neighborhood. please. we want you to build schools in our neighborhood. [applause] >> my name is.rodriguez, and i am here to talk about the buena vista school. in the beginning of the year, there was an agreement made with the school and with the educational placement center that this year would be like a feeder program, a preschool into the kindergarten, and i was actually number two for the tie breaker, as well, and the pre-k

students are pretty much made up of low-income, latino people. i was told that, no problem getting into, as well as me and other families were to access into the program. to this day, they told us it would be fixed by the may placements, and that did not happen, and as of now, i was told we would be put on a priority for the august placement, so i just have that fear that it will not happen for the august placement, as well. [applause] >> hello, my name is -- i live in the sunset. forén$áup'd, these people came up with the idea, in new adopted it, right? is that right? so they are not here today to defend this idea.

anyway, why are we sending our children away when they are literally next door to the school boat instead of what miles away? [applause] i do not know. it seems to me that you are not trying to make it easy for us. i am married, and both me and my wife work. one of us would have to quit a job. otherwise, he would have to transfer. what happened to community? remember, community, community, a community? let's be honest here. why do i want my kids to go to chinatown or in the mission district? i have no problem with that. my time is over?

[applause] >> hi, my name is -- i do not have a translator, but i am a minority, believe it or not. i have heard some people talking about it, and it is important to some people. my kid is 11. he is crying a lot because he has to go around town, away from his friends. anyway, the sense of community, how am i going to go to another school? i cannot go there. i am sorry i am not addressing the feeder program. that is not the most important

thing to me. i do not want to send my son on muni and having to transfer twice. would you? when any of you send your 11 year-old? [applause] >> hello, my name is sylvia. i have a child in a neighborhood school. i have to say the i am a product of the 1970's experience of busting your child picking around the city, and i do not think i benefited from that. but it took one hour, two hours out of my day is for school. unfortunately, my parents did not have the option at that time. they did not have the options i can provide, and i will not send my kid out side to another school.

another thing that mr. garcia mentioned is that we will continue to get what we get if we continue the system, and quite obviously, the system is not working, so let's make the change. i think we have been functioning under this system for decades now. let's make a change and see if we can improve the school. thank you. [applause] >> good evening. my name is camille, and i have a third grader and a fourth grader in the sf unified school system. all of us here, all of the parents are here at least until the in part because we're trying to secure what allows our children to opt out of a broken school. the choice proponents want to avoid being channeled, and the feeder ones want to avoid being

sent across town to one, so we're all almost unloaded here because we're trying to make a broken system work for our individual families, but how we work around a broken system should not determine how we fix it -- how you fix this system. the district middle school and k-8 plan is reasonable, and this is a long time to lose momentum. if you are going to do it, why delay the implementation? [cheers and applause] . >> hi, my name is lisa, and i am the parent of an elementary school student. for parents to choose to stay in san francisco and pinchot's public over a private placement, i was very pleased to wind up at lafayette, where two years i have been very involved in the community. my daughter feels supported by not only the teachers and administrators and parents, but

i feel supported by those parents, as well, and i look forward to moving into a school together where we can use our combined strength to continue to make that middle school better, and i am a strong proponent of the k-8 feeder. [applause] >> hello, my name is lisa. i am also a parent at lafayette. i in a huge proponent for all of the public schools, and i am now kind of eating my words due to this year's problem with the placement, and i think it was a purely choice placement this year, and you have taken a lot of people who are very active and very happy in their schools, and you have made them miserable and their children miserable, which makes their home life miserable. at lafayette, most of the people that attend are in certain zeb

coats, so, of course, we want to stay in our area. whether it is the presidio or another area close by, we like to continue, but i also believe that the neighborhood is really important, too. i hear from some of these people who are being shipped across town to go to a feeder school, and i think you need to reconsider where those feeder schools are for the people. for us on the western side of the town, presidio is a great school, and it is not even necessarily that it is a grade school. we have built community, so i want you to consider neighborhood with the feeder, but please keep the feeder. >> hi, good evening. my name is carol. i have a kindergarten student at lafayette, ind i want to speak in favor of the feeder proposal. my family is very much invested in the notion of neighborhood schools, and i feel that the

feeder pattern is a very rational, sound policy. in terms of the transportation issues that lisa just spoke to and other people spoke to, as well, i would think these transportation issues are just diffused, hard to predict, and larry bird is a moat to those families that are not assigned to their choice schools. i know we had a miserable time getting into lhasa yet. we got none of our choices and had to go through that whole traumatic thing. yes, we should have rational assignment, and then be clear where those communities are being fed, and we can address the transportation issues. i also want to say that i think there are a lot of families in favor of the feeder haute, and they already thought it was a done deal. i heard that from many. the last thing i would say is that i understand that the k-8

