about that particular slide on page 11? it should not be current range 81%. it should be 81 points on the scale, so the test -- the range between the highest and long average test scores is not a percentage. it is a number of points. the projected range is 46 points, so it decreases the difference between the best and worst projected performing the middle school. >> good evening. i am a parent of three children. i am part of students' first, and i think that focusing on improving the quality of the schools in san francisco will help the question here about parents that are worried about feeder schools.

my personal experience from high school is that was not address, so maybe on a future meeting? i am a proponent of neighborhood schools because my son was assigned to a school all the way across the city, and we had to drive back and forth. thank you. >> i am speaking on behalf of my wife and my two children. i want to share my experience with everybody tonight. i do not think everybody realizes the current process that we are going through, and i will share nine -- i have applied my son to kindergarten here in the city. we have been on the waiting polls since april. april 5, 473 families fall into

that category. april 30, 280. may 28, 344. i do not understand the numbers on here, but it is all published on the website. june 30, 333. august 6, 226. today, i still do not have school for my son. i have been down to the educational placement center, spoken to more than three counselors. i met the director twice in the office. i am really questioning the capacity of the school system. if i am looking at the map, there areis available anywhere in the schools in the district. four schools in this general area of town, okay, so i'm questioning the current process and also the future process because i think it is not addressing the key issues.

are we providing enough spaces for the number of students in the city? we are driving families out of the city because the way the process is arranged. you have the sibling trump card, which i believe in. you have the five social economic factors. that is punishing the lower middle income families, such as myself. >> i am going to have to ask you to summarize. we have someone from the educational placement center that would be happy to talk to you and try to help you. we are happy to listen to your comments. we really want input on what you have heard tonight. based on our previous experience, and what we have said, and gone through, it is not the intention to reopen the

policy we have we're now talking about implementing the policy. we've had recommendations made tonight about the specifics of how we would actually do what we said we would do. it is not our intention for this year to change the policy at all. i just want to clarify that for everybody. thank you. >> just a little bit longer to conclude? i have two questions. where do i go from here besides buying -- hiring a lawyer and suing the city? >> you can see to our staff. >> i have and have not gotten anywhere. that is why i am here speaking to the school board, of my frustration. i think the future implementation of a process, you need to think about the middle income families.

you cannot make the track a trumping factor. i would want to meet -- move my family there to get a place in the school. [applause] >> thank you. >> i have two children out of toronto -- at alvarado. i am really excited about the fact that alvarado will be moving on to a middle school. i think that is an amazing opportunity to get middle schools, like all of the elementary schools with active parent groups, it is an amazing opportunity to bring that energy to the middle schools. i have already talked to the principle oal of alvarado to get

the joint community together. i think there is also an opportunity for really good results from all of that. i do have one clarifying question. i have heard a lot that there will be a real neighborhood preference in the kindergarten process. i do not know what that means. if you look at the current system, it is one of the preferences, it is neighborhoods. if there is a way to quantify or qualified what that means in some sort of formula, that would be incredibly helpful. i do think there is a trust issue. it seems rather complicated. it seems that we are swapping one complicated kindergarten assignment system for another. i know that is not the intent. if there were a way to clarify how the neighborhood

preference, what it really looks like. earlier tonight, there was a comment that we have a degree of preference, but you are still not guaranteed a spot at your neighborhood schools. parents collectively go, "oy." concentrating on that specific issue will put a lot of questions to bed. thank you. >> i am with students first. i think the results of the neighborhood school system, kindergarten through five, is something that people on the west side would strongly applaud. it would increase their participation in the neighborhood school by 30 or

40%. i wonder whether not for the east side that has any benefit. you have schools in certain parts of the neighborhood that are persistently low performing. they are half empty because a lot of the families decide to move elsewhere. the school policy, stayed in school policy is to have high expectations -- the stated school policies to have high expectations for all. the administration has to be serious about it. the east side families who have fled and looked elsewhere have suddenly found themselves, their choices have been greatly reduced. i look at the feeder system. i see a lot of the prominent

west side middle school's being fed in by low performing schools from the east side. hoover would get mount malcolm x. a think the naacp has conducted of it before. the kids who move across town on the side to the west side have not had a good experience. they felt they were second-class citizens. they were socially isolated. with this integration, this really provides the opportunity and justification to raise quality in east side schools. i do not think the policy that exists now in which the lowest performing schools have the

least experienced teachers should continue. thank you. >> i am the parent of a kindergarten girl who is currently unassigned. i want to reiterate the comments about the intent of making it certainty more of a feeling for parents next year. looking at the map and listening to comments in the neighborhood, there are five schools close to me. i see no certainty that if my girls were in kindergarten and the mixture that i would be assigned to one of those schools. i do not think we are accomplishing anything as far as a neighborhood schools as far as i can tell. thank you. >> i am also a apparent at mckinley school.

