't have it, we can define it all day long, right? We can get everybody and their mother and father and grandparent to help us define it. But until we actually have a plan to operationalize it, I think we're going to still not be having these discussions about like, what does choice mean? It's not real. I was talking about like choices of privilege versus an escape hatch. I don't think that we can actually get there until we know. what these quality schools actually look like, and not what they look like, but how, when can you say this school is a quality school and we feel really confident in it? Because if you're like, oh, we're going to be 10, that's at a decade, then making these changes now, all those kids for the next K-8 or K-5 are not going to be in the quality schools that we're promising them if we're making these changes and say, and now you can't go to do another school. I realize that may not, that's a big, that's big.

So it's really big.

I feel concerned about having to do that before we get, I know, I know it's a chicken and egg thing, but I don't, I feel like we're going to set ourselves up to say, we have this great plan in theory, but our schools don't look the way we want them to without them taking away something. I don't know. I feel, I appreciate VP Chilling's You know, like, if you build it, they will come, but I also feel like it's a little bit polyamorous and I don't know that. I believe that if we build like that, it will be built and.

At least in the time that we need it to and I just point to this that I, oh, sorry. Sorry.

OK. Let me be a little clearer.

In other words, I'm going to build on what some brilliant comment by my colleague. I think every word that she says is an incredible gift to this world. And I'm going to say something completely different. And worse. But it's way worse than far inferior. This is related to then your next question about the guiding questions related to April 1. Because I think this might come to answer this question here. My assumption is that by the April meeting, we will be asked to vote on a final policy that includes final implications on our portfolio, which includes strategic mergers or consolidations, shifting programs, and a plan to execute on resourcing our schools sustainably to reach a small school, a strong school vision. Is that what we can expect by April?

Yeah.

Okay. Because I think then if we know that that's the end goal, I mean, I don't know. I think that's really important, right? I want to know. I want to go get full two red. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Let me go get it. Because that's where it is.

Sometimes I lean over and he's like, are you sure you want to do that? Are you going to do this? Are we going to do this?

I mean, it's an honest question because I don't know what's coming in April. Like, I actually don't know what to give in October, right? Like, and I would hope that.

That was crystal. Thank you.

Cool. I swear I respect you so deeply. But these are really consequential decisions. And part of the reason why I don't want to be construction number one either is because I don't know what I'm taking off the table if I say that I want to take this option off. Because what I do want is a plan in April that we can execute on, that staff have confidence in, that are going to, again, give us the final implications, and I'm gonna say this, I wrote this down to be very clear, final implications on a portfolio that include strategic mergers and consolidations, strategic program shifts, and a plan to resource our schools sustainably so that we reach whatever this vision is of strong schools, right? Like if that is coming, then I think there are micro versions of this that I wanna know by October, to build my confidence that any one of these scenarios is going to lead to this, right? I think that's my bigger thing.

I can hear you. And I think, like, if we tell you that those things are coming, then do you feel more comfortable giving guidance and on how we're based on what you know?

I mean, if the answer is good, so here's what I would say. The difference between each of the scenarios, I'd want to know the magnitude of difference, right?

The impact on quality schools?

on any one of these things, right? Because if you're going to tell me that, hey, to get to neighborhood plus all is going to, and I'm making this up, require us to completely move every single one of our programs, and we're going to have to merge 10 schools. But then if we do neighborhood plus whatever other model, but this other model is going to require us to only subtly move two language programs, grow four of them, and you know we're going to move those four into these schools here and we're only going to merge two schools together like i would feel differently about that right because i have questions about our own district's ability to deliver on that for commissioner weisman warren's perspective yeah and so i don't i can't tell you how i feel about any one of them without knowing the magnitude of difference for any one of these conditions okay so you're sort of saying program placement larger portfolio decisions and boundaries like

Show us at the next meeting how these things play into each of the options. So give us more detail here.