schools are very light schools. this is as close to that model that we can get without having all that way. >> good evening. my name is david, and i am a parent of two children, both at lafayette, won his fifth going into six and one that is second going into third, and first of all, we were tremendously surprised and shocked that the feeder system was removed for this year. it was our expectation that it was going to be there, and it caused a tremendous amount of chaos inside our house, and in fact, our daughter was placed in a school that is way across town, while we still have a chairman who is at lafayette, and that is the tremendous problem for us next year. i will speak just in general

around the feeder system. i think it is a great idea. i do not have a leg in that game, but the issue is that what has made life yet great, a distinguished school, not only the teachers and the minister raiders but the parents, the parents who got together and work hard to build it out. the programs, to be there at the school for the kids, that is because they are neighborhood parents, and i think that is really necessary in the medical system, as well, so i am also going to strongly advocate, as an said earlier in the conversation, at the current system for kids who are not placed and are not accepting their assignments for next year. thanks very much. >> yes, my name is doors crawford. i have a daughter in high school, and we live where she

should go to balboa. she is 4'1", 98 pounds. the crime -- the school is fine. i have been there. all of your schools are fine. it is your neighborhood you cannot fix. you're always talking about quality schools. it is quality schools. it is the neighborhoods that are not quality. that is why i refused to send my daughter there. she is going to stay at home, and i will home teach her, or something. you cannot fix those neighborhoods, you know? the neighborhood has to fix itself. the people living here have to be wanting to fix it themselves. then they will have more people coming to their schools.

>> good evening. my name is edmund. i am a parent of a soon-to-be third grader at lafayette, and i just wanted to say that i am also in support of the feeder pattern, and i would ask again that you keep in mind to the customers are. it is not just the parents. it is the children, because they are the ones who are going to be paying the price of how things happen down the road, and i think that is why keeping them in their community, their local community, that allows them to be better learners. some parents said indicated that if they have to be shipped across the city, taking the bus, or even taking the school bus, it is going to be a very huge burden on them, and it makes it less able for them to learn, because they are tired. also, i think if you want to

keep costs down and use the money in another way, again, consider keeping them in their communities so you do not have to ship them. ok. thank you very much. [applause] >> hi, my name is sharon kennedy. i was here a couple of months ago. i have a kindergartner that is being sent 5.2 miles away from my home. i am upset about it. e(zthe proposed feeder patterny benefit us, which i do like that, but right now, what is a parent to do? you have an algorithm for everything. you have an algorithm for siblings, for a test score, for everything, but there is no algorithm to prevent a family from traveling 5.2 miles into a poor performer neighborhood? why would a pair of what to do that? it is one thing if you want to volunteer to make those schools

better and get with other parents to try that, but i have no motivation to take my kids down there so far away from home. at the time and the money with gas. how can we afford to take them down there? how can you ask a parent to do that? it is so stressful. and then you are pinning families against one another. we are like fighting for the best of what we can get, and it is just not fair to have families do that, and then i have one other thing. families to get somewhere in the system. i went around 1, route two. what is going to happen when school starts? how are you going to prioritize families who are still waiting to get in? there is no transparency whatsoever.

commissioner: what area you are in? you were supposed to be offered the closest. >> i do not see why i would be given sheridan. commissioner: can you just take her name so we can see if we can find out? thank you. to see where staff is. ok. we want to thank everybody for your testimony, your comments. we are not going to hear anything. if there is translation going on, they have to be really careful to not have side conversations. so if we could have the staff people, if we could see if we can squeeze in as many as we can, and then, a board member's

comments? mr. yee? commissioner yee: they used an example about what would happen if there was a feeder system versus what happened in 2010. it was nice to see, the issue of diversity. it would have been addressed adequately with this feeder system, so thank you, staff, for that. this is just a simple question.

