>> please note the presence of the commissioners, and the superintendent. this is an evening that a l many people vn waiting for for a long time. we have been working and the staff and consultants have been working really hard and really long to get us to this point, which is not the end. but the beginning of the next stage.

we are here this evening. i presume you all have the agenda. they added transportation policy, and to talk about how they're going to proceed from there. >> i have with me tonight gene from demographic research, he has been helping us with the work, we're very grateful for her assistance. the three of us will be sharing information. i wanted to go over some of the information that's available for the public, and then i was going to start going through the power point presentation. so one thing that hopefully everybody in the audience has an opportunity to have is a copy of the power point that we're going to be going through. there's also a list of frequently asked questions. there is a list of the proposed

elementary to middle school patterns. and maps. i'll be sharing information. all of this is going to be available on the web and for general distribution as well. and the board materials are the same, and so if there's any questions about the packet, i'm happy to answer those. >> you all have some material in front of you, correct? thank you. so this is the website. we'll be talking about this a little while, because we will launch it tomorrow after we shared it with the board tonight. we have a lot of great information that will give parents and community members an opportunity to view maps and data really closely. tonight's goal is to share the superintendent's recommendations for elementary attendance areas.

theatre patterns and a transportation policy. to launch a community engagement process and provide an overview of next steps. so we'll start with recapping the policy and there is a document, and the board has a copy of it as well, called the placement policy guide, and it looks like this, and it's a parent-friendly guide. should be in the audience as well. it's in draft format. our goal is to send this out to all of the schools, translated by the beginning of september, because we know that families are asking principals and staff at schools what's the new policy and how does it work. so we want to get this out as soon as possible. we got a lot of really good feedback from parent groups and organizations and individuals, and we believe it's ready to go and are hoping to send it to the printer tomorrow and do the translation. but if the board tonight has any questions or feedback, we're

happy to answer questions on that. >> the board members all have copies of that sent to you electronically. so hopefully you've reviewed them, had time to give feedback. >> thank you. >> so the key date, and just to share those for the process moving forward. this is the only slide about the process moving forward. we're then going to jump into the presentation about the boundaries. but we are going to have an application deadline of february 18, and we'd like help getting the word out about that, because for a while, we were talking about a different date and we don't want people to be confused and get them in late. we moved to an earlier deadline. and we're going to now start talking about the -- i want to spend a few minutes talking about the city wide schools. gene is going to talk about the boundaries and how they were developed.

and the idea with city wide schools is we want to make sure that every student who lives in the city has an attendance area school. so no matter where a child lives, they would have an attendance area school. we've got 72 elementary schools, and we're going to draw attendance areas around 58 of them. so there are 14 schools that will not have attendance areas. obviously the greater the number of city wide schools, the more difficult it is for the attendance area tiebreaker to really have as much effect, because you're basically saying there are fewer schools with the same number of students that would have the attendance area tiebreaker so. the city wide schools, or the 14 schools, there are 13 that we've talked about for a long time with the board all of last year, and we're adding s.f. public school as a city wide in the discussion. and that's because it has criteria for acceptance. and you have to have been in the prek.

so that's why staff is recommending that we have that as the 14th city wide school. and in addition to having schools that are city wide, there's lots of programs that are city wide. so i'll give you an example. west portal has a chinese emersion program. it's going to have an attendance area. but the seats that are for the chinese emersion program will not be eligible for the attendance area. the same thing as collaren -- clarenden. 50% of their seats are actually reserved for that. which means that even though it has an attendance area. only 50% of the seats will be available for the attendance area tiebreaker. so the attendance areas, even though there's 58 schools with attendance areas, there are within schools programs that are city wide and that don't have a local preference. this is a distribution of all of

the city wide programs. so you can see -- and it's color coded by language. you can see how they're distributed throughout the city. and this is the list of nine elementary schools that did not have an attendance areas the past. that would have an attendance area under the new system. and we sent a packet of information to all of these schools, and we are available to come out over the course of the next month and chat with the school and the exunety and gather their feedback. and now i'm going to hand it over to jean, who is going to share information about the attendance areas. >> good evening. great to be back here with a work product. and it was very challenging to develop this. because there's so many things that need to be taken into account. it's like learning to juggle about two or 300 different

things simultaneously. in any event, we have put a great deal of effort into doing several sorts of things. first, identifying areas of the city with the lowest average test scores for focus in the assignment process of giving priorities to some children, and i'll talk shortly about how we did that. then i'm going to talk about elementary attendance areas and where students live as a factor in the whole scheme of things. and then finally, the elementary to middle school patterns. those are three main categories of things that we worked on. the first areas with lowest average test scores, in order to identify the geographical areas of the city, where students are concentrated, very concentrated,

and tend to score substantially lower than students in other geographical areas of the city, i looked at census track and combinations of census track and computed average test scores for the 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 california standards english arts test. and this meant look at over 140,000 student records. so plenty of data, large enough geographical units, and sometimes combined census tracks so that there would not be very much random variation. averaging four years worth of scores also helped minimize random variations. however, although if we put a lot of effort into developing these areas and identifying

areas with lowest average test scores, we're going to continue to study how effectively we're identifying students with academic challenges, and after the first year, the supersbendant may, based on research, recommend different demographic data or tiebreaker minimums or maximums to better fulfill your policy goals. and any recommended changes would be discussed at a publicly noticed board meeting. this map overlays the areas with low average test scores on the san francisco planning neighborhoods. these are from the city of san francisco's g.i.s. system. and you notice that they don't fit neatly within neighborhoods. they don't exactly match the

city's neighborhood geography. nor do they match exactly many other kinds of geographical units. in many cases, the attendance areas are partly areas with low average test scores and partly are areas with higher average test scores. >> i'm sorry, can you repeat what you just said? >> i'm on slide 13. and i think you have in your packet, in addition to the map that's being projected and in the power point handout, a detailed map that includes streets on it, streets and parks. and the attendance area boundaries that are also shown on this large map.

stand over to my left. >> i'm sorry, i just want to make sure i understand how you derived the calculation. i missed some of the explanation. if you could just give us that. >> all right. i had a big student data base that we had geocoded or electronically pin mapped, so we knew where each child lived. we had test scores. actually, the data base, more than a quarter million records in it. but we looked only at the records. >> there are over 140,000 of these. >> for each area of the city of interest, i'll get back to what the areas are, we computed the average -- >> it doesn't include

kindergarten, first graders -- >> special ed kids. >> children are enrolled in the district. >> it was administered. >> how -- what period, what tests are included in this? what year or what -- >> 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. >> so four years. >> i pooled all the data for four years. the point of pooling anything is to create a larger sample so you can be more confident that you're not just having handful of things that can very randomly from one year to the next. >> thank you. >> so we averaged four years worth of test data. and the reason this particular test was chosen, i believe, is that it's a good predictor of

student's academic success, or conversely low test scores predict academic problems, or cor -- correlated with academic problems. the geographical areas for which we computed the average test scores, fairly large census track. these are defined by the u.s. census bureau. and office of management and budget. and they're large enough to have large numbers of children living in them. people and children living in them. in cases where the population of students were too small, a combined census track. each one would have minimal random variations, so that i wouldn't falsely identify a census track as having low test scores, because of random variation. there are only three students living in it, for example. there could be a lot of random

year-to-year variations. >> the reason that there's a problem here, as we were discussing on the side before, is that only a very small map shows the low test score area, with the planning neighborhoods. and it's not the same as the other map where we can see this area. these are the attendance areas for school. so the reason that you just explained is why these areas are not, you know, don't