And what I would say is the difference between any one of the options, right? Because if you're going to, again, say that one is going to do all of this stuff and another is going to do some of this stuff, but not quite retriples, I may be okay with doing a smaller bite and letting go of some things. I don't know actually right so like I think understanding the magnitude difference between each of the models will help me understand what I didn't get behind. Because there is a level that is a question here of what is actually practical that we believe we can do that it makes me. That I really do wonder, and if that means that this year we do this thing and that's going to last three years, and then we in three years, I don't know right like I just think that that's going to be an important factor in thinking about folks.

gotcha. We can show you magnitudes of difference.

Yeah.

I think to Commissioner Weisman-Ward's brilliant point that the question about, you know, get like whether it's Pollyannaish to think that all of our schools will be equitably resourced goes back to some of the budget conversations that we were having as a board last spring, because once the superintendent announced that enrollment was going to go before portfolio decisions, I think that increased the urgency to make immediate and perhaps disproportionate to current enrollment investments in certain schools to ensure that maybe the money comes before the students, right? Like maybe even if a school doesn't today have enrollment to support a librarian or teacher both full time, we're going to do that anyway, because we want the families that are coming to know that when they come, that school's gonna have that. Or we want to put a, yeah, an extra instructional coach or T10s or, you know, reading interventionists, like whatever, to make sure that this is a school that has like carrots to draw people. And to the question about, To the point that President Kim was making, we kind of missed the slide, but I do want to draw Commissioner's attention to slide 29, which talks about how some options would have some program change and neighborhood plus citywide programs would have relatively more program changes. You know, if you look at some of the maps, for example, like there's a dearth of GE spots currently in the For example, Alvarado and Clarendon attendance areas where they're also co-sighted language programs. So it may require that those language programs get recited. And so the question becomes like, what is the magnitude of disruption to existing currently enrolled students that the board feels is maybe if I preferred neighborhood schools, I might not prefer it if every language program needs to be moved, for example, or if it were a plan that were essentially infeasible for the district to have the resources to implement. And so I think those are really important things to know. think for me, I would say that I feel like there's an option that we could take off the table. For me, it would be neighborhood plus all schools, because I feel like that actually is essentially the existing lottery, except you're guaranteed your AA instead of it is a thumb on the scale for your AA. And I think that that continues these inequitable access barriers to getting certain schools you know to families who are less resourced and getting less choice you know it might be that families on the west side might prefer their neighborhood school and so they might functionally get a neighborhood plus city-wide school system whereas families on the east side may essentially just be shuffled into a smaller lottery and have fewer schools to choose from because those would be the only schools not automatically filled by neighborhood seats. So to me, I don't think I would be interested in the neighborhood plus all schools because I think it would perpetuate existing inequities and would perpetuate uncertainty for families because to the extent that a family that we're still telling people, you should look at all the schools and you should choose your schools and you should rank your schools and emotionally invest in what you've ranked. If you don't rank your neighborhood school one, you still actually have complete uncertainty until the end what school you get, just like the current lot. So I actually don't think that it solves the predictability problem in the way that we might imagine it to. And I think it also might perpetuate the system of families opting out of certain neighborhood schools and those schools continuing to be under enrolled and under resourced. So that would be one that I would want to take off the table. And for me, the most critical thing to prioritize for study session three would be getting actual survey results for families about like, what amount of sighting change families are willing to absorb, what percentage of families not in SFUSD would want, would be more likely to apply if they were guaranteed their neighborhood school, like that kind of information. And so like actual survey data, not town halls, because I think town halls are not historically giving us broad community input from people who, maybe only have a minute to respond to a text survey on their phone while they're making dinner you know it only prioritizes the voices of people who can come and sit through one meeting and then maybe also some sort of broad-based community listening session where we have something like a board meeting and just hear public comment for the entire time and tally it or something like genuinely like hear from the community and listen um so those are things I would I would want before I could give um um I uh