in counting up the slot for middle school, do we do this lot better in the k-8 schools? -- do we do this lot better in those? -- the slots? >> it is a significant number, and we took that into account when we looking at the middle school capacity compared to the involvement projections. commissioner yee: so the numbers are in here? >> yes, they do reflect the 1300's k-8. commissioner yee: if a family

did not want to go to the feeder school, do they have a choice, an option to go to another school? there is still a possibility? >> yes, it is still a choice system, and there is a tie- breaker for the middle school feeder, and then starting in 2017, it would become an offer. kind of light -- like the k-8 now. commissioner yee: for example, some of those in monroe, that is pretty much like 50 slots that is when to open up, is that correct but that is correct. commissioner yee -- is that

correct? >> that is correct. commissioner yee: thank you. commissioner: commissioner norton? commissioner norton: to changing this a significant amount of time, and i ask that about having particular things in place, some of the special education planning, and then the other question i want to ask you, and then i understand you'll probably have to answer for yourselves, but do you feel let the district presentation this evening and answered some of the questions that you have had at the beginning of this process, since you completed the community engagement? >> so i think to answer your

first question, we read the proposals that were read at the may 24 meeting, which is the same proposal here. the date change was on that one, right? the first reading is the one i am talking about, thank you. said that date, before we wrote these questions, to be submitted tonight, we did know about the date change affecting in coming kindergartners and the families, but i think we still stand by these questions. i think delaying it that one year still did not change sort of our questions around some of the bigger strategic questions around budget, around planning,

and around language and around curriculum, and so i hope that answers your question. we did know about it. >> i do not feel that it does. there has been several changes. then the board agreed to delay it one year, and now we have a proposal before us that would place the system on tiebreakers for the next five years, i think. and that is the newest change, so you still wrote those questions knowing that information. >> let me clarify. at our very last meeting, we did not know that. we're still very unhappy with the details that are not presented in this year pattern. and not enough information is there for us to recommend it.

we know, and i was going to say this in conclusion, if, in fact, you did decide to pass this feeder system, there are some things that we voted on that we would recommend to you, and i can talk about those right now. first, to change the order of the tie breakers to make equity and higher priority in the feeder school. we recommended the tie breakers to be sibling priority over any other party mechanism, and many of us are from the southeast side of town, and we do not like the idea of our children being locked into a new -- underperformance or, and most of the parents that are happy with the feeder system are being sent to the highest achieving middle schools. it does not give any of the rest of us parents, who are already into lower achieving schools, a

way into those schools. we are behind everybody else, so we do not recommend it that you pass the feeder system as it is, the proposal, because we want more information on the transportation, how equity is ç i know we will probably have to go through this conversation again if it is not passed, but as we all know, the devil is in the details, and we all would like to see more details. >> i am sorry. i was one to answer your second question. i am sorry, commissioner norton. i misunderstood. we did know about that, and we did develop that after the first reading, so we did know about that. that is the short answer. to answer your second question,

i thought tonight's presentation was very well presented, and i really like the fact that the district addressed the priorities and addressed a lot of the recommendations that we made. what i feel sad about is the community did not get to hear any of that, and i feel that it is happening after we have gone out to the community. i think the district made a strong case tonight for a lot of things, but i feel like the committee heard sort of a different thing, so i would urge continued dialogue in a lot of ways on a lot of these points with people, and i also think that some of what is also sitting there for me are some of the strategic questions sort of about implementation, and the planning process is different from our user experience and have kids and parents sort of

have to deal with the day-to- day, and so, for example, predictability is nice when it comes to assignment and knowing where you are going, but it is very hard to use it if it means more predictable school is very far away and inconvenient to get to, so it is those kinds of things. commissioner: commissioner mendoza? commissioner mendoza: i think this makes more sense than anything i have heard in a while. if this is what we had out there, i think the conversation would have been a little bit different than what it is. this will always be very

personal. as your child goes through this experience, it is very personal, and if you read a fourth grader, you are feeling really anxious, and if you're the fifth great parent who was banking on the feeder pattern to start to kick in this year, and it did not, you are pissed, and this speaks to so much of what we have been talking about for a long time. if you like your neighborhood and where your kid is at, you are going to support neighborhood schools. this is why we left high school the way that we did. and i always feel a little jaded around this because my kids went to schools that no one wanted to go to, and i was part of public

schools for half of my life, it feels like, and that will conversation was about going in and taking charge of your school and not having your school take charge of you, and really changing what our schools look like, and i think we have been able to successfully do that because of support in our elementary schools, but we still have so many of our schools where families date that they are the only in town, and this line that shows the diversity fees from kids from all over the city that go to these particular schools, it is very powerful, because we're not talking about where schools are located as much as we are muley recognizing families traveled from all over the city to get to a school that they really feel strongly about, but i also feel that the work we're doing is

simultaneous to a large degree, and middle school quality, working on quality middle schools is not -- we did not start doing this when we started talking about -- this was going on when another was in charge. this has been a conversation we have been having for some time and really thinking about what it is that our middle schools need, and i think a lot more time has been spent focused on doing assessments across the board about making sure all of the schools have what all of the schools need to have, since you are not looking at particular schools because you do not have special education at one place or something. so we are working on making that he's more solid at all of the schools -- making neckpiece re