people know me know that i am very committed to the public schools of san francisco and california. i will not be running. i do hope that there is going to be a clear message of assistance regarding recruitment. there are many schools in the system who were asked five years ago to show that they could recruit families to their school and keep their numbers increasing and keep their test scores increasing. mckinley and others have made that jump. to piggyback on what other parents have said, this recruitment effort is going to be complicated, long, and difficult. i really hope there will be a lot of emphasis put on helping to guide our schools through the process. thank you. >> thank you. does any member of the board have something else to say?

go ahead, commissioner norton. >> for the record, if you look at the mouth of the middle schools, realistically we went into this knowing there was no way would please everyone in san francisco. that is impossible. it is absolutely impossible. we have spent a lot of time looking at this. if you look at the map in terms of number of schools, overwhelmingly it does address the issue of the concept of neighborhood schools. that one is one that we have spent a lot of time on. it is not going to be perfect. some of the comments made about everett, i need to make a

clarification. the reason we put isa and others on there is that we've written a magnet grant to put those on there. we have a huge magnet grant. we're hoping to get that by september. that grant is to develop a feeder program for the school of the arts. it will bring in resources to create a school of the arts program within the school if people choose. we are trying to take schools better on the bubble to make them excellent schools. when you start looking at this, i think the information is good for people to see what it does in terms of the makeup of the preschool. that is critical information for everyone.

someone may wonder why we are taking neighborhoods over improving schools. wthese models address those two issues. it really does address academic student achievement. it really does address trying to create some type of neighborhoods. at the same time, we're trying to have schools better balance. if you really want to turn around a school, you cannot have a school in san francisco that just has the lowest performing students. that is unacceptable. we are trying to build up those schools. there is not a willie brown on here for the bayview. the reason why is we're going to build. our goal is to close willie brown this year. hopefully, we will pass another bond measure in 2011 to come back and build a brand new state of the art school and create a magnet school there.

it will be for the neighborhood but we will allow others to go to the school there. when we were looking at this, we realized -- your input is valuable. we are not done with this. we are looking at it. no matter which way we would go, there are going to be groups of people who are going to view it differently. if you look at what we're doing it with elementary, i think that is a pretty basic step that we have done. the next step is looking at middle schools. middle school is all a little bit trickier for a multitude of reasons. i think those reasons are showing themselves here tonight. that is why we're going to have the hearings. we want to hear what your ideas are and see what is out there. will meewe may need to be more t

about what we have gone out for in terms of grants so that people know when these 10 schools receive these funds, they are four specific things to make the schools a lot more dynamic schools. we are probably going to have to create the list before we go to the public meetings so that people at least know what is going on at different schools. there are a lot of different things going on that are not shown by a map here. >> commissioner? >> i have a number of questions for staff. the first question i have is the feeding into isa. i am a little concerned because the programs are not built everywhere. students would start feeding

into isa next year. what is our plan with that? >> that is true with all of the pathways. it is going to be a number of years before we have fifth graders 4 milliofrom the mandarn pathway feeding in. it is a building process. it will grow over time. it will not be instantly you have to be part of it to be at isa. the higher grades would not be part of the program until it has built up gradually. >> my point is that there is a future promise of something really great happenings at isa, but there is nothing there for students beating in. muehrer is pretty far to have

them go to the other. what are we offering to students expected to go there next year in terms of transportation and program options? >> i have sort of the same question. my question is more related -- i appreciate the ib plans, but it will be a lot of years before it gets up. this is the only place we are proposing to have a path with it takes kids into a different configuration. we are proposing a pathway that takes certain the elementary schools into a 6-12 school instead of a 6-8 school. i am going to want more discussion with community partners and among ourselves. that is one place and i suspect

there are other places or anomalies that we may want to consider or look at. i just wanted to put that on the record. >> the next question i had was about treasure island and why we would divide treasure island into two separate attendance areas. both require transportation, i am assuming. that does not seem to make fiscal sense to me to have two different transportation routes from the same place. >> there were multiple factors contemplated. one had to do with the diversity and supporting the goal of the board of reversing the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of students at schools and for schools to have capacity to accommodate the students. it was also for equitable access, for children who live on treasure island to have the opportunity to go to more than