I agree with commissioner healing about town halls. Having attended many of these over the years, we consistently see the same small number of folks. If we are going to have town halls, I would strongly suggest they'd be virtual because we get hundreds more people there instead of 15 or 25. Um. I think survey is a good idea, but we need to be absolutely like, that's the broadest based thing that I know of that we can do if we have some things broader based. Great. But I don't know what it would be. Please let us ask true questions and not designed as much as possible to get real answers from people and not question designed to push people towards a specific predetermined answer. Personally, I'm not comfortable at this point taking another option off the table. Because I'm already a little worried, even though I personally agreed with not having the large zones about having taken that off the table in the sense that I feel like. People will view us as having prejudged that whole situation and not having heard from them. 1st, so I'm concerned about taking anything else off the table before we can actually hear from folks about what they want. Like, I would like us to get the most honest information from as many people as we can. So, we can consider that and moving forward.

Do you want to go around all that?

Um. yeah i was going to say for me i think i agree with commissioner ray that it'd be best to leave all those three on here unless we feel like i guess i would also want to know if if it just feels like too much work i don't know at some point i get that we have to make a decision i don't want to like have you all running down lots of routes at one time so if it feels whenever it feels like it's important to make that decision i think we can but if it's not right at this moment i think it might be useful to leave them on there. Because I also don't know some of the, like, I appreciate Vice President Hewling's point around the neighborhood plus all schools and this idea of, like, what would happen when kids enroll in July in those schools? And I think there's some details about it that I don't understand. The small zones, the thing that worries me about that is, is it really, is that just going to be really confusing? Because now it's, like, it's, like, a five-school lottery. Like, what does that mean? Or a four-school lottery? I don't know. It's what they do in Berkeley. Yeah, although I would say, I mean, most school districts in the United States have neighborhood schools and maybe they have some alternative programs. And I just think there's something that is really attractive about that because it's simple, it's predictable. It's both for the families, but also, like I think I mentioned, for the educators to be able to plan staffing and budgeting, and it just feels like we've created this system with so many complexities that we then can't concentrate on school quality. And so for me, I think the predictability piece is probably the most important so that we can make every school great. Because once we have that predictability, and so maybe that would be the neighborhood plus citywide programs where it's like, okay, everyone gets a neighborhood school, we're going to have citywide programs that are great, and we're going to make sure they're placed around the city, but I just think we've got to invest in every single 1 of our neighborhood schools at the elementary level. And frankly, I wasn't here last time, but I'm not, I really think we need to address middle school and high school feeder patterns as well. So, I don't know. It sounded like we were taking that off the table, but I'm not really okay with that. But I get why we need to do this. 1st.

We are addressing the middle school, your patterns through this process. We are. Okay. But not the wholesale algorithm.

But I do think I would argue that we need to do high school as well because. Um, because that's a huge pain point and we lose families at high school as well. So was that helpful?

Yes. Yes.

So on the, what does each option protect that matters to you and what does it cost that you cannot accept? Um, I agree with the president more. I think if, if possible, I understand this is a tremendous amount of work and I would commend you for creating space for this conversation. It's it's great. Um, if it's possible to keep all the options. on the table right now and do that kind of analysis where you can practically understand what that is, what that change management looks like if we were to do this. And I guess some of that feasibility, that would be fantastic before we make that decision. That also seems like then we can take into account some of the community engagement feedback. I really appreciate that in community engagement you include multiple forms so it isn't just a town hall of some sort. I would second, you know, if we can use, I don't know if there's in-house or otherwise externally a design consultant that can help on survey question design so that we get the most out of that, that would be fantastic. And I don't, you know, with regard to neighborhood plus all, neighborhood plus citywide, as I said, I mean, you know, we'll see what practically comes out of your guys' analysis. But, you know, and it could be, I don't know, a transition. over time depending on what is how quickly can we create the quality schools that we seek so that you know potentially it's we're not limiting it in the first few years but then you know we're ultimately going to neighborhood plus citywide something to potentially consider but again we'll see what the analysis says as well as what the community feedback says thank you all thank you thank you

