Letter to SFUSD: Parents and kids need certainty and calm, not chaos and fighting.

Hi Dr. Wayne and Board of Education, 

There’s a lot of chatter in the parent community about the method with which you all plan to announce the closure process and plans. We urge you to seriously consider this Hunger Games approach you are about to take. 

We are sharing some comments below from SFUSD parents, and we are urging you to think more carefully about the language you use and the approach you take. Please lead with confidence, certainty, and a clear rationale during this time. Communities expect to be engaged in conversations on how to make this process and transition go smoothly for their kids and communities, NOT to be entering a stressful fight for their lives/schools scenario. We hope to see SFUSD set up the former, not the latter:

• Parent and teacher: 
  • “I think it’s a plan for a very difficult month, where some schools on the list will be able to marshal significant and immediate pushback and others won’t. This makes for chaos, bad feelings, and inequity.”
• Parent: 
  • “What a mess. Think about this in business terms. If a company announces that they’re going to have layoffs, instead of just making the layoffs occur on one day they announce one month ahead of the layoffs all potential employees that could be laid-off. And then a month later do the actual layoffs only for a few people who were on the original ‘potential lay-off list’. How would you feel if you were on the potential list but then retained? You would have no trust in the company and would probably find a new job. How are the teachers, students and families supposed to recover from that stress and potential trauma? How do the leaders of SFUSD not see that this is a really really bad idea and no company in the history of business would ever go about it this way? The stupidity is mind-blowing.”
• Parent: 
  • “I really hope this isn’t how this plays out—releasing a list of schools that may close, a period where parents and staff feel they must fight to keep their school, and then the final decisions. I’ve been prepared to accept if they close our school and move forward, but not this mess.”
• Parent and Enrollment Promotion Volunteer: 
  • “They need to release the list, be firm that this is the final list, & tell all those schools that they have been removed from enrollment materials. My co-lead of tours and I spent hundreds of hours on brochures, enrollment fair, tours, outreach to parents etc trying to boost enrollment at our school. I cannot even imagine leading tours under the circumstances they’re setting up.”

Please let us know what shifts you will make to lead schools through a clear process and NOT create chaos and fighting that will be bad for our communities and very bad for student learning.

Respectfully,

Meredith, on behalf of SF Parent Coalition