Parents at Some SF Schools Named for Closure Vow to Fight to Keep Campuses Open

Updated 2:05 p.m. Wednesday

After touring eight different schools, Nicole Macias and her husband fought through rounds of the San Francisco Unified School District’s difficult enrollment lottery for a spot at their top pick: Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy in the Castro, just two blocks from their home.

“It’s been a dream,” Macias said. “Our daughter loves it. Her kindergarten teacher is wonderful. The curriculum is wonderful.”

Now, Macias and her family must prepare for the likelihood of a new school. Harvey Milk is on the list of 11 San Francisco campuses that could close after this academic year as the district grapples with declining enrollment and a staggering budget deficit.

Macias said it wasn’t a huge surprise to see Harvey Milk on the list, which SFUSD finally released Tuesday afternoon following months of uncertainty. She knew the school was small and had spoken with her district supervisor over the weekend, who gave her the sense it was likely.

Still, she said that as she picked her daughter up from school and walked her and 15 or so students over to soccer practice, she wasn’t sure how she would have the conversation about the decision with her daughter.

“I’m honestly scared,” she told KQED outside a Tuesday night school board meeting where frustrated parents turned out to vent. “I’ve kind of mentioned to her that this could happen, but just really high level. I’m at a loss.”

She’s also thinking about the logistics that families will have to take into account.

Under the district’s tentative proposal, Harvey Milk students would merge with Sanchez Elementary. However, the two schools have significantly different schedules; Harvey Milk starts at 9:30 a.m. and gets out later than Sanchez, which starts at 7:50 a.m.

“That’s going to force a lot of people to have to get aftercare who don’t have it because the school will end much earlier in the day,” Macias said. “The idea that the community will stay together is not really possible. It’s not going to be viable for a lot of families.”

Most of the campuses that could close or merge — meaning all of their students would move together to another campus — are small elementary schools that have fewer than 260 enrolled students and fall in the bottom half of the district’s “composite scores,” which rate schools on factors including equity, academic performance, school culture and effective use of resources. Two are high schools that have fewer than 400 students without a specialized program.

Both of Sara Sullivan’s kids have attended San Francisco Community School, a K-8 campus in the Excelsior that is proposed to merge with Paul Revere TK-8. While her daughter transferred to a different middle school, her son is in third grade this year.

She said parents are hoping they’ll be able to keep the campus open.

“We’re still fighting to not let them close our school because it’s such a special place,” Sullivan said. “It’s been a place that both of my kids have really grown up and flourished and many other kids have grown up and flourished. It doesn’t make sense to close a thriving school.”

Macias, meanwhile, said she’s “envisioning a lot of Harvey Milk tactics” in the coming weeks as parents try to keep that campus open, too. On Wednesday afternoon, some plan to march from the school to Harvey Milk Plaza to protest Tuesday’s announcement.

The last year has been difficult as families navigate confusing messaging from the district and an “incredibly not transparent rollout,” Sullivan told KQED. The list they came up with, she believes, is also unfair.

“It’s a lot of kids that haven’t had a lot of resources in schools that haven’t had a lot of resources. And now, they’re telling us that they’re going to close us because we’re not good enough,” she said. “That is not OK. That is not equity.”

Most of the schools are on the city’s east side. Sutro Elementary, the only westside elementary school on the list for potential closure, offers Cantonese and biliteracy programs in kindergarten through fifth grade in addition to its general education classes.

If that school shutters, students enrolled in Cantonese biliteracy would move to the Chinese Immersion School at De Avila Elementary near Buena Vista Park, about two and a half miles southeast of Sutro Elementary’s Richmond campus.

Some of the district’s language programs, like Sutro’s, are under-enrolled, according to Frank Lara, the executive vice president of the San Francisco teacher’s union. He said that based on feedback from families, the union is suggesting more dual immersion programs, where two language programs could be taught on one school site.

“That’s how you can actually attract families and increase enrollment,” Lara told KQED. “The challenge we have with the current district and the level of mismanagement — and to some degree incompetence — is that instead of talking about how to expand these types of programs, they’re looking to cancel out the programs.”

There’s also the question of whether the eventual school closures will be enough. Superintendent Matt Wayne has said significant staff reduction will be needed to rightsize the district’s budget, and there are already schools that are understaffed and under-resourced.

While the district has said, declining enrollment over many years has left about 14,000 empty seats across its campuses, even if all of the closures and mergers on the list released Tuesday are made, only about 2,000 students will be affected.

Meredith Dodson, the executive director of San Francisco Parents Coalition, said it appears district officials are suggesting “they can’t deliver on the education that our kids deserve at these really underserved schools because they can’t provide enough staff to support a high-quality education there.”

“If that is your rationale,” Dodson said, “how are we going to actually deliver on that on the other side of this if we’re still going to see not the staffing capacity that we need for that high-quality education because we’re not making enough adjustments?”

Multiple Board of Education members have said that about two dozen schools would need to close to make the necessary staffing and budget impacts, Dodson said.

Others who have done independent analyses put that number as high as 30 or 40.

“I think the question remains, ‘Is it worth it to put these communities through this pain if we’re not even going to see the results that we desire in terms of a higher-quality education across San Francisco?” Dodson asked.

During Tuesday night’s school board meeting, President Matt Alexander said the board encourages people at affected schools to engage in upcoming town halls and discussions with Wayne and his staff. Wayne said he plans to meet with families and staff at every campus on the list to discuss their budget impacts next year and what the transition to a new school would look like for students.

Alexander said the board expects “meaningful community engagement,” as well as an independent equity audit and fiscal analysis of the closures to be approved by the California Department of Education when a final recommendation is presented next month.

Wayne’s proposal will undergo a first reading on Nov. 12, and the board is set to vote on Dec. 10.

That will be after November’s general election, when San Franciscans will vote on a $790 million school bond, which, if passed, would mostly go toward modernizing district buildings and creating a new central food hub.

Harvey Milk underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation in the last few years in a modernization project funded by another bond measure.

“That was money from a bond measure in 2016,” Macias said. “What does that say to voters when they’re just as willing to abandon buildings that they invest in?”

KQED’s Juan Carlos Lara contributed to this report.