I will echo what Commissioner Gupta said. I really appreciate the conversation. I love listening to you very smart people talk. And I hope we get it here. And I look forward to the next section about what our very smart community members are going to get the opportunity to tell us as well. My only pushback on the focus on surveys is think about the, we hear a lot from community, especially families for whom English is not their first language, how hard those surveys are to access. And with the RAI surveys, the average, I think the majority of our respondees had at least a graduate level education, right? So I just want to be careful to make sure it's an inclusively designed and fully accessible survey. I think for me, I would echo, I actually wonder, looking at the board study sessions on page two, should we potentially flip the November 10th and October 13th? Because it sounds like what President Kim and what Commissioner Gupta are proposing here and I would agree with, is really having a fully understanding of the program decisions, the trade-offs. It sounds like we need to do that before we set any assignment policy direction. And that also gives us an extra month to do community engagement. Sorry. Sorry, Hongmei. But...

intended to be a deep dive into the specific model that's been directed by the board and asking staff to do that for three models and have one month less to actually prepare the final policy may not be

I was also saying that we're asking for direction in October because whatever it is that you guys tell us, we need to turn it into an algorithm and purchase software to make it work. And there's a lot of implementation steps that if you really want it to work a year from October, we need to narrow it down.

The needle we're trying to thread. So you said micro kind of like bring kind of a micro version of April to October. And I think that's what we're trying to do is bring not the full program decision set and all the criteria, but to bring in like, we are already looking at impact on the site level or impact on this, right? Like seat level on those things and try to bring that to the conversation as best as we can responsibly. um without having to flip necessarily it's definitely been thought about or talked about but i mean flipping the order has a lot of other implications in terms of how quickly can we actually implement and get you something in april that's like ready to go and in october of next year i appreciate that that's that's helpful feedback i just i

I won't reiterate that. I think we're, we're all in agreement that, you know, in order for this to work, we have to have. The appropriate resourcing at all of our schools to make them strong schools where all of our students succeed, regardless of family income, like, that all has to happen. And so how do you all make that happen? But I will echo commissioner Westman word like. I'm skeptical and I know our community is very skeptical. Our families are very, very skeptical of all of this. And I think that needs to be said a lot of times. And it's our job, frankly, to not just bring us as a board along, but unless we bring community along, this all fails. We saw that two years ago. And so that's why my biggest question still outstanding is, What are the plans to bring community along? Where's community engagement? And surveys will not be enough to do it.

So.

The last point I'll make, and then I'll stop. Algorithm. Jeff, you brought that up. Thank you very much. A lot of the, like, I've been polling folks that I know in community about, hey, what do you think? What do you think about the direction we're going? And a lot of folks that I'm talking to have said, you know what? It's really not like the choice that's the problem in the system. it's our very painful procedures and the algorithm and like to your point of the algorithm you know when my kids were starting school and we did all paper assignments we still had our january deadlines and we still found out in march here we are we've digitized everything you know there isn't the same amount of human input required why do we still have that long like what where are the disconnects in the system what can we do to maybe streamline process and make like We've done a lot of HR and payroll and ERP system upgrade. What's the next version of the enrollment system software upgrade to help with some of that? Is that the algorithm software you're talking about?

The problem is language testing. That's what happens between when we close the application and when we send those things out. So like, I hear you.

I hear you.

That's one example of just where when we talk about rebuilding trust with families, some of it has to do with just like that nebulous process that is the assignment system.

If I may also just put out there, I know that October is a big conversation for this board to have. I think what would be helpful is understanding what it means for us to give direction in October.

The October 6th, so the October 6th.

