Budget woes grow
There’s nothing easy about where we’re at with the SFUSD budget — we’re mid-shift now with moving from budgeting for 57,000 students to budgeting for 50,000 students. Our rational minds hear and understand comments like at this week’s school board meeting from state Budget Babysitter, Mr. Elliot Duchon, “I know this is a painful step, but it’s a necessary one.” Still, our hearts just sink, hearing public comments from families and teachers at Sheridan, Cobb, Lakeshore.
We’re right there with you in terms of worry and concern about everything from classroom closures to AP cuts to teacher layoffs. SF Parent Coalition asked SFUSD to organize a budget town hall for families, educators, and administrators to be transparent and clear about the cuts, what we can expect, how they are working to minimize impacts to our students. It sounds like that Town Hall is now in motion; stay tuned.
Learning loss data and recovery efforts
SFUSD’s data department finally released student outcomes data; data we’ve been asking for for months now. SF Parent Coalition is beginning to look closely at this data and will get back to you with what we learn. You can review the summary data here. One quick snippet that illustrates a beginning of our understanding about the impacts of school closures on our students’ learning loss:
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~46% of Grade K-5 students are reading at grade level in Fall 2021 vs. ~52% in Fall 2019 (Pre-Pandemic)”
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There’s a lot more to the data where that came from. Care to join our SFParents volunteer data analysis team?! We need you! Email [email protected]
In the meantime, last week SF Parent Coalition helped spread the word to elementary school sites to get students signed up for FREE literacy tutoring. This tutoring is provided by BookNook through a partnership with SF Ed Fund and SFUSD, for our highest need students exhibiting signs of learning loss in reading. SF Parent Coalition hopes to see a comprehensive plan from SFUSD to assess and address the full extent of learning loss for all students.
Superintendent search
Applications are due on February 18th for candidates interested in applying to be SFUSD’s next superintendent. Wait a sec… Feb 18th? Well, there is a school board recall election happening next week, which could drastically impact the board composition and who would be ultimately selecting the next SFUSD superintendent this spring. Until those results have been certified (likely sometime in mid-March), SF Parent Coalition and four former presidents of the school board have called on SFUSD to delay the superintendent search timeline by one month. Read our press release for more information and stay tuned for their response!
School board qualifications
Last fall, many of you filled out our SF Parent Coalition questionnaire on the desired qualifications you want to see in future school board leaders. We’re summarizing that feedback and sending it in a letter to Mayor Breed, as she considers appointments to the school board should any seats become available after next week’s election. We will include the letter in our next newsletter and let you know if/what parents hear back from Mayor Breed!