one school. that would be positive in the direction of providing equitable access. >> all of treasure island is a ctf1. . >> as we think about how we will support families living on treasure island to be able to attend schools with transportation to those schools and thinking about what schools are not too far away, rather than having 100% of the kids on treasure island go to sherman or chin, we would have two attendance areas there. that would work both in terms of the receiving school as well as the students who are living on treasure island. >> what is the financial impact of having two different --

having one bus route from treasure island that goes to two different places? is it about the same? do we incur additional costs for that? not to put you on the spot. >> i think there are too many students for a single bus. the numbers are growing. >> is there a start time issue with the two schools? could we take them with one route? would we have to have different routes for different start times? >> the option is for one route to service both schools. that is a possibility. the numbers in terms of birth are there. someone in the future will have to look at it when it goes down. if the numbers grow, we could be looking at having to have to gwo buses because the numbers will not fit on one. we are still developing it. >> that is something we are

going to have to monitor closely, that we have made a trade off there. i wanted to follow-up on what the commissioner was saying about leadership and how out some of these feeder patterns are affected by co-location. have we taken that at various middle schools into account and how? >> yes, we did take into account. we established an enrollment capacity based on the number of classrooms in the school. we made a note of classrooms been used by charters or for other purposes in establishing boundary capacities. we did enrollment projections using four-year averages based on historical patterns. we looked to see if every elementary school was operating

at maximum capacity feeding into the middle schools if they would all be able to fit. in this model, the answer is yes. in some cases, it might require using more space than is currently being used. i will look into addendum one and see what the assumptions were about the use of space there. >> i am concerned about mann. i know we're trying to hold metro there. there was already a tug-of-war over space in that situation. if these feeder patterns hold and this is what we enact, there will be more kids coming to mann than are enrolled now. is that going to affect the number of class is currently available to metric? i have got my answer. the last two questions i wanted to ask -- i wanted to push back

a bit about not including middle schools and why we made that decision. i want to discuss what we propose to replace it with. it sounds to me in the interim years while this is being implemented that families still want to do some middle school shopping. why would we discourage them? are we trying to discourage them from doing that? >> i think what we're going to do in the average plan that we will share later on is that we're working with middle school division. we're going to try to build the connection from the old entries that are going to feed into that. we will develop specific strategies to enhance the connection early on. we do have some plans to work with the middle schools and the feeding elementary schools. >> i do not want to totally let the middle schools of the hook

in terms of the need to reach out to parents and sort of introduce themselves to parents. that is what the fair has accomplished over the last decade. the schools have to think about what kinds of things they want the parents to know about them and what questions they will have to answer. i do not want to do away with that. i would like us to keep focused on that. the last question i had was given some of the public comments we heard about the worry that families -- that address fraud will increase, can you talk more about our and verification plans? >> we have been trying to build capacity to have an address verification unit. we have been aggressively building mounthat since the adon

of the new student assignment process. we have some expertise we are tapping into. we are building some strategies and bringing in additional resources to help us in that verification process. >> quickly, in terms of the projected middle school enrollment that you had on theire 48 to 10 years from now,i am curious, what was the thinking? some of the middle schools' enrollments would increase or decrease. and look at the marina that has a capacity of about 1000. it has about 800 kids are now. we are projecting it to have 430 kids in a few years.

is that intentional? why are we doing this? why are we trying to make a school with a large capacity have such a small enrollment? the minimum is 420. francisco is in the same category but it is not as drastic as what i saw with marina. >> thank you for the question. i would urge that you not take these estimates very seriously. there are a huge number of caveats that i did not put down here. what we were truly trying to develop was the question of whether there would be enough space at each middle school for incoming fifth graders who would be assigned to it according to the elementary that they attend. the answer is yes.

the thing is that these are rough estimates are based on the rate at which children have moved from fifth to sixth grade in the district over the last four years. this is called a great progression rates. we measured grade progressions for each of the elementary attendance areas over the last four years. we compared the number of fifth graders with the number of -- we identified all of the fifth graders who did and did not enroll in six grade in the district. we found a great progression rates do very geographically across the district. what these numbers in the rough estimate column really mean is what enrollments would be at the middle schools given everything that we can take into account

but limiting it to just the fifth graders moving from elementary to middle school. there would undoubtedly be more than the numbers shown in the column. there would undoubtedly be more than 430 at marina. some children come to your middle school not having attended ak-5. there is plenty of room for them here. i think i need to put these in so that no one takes the numbers too seriously. it shows there is enough room at the middle school for fifth graders who would be assigned to that school. >> you are talking