Well, so, I mean, I think there's a, we talked about this in leadership. There is a technical issue because October 6th lies within the four dots 12-day window, not October 13th. So there's kind of like a little bit of a mismatch in the timing. So if that means that October 13th meeting should move, I think we should talk about that and the implications of that. I also think it would be helpful in understanding what is it, to what extent is the guidance going to lock in certain things, right? So like when I hear, for example, that we're going to not purchase, go out and bid for stuff, that sounds pretty permanent to me, right? So, and I actually would not have guessed that. had you not said it here. And so I think it would be helpful to know what the implications are coming from the guidance that we give in October so that we can know the permanence of something. Because what I would also say as I was just trying to comprehend all of this is like, I think the headline here, I don't want to find ourselves in April having realized that the decision or direction that we gave is going to be not operationalizable or not aligned to board direction in April, right? Or like in March, you think, right?

Or it's actually going to take five years to scale instead.

Right, right. Or like, oh my gosh, we actually need to go out and bid for some of these building modifications and we actually can't do it by the summer. So understanding the implications of what those decisions may trigger, I think would be helpful to know. And here's what I would put on the table. If that means that we need to talk about a November date because October is going to be too soon, or that maybe we use the October 13th to talk about the implications that come from a direction and we actually give the direction on November 10th. I don't know what that would all look like. I look to staff to help inform that. But what I don't want to do is I think it's too consequential to miss that mark.

Let us go back in and regroup. Because I know that this was something that you all brought up.

But can I just one thing to follow up? I'm sorry. I know we're trying to move on. I'm also thinking of like the failure of Empower as like my cautionary tale here, right? And that was, we know our software company and our staff were telling us, we need to put X resources behind it. It's going to take this number of staff to do it and stand it up right. And we said, meh. you've got two full-time staff people and a fraction of that, go make it work. And look at the implications that that had for years to come. So that's where I would look to staff here. If this timeline isn't going to end, we all said it, so I would much rather know between now, maybe hell, maybe even May, not April, but I'd rather find this out than a year from now when we try and implement, and we've made our school resourcing worse.

The only reason I thought what I said was in part because this timeline is saturated. Right. So I I essentially want to name if we need to move some things. I think that there's a conversation to have a leadership, and we can talk about the governance calendar and the implications of all of that. I'm just putting that on the table, because this like this wasn't really all that important by leadership. It was important by staff right around the timing, the study sessions, all that stuff, the October deadline, and not people to find the things that staff. Right, so that's what we're saying.

We forced them to do it. This is a timeline that we bring forward.

So I actually don't have the case.

My point being is the further we get into this, if we're realizing we need to be course correct. Like, I want to make space for that too. I don't want like, I would rather know.

Well, what I'm hearing is that we should look at the very close October 6th, October 13th, November 10th sessions and see if there's a way for us to readjust.

That's not what I'm hearing what I'm hearing from staff is that they've designed this. Calendar, because it works for them to operationalize it and that us asking for extensions actually creates the risk. The commissioner Fisher is worried about that. We commit to a system that we can't that's helpful clarification.

I just lose that, but is that true?

This was backwards maps to an implementation in October release and launch in October of 2027. okay. Okay.

Perfect. That's a great clarification. Thank you. Can I ask it?

Yeah, yes, because we had to back this up based on the deadline provided by the board. I guess the deadline was.

Okay, that's what I want to declare and I think that's helpful to know. Again, I think what I would say then is understanding the implications of what it means to give guidance would be really helpful to understand as context to that direction.

Gotcha.

I guess I also would want to just name that based on the direction given in October, there may be other elements of direction that the board may want to give around what foreseeable impacts of that are around budgeting investments. Or another thing that comes up for me is like middle school quality, because if we are truly moving to any geographic system, to me, it just, re-raises concerns I had around the implementation of algebra, that we have like a pilot program that's only accessible at two schools. And so I don't think that it is equitable to say, if you live in a certain neighborhood, you can't access compression algebra. Like, I do think that we need to think about the options that we provide throughout the city and making sure that we, if we don't maintain choice, that we maintain access and that we're not Locking families in to a lack of access to certain. Academic or other programmatic opportunities.

