Every week should be teacher appreciation week, but NEXT week it’s official! 🎉 What will you be doing to celebrate and appreciate your child’s teacher? Follow along next week on our Instagram and Facebook pages to get some ideas on what SFParents suggests. Have a great teacher appreciation idea you want us to share out? Email us at [email protected] and maybe yours will be featured!

Superintendent interviews underway. It’s true that by the start of the 2022-23 school year we’ll have a NEW superintendent. We’re hopeful that the commissioners are taking this process seriously and will select a phenomenal new superintendent, ensuring a match with the desired qualifications that parents, a.k.a. many of YOU!, helped identify and outline this winter during several of our parent meetings. It’s a pretty solid list! If only SFUSD listened to parents more often. (We’re working on that, together!💪)

Literacy improvement updates. Last week, SF Parent Coalition and SF Education Fund hosted a follow-up forum on SFUSD literacy improvement plans, with our district’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction. (Recording coming soon). SFUSD recognizes our district’s unacceptable gap in reading outcomes and the urgent need to fix it. A few quick highlights from the event:

• SFUSD’s literacy curriculum and materials review, conducted by an outside auditor The New Teacher Project, is complete. Preliminary findings will be shared in May.
• Pilots in middle schools and elementary schools will begin in the 2022-23 school year. This will be a long-term investment in our students with potential adoption of new curriculum following data collection and review.
• A UCSF dyslexia screener will be applied, starting this fall, piloted in at least one elementary school.
• Spring data assessments have been completed; results on student outcomes will be shared soon.
• SFUSD acknowledges the need for coherence and to create baseline experiences for students across all schools. They are developing new instructional guides for teachers starting with kindergarten instructional guides, to be implemented starting this fall.

Virtual Academy voted down (for now), at Tuesday night’s BOE meeting. While there appeared to be a fair amount of board support for the idea of continued online learning option, one thing was clear on Tuesday night: the school board was NOT happy with how staff presented a half-baked plan to open an entirely new school–a Virtual Academy–accelerating the typical process of two resolution readings (and ideally a budget analysis). Instead, staff moved it straight to a vote. All three new commissioners and Commissioner Alexander voted no; only Commissioners Lam and Boggess voted yes (Sanchez was absent).

Budget update! Did you ever get around to reading the updated fiscal analysis report from the state? Well, we read it, so you don’t have to! Check out our brief 1-page explainer, co-produced with Families for SF. Bottom line: SFUSD needs to do much more work to fix its budget deficit. Fixing our budget will be hard; but failing to fix it will be much harder.

Student/school assignment process. The committee is meeting tonight at 6 pm to discuss updates from the recent enrollment cycle, progress with developing zones, and timeline adjustment suggestions… including the possibility of delaying the effective date by a year to 2025-26, to have more time to get the new policy right. Learn more by attending (tonight!) April 28 at 6 pm at 555 Franklin St. or by Zoom (password: 583102).

Outdoor classrooms? Yes, it’s really a possibility. And why not, in the beautiful Bay Area? (Don’t get us started on how more kids could have been learning in person all last year if we had taken advantage of the incredible outdoor spaces on school grounds). Take a few quick polls, here, to provide your feedback on how recent bond money, allocated for improved outdoor learning options for SFUSD students, should be spent.

We sat down with SFUSD mom, Chanel, to ask her about her thoughts about a recent meeting SF Parents facilitated for Black parents and caregivers with the three new board commissioners, Lainie Motamedi, Lisa Weissman-Ward, and Ann Hsu. Here’s what she had to say:

“It was hopeful!” Ms. Blackwell said, “It could be a honeymoon period, but I’m hopeful.” She pointed out that all three of the newly appointed board members are parents. “They are parents, not politicians. They are ready to work: compassionate, but practical.” Chanel is concerned that marginalized families don’t know how to access the resources that are available. “They don’t often know they exist.” She appreciated the meeting for the opportunity to share concerns with the commissioners, resources within the broader group, hoping to then disseminate information to other families.

TODAY at 1 PM || An unmet promise: Early literacy for all in California (by EdSource) Join EdSource for a discussion about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to learning to read and whether California is doing enough to improve early literacy. Register here.

Sat May 7th, 1-3 PM  ||  Bubble and Ballots. TogetherSF and SPUR invite you to attend a fun-filled afternoon of food, drinks, and learning about the upcoming June election and what’s on the ballot. (So many elections this year, it’s hard to stay up to speed!) RSVP here.

May 18th, 7-9 PM  ||  Parents Night Out with SF Parent Action. Our sister organization, SF Parent Action, is hosting a Parents Night Out in May, particularly focused on how parents can get engaged in advance of November’s school board election. Design candidate questions, plan great family-friendly candidate events, and more. They want you to join and pitch in with this collective parent effort! Tentative date/time: May 18th at 7PM. If you’re not already subscribed to SF Parent Action updates, sign up here. [Note–their website is currently undergoing improvements!]

May 22nd, 10 AM-12 PM  ||  Family Action Day. Should our city be more affordable so families can feel confident establishing roots and raising kids here? Um, yes?! Join Families for San Francisco and YIMBY on May 22nd to learn more and participate in this fun Family Action Day. RSVP here.

SF Parent Coalition centers the needs of children and youth in San Francisco public schools by bringing together a diverse network of parents and caregivers to advocate for a thriving, equitable school system.

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