Yeah. So, yeah, I think there will be like, it is kind of like a little rudder move in October, which will help give staff focus and direction, especially as we're getting into the program design, but also the policy design. So, at that point, I think there's still room for. discussion and guidance, right? And we've built in updates on just design progress and other questions that we're probably going to have. And I feel like that is, and we'll, I think it's coming upon our team to let you know of the ideas that are being surfaced and tabled, like what's the critical path to the end zone here and what we can actually handle and what things we're just going to have to keep aside for a little bit. But yeah, I hear you. I think there's room for many, many smaller decisions that need to happen once that bigger switch has been flipped.

And then access. Oh, no. Community engagement section. Yes. Yes, go ahead. Yes, we are going to make it very quick.

I just want to say first, thank you all so much for making this already a conversation now.

is being had during tonight's meeting. And just to kind of reflect back to you all what I have heard in terms of what's important in thinking about engaging our communities is that First, we really do need to create opportunities to socialize this very complex set of proposals with the community so that the board can get some level of input prior to providing direction. The second thing that I've heard is that we should think about accessibility and ways that we can provide listening opportunities in concert with the board. so that we're able to gather community input prior to big decision points that we have laid out and that this can be town hall style settings. It could be in person, it could be virtual, it could also be surveyed. So I think a lot of what we had put down as initial thinking is aligned with that. I think that's really the headline. We have broken down the community engagement plan into two phases. The first one is leading into the October 13 milestone, focused on socializing information, engaging through outreach and community dialogue. So as a part of that, we're working with a small group of internal staff leads who oversee advisories, who work directly with community-based organizations, with family, through family partnerships, to really think about how do we create assets and collateral. So information explainers, to facilitate greater transparency and accessibility based on the decision points that are coming up. We have also launched a website where we can provide regular public recaps after every study session, share what we are hearing, and also being able to provide that in multiple languages. In addition to that, we are also working on a district-wide survey. I just want to give our partners in RPA a shout out and also Abby Reiner who's been leading the community engagement work. We've been partnering across different departments to pull this listening tool together so that we can actually get some input and some data to inform our engagement. Oh, sorry, and I skipped this, but we're developing community outreach tools to begin engaging advisory bodies, CBOs, schools, team, really a trusted messenger strategy. And then I think just to also lift up, right, like there is ongoing community engagement that is happening citywide through the Our City, Our Families collaboration. So we're going to, you know, think through how and actually implement the survey, gathering some of their survey data, but also being present at these listening events. We're pulling together a schedule. I heard the word schedule multiple times. We're pulling together a schedule that will take into account these activities happening citywide. We will also be pulling a schedule together of upcoming advisory meetings that we will make available to our board and for us to really be engaged with. In phase two, and this is where the programmatic designing conversations are happening, we need to understand site level implications, impacts, community driven kind of solutioning. We will be engaging from that perspective of how do we deepen that engagement, that dialogue? So we will continue to update our website. We will continue to summarize community insights and what we are hearing, but also really going deeper in in-person sessions An engagement by geographic area, since we're moving to a neighborhood or zoning sort of level conversation. But also, as we think through the magnitude of change and change management to really engage with school site communities, thinking about integrating site level strategies. with families, with staff, with impacted student populations as part of the engagement that we will put together. And there will also be a schedule for that. But we really do need to kind of refine this as we are getting input and feedback from you. I just want to take this opportunity to thank the Special Education CAC. We vetted a couple of these slides with them. They gave their input to help make this a little bit more accessible. So I just, if you are listening, thank you very much for your input. Next slide. All right, so here are just the contours of what we're seeking to understand on the issue of asking authentic questions so that we can get some real sort of input and feedback. you know, questions around what must be true for policy option to work for you, student, your family, to really understand from families, what are their concerns? How do we bring you information about how families are thinking about trade-offs and what could present as barriers to entry? And then thinking about asking how do language programs and K-8 pathways shape the current school landscape? That is part running existing preference level data that can provide some insight, but also being able to pose this question for prospective families and current families as well. And what we're not asking is we're not asking for there to be like a voting thing that we're not doing that. That is the authority and what we will get from the board. both directionally in October and then as a policy in April. We're also not pulling or asking about any individual school closures, mergers, consolidations, anything like that. That is not what we are going to be putting in front of the board in this phase of the project. And if and where there might be strategic recommendations that needs to come to the board as part of the portfolio conversation, that will follow an intensive process. around site level engagement and also just continued analysis and engagement at the board level. So that's what we have put together around community engagement. I owe you schedules. I owe you just, you know, just some level of data sharing and we will consolidate and pull that all together in the upcoming study sessions prior to 13.

Um, you had, you had reference to town falls and from what happened, uh, previously when all the, the budget town halls and so forth, it seemed like there was a tremendous expenditure of staff time and effort that was not commensurate with the attendance. Like, I just. I would strongly urge that we not repeat that and that to the extent we have town halls, they be a forum that draws many more people, which seems to be virtual, but, um, you know, school based engagement work different. You know, schools have their communities talk. That makes sense to me. I don't know what level of staffing that requires. Maybe we can just do it at the school. But we already have so much to do. I, you know, I hope that we're not going to. Going to put all the staff time and effort that went into the budget style things that we can use that time and effort more.

uh you know to reach many more people including folks who didn't choose to come here like not just prospective families but folks who didn't apply or chose not to come thanks to commissioner ray's point like i would actually really love to see focus groups that are act for like polls like whole run by pollsters that are statistically significant instead of just asking seeing who comes to us um and i would even though i understand people might not feel like they get a chance to show up in person i would much rather actually have like a poll in the field that actually like properly weighted for demographics and things like that or focus groups run by like the professional focus group folks um that are representative um to get more qualitative data than um continue to rely on the same community outreach tools that we've had that to commissioner fisher's point i think a lot of folks have not felt actually succeeded in allowing them to be heard or given us the type of information that we felt was meaningful to them for decision making i think another idea that i've heard multiple times is engaging

directly with schools through school site councils, ELACs, other forms. I mean, those are already existing structures, frankly, democratic structures if they're properly elected. And we could have a bottom-up system where every site council and ELAC were asked to weigh in on these things and then give feedback back up through LEAD. Like, it could actually build trust If we did it that way, I think people would be excited about that kind of opportunity and we almost never do that and that's obviously I don't know why, but it seems like it wouldn't be that hard and it actually might be something the principals and others would be into.

And would ensure that every school community is safe instead of just certain school communities.

I was actually going to say the exact same thing so just plus one to that and then what we seek to understand, I assume this is this is. type of questions that will then be workshopped and whatnot so that you know people are clear on what policy options are and presented in an unbiased way okay great thank you this is what it means to have zone this is what it means to yes awesome um i would ask uh just what you want the role of the board to be and how we can engage in support and then in some way like

Doinor embed ourselves into some of this work, not all of it, but I think there's some areas where there might make sense. The other thing I was thinking about is leadership has been, I mean, this is, well, We've been in conversation about the operationalization of the ad hoc on public engagement recommendations, and I think there's probably a natural lack of also being able to reach your final that tells me that you are one step ahead of me. I do want to ask a question about the second bullet point of what we're not asking. I understand why we would not ask us, ask the public or families about individual school closures. That makes total sense. The, that is not the decision that it's kind of working the space part. I know that we will not likely see individual names of schools, but it kind of feels contradictory to the conversation we just had about wanting the implication of portfolio as part of that conversation. So can you just clarify what that means?

Yeah. So in this phase, phase one, leading up to October.

This is just for between now and October.

Yes, because we know based on the conversation tonight, and also as part of the bigger zoning out, aligning student enrollment, portfolio, IE program, and strategic resource allocation, these are the work streams that are going all at once right now. aligning all of these things mean that as we come back to you in April for this particular project, and as we sort of cascade through the decisions around programs, resources, et cetera, that if there are proposals there, that we will flesh it out with the board in the second phase.

I see. Then the term phase is a new word for me. I think my question then would be, what is redefined with face burning right now. Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah. Sorry. So we are in phase one.

Look at that.

We've arrived.

It's like a half moon, but it'd be a full moon. Yeah. Yes. So, and, and, you know, just recognizing that.

the felt impact on communities and the people in our system, right? That we are designing the two phases a little bit differently, and definitely appreciate the input on what are the existing structures. We want this to be very asset-based in how we approach the conversations.

Does this mean that we're going to get the results from this outreach in advance of the either October 6th or October 13th meetings? Because if this data is going to be gathered up until October 13th, but we don't get it until after we've given a policy direction, that could create some issues if the direction is not aligned to community input.

Yeah, that's a really great question. Let me double check with the team. The goal is to be able to bring that back to you prior to the October 13 meeting. That is the targets that we are working up against. How early? How soon?

Yeah, it's given that it's September. Yes. I would, you know, be expecting to be blocking dates on my calendar and to have schools know when they're going to be reached out to and things like that. Interesting.

Yeah. Interesting. I know that we've been having conversations home has been having conversations with schools like. Sorry Community schools coordinators family liaisons Community advocates, so if we're starting those conversations we just wanted to make sure that the board for today and then tomorrow. we'll start rolling it up yes.

So yeah, I have a couple of things to add to here, specifically for slide 33, what we're asking families now and what we're not asking. That question, what must be true for a policy option to work for your family? That's not exactly the question that I said last week, I think, or last session that I'd like to see us answer. It's very similar, but I think just more proactively asking families Like, what and what are we missing? Like, what would it take to bring you to a school that is right now considered under enrolled or that you think is a school that in your neighborhood that you are not choosing for a particular reason? Why? What would it take for us? You know, what do you need to see us put there for you to have the confidence to enroll your kids in that school? That was the question I asked that has been missing consistently, and we need to ask families, right? We need to make sure we have clarity on that before we move forward and not make assumptions.

And it might be something that doesn't cost money, like changing the start time. That's, yes. Or having enough support there.

Right, yeah.

Or even something like we saw attendance. where the teachers stand in the hallways at the door, but in the hallways, and that helps with the situation with both getting kids on time into the classroom and the security situation.

So they're not inside, they're just outside. Just to kind of say back what I'm hearing.

Can I just? 1, other kind of feedback, and then we're doing the whip around and just then this will be it. I got that. I got the visual. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I saw that. Okay. What worries you? That what worries you most about each option? That's a classic SFUSD question to ask in community engagement. We did that with the assignment working group or the attendance working group. And what we heard from families, we heard from all, what worries you about this? consistently we heard oh that we're going to put all this work into it and that nothing will change and then guess what nothing changed so if we're gonna ask families this we really really have to be ready to make change we really really really have to be ready to make change thank you i'm sure this board will hold me accountable to that in that spirit if i just may what i just heard

just now is actually to double click into what we have heard in 2020 around what makes a great school. It's high quality learning and teaching for their student, the school safety and a welcoming environment. And I think we can do a lot more building off of that as a form of learning so that we can really get down to the questions that can help inspire confidence in this process. So I really appreciate that input.

Thank you, Hongmei. I would say the more specific we can be, the better it is for us to understand and be able to communicate what that means. And so appreciate the work of staff. This has been a really, I think, helpful and illuminating conversation, and I look forward to the next one. And with that, I will, oh look, 9.40 PM, I will address.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. When does our new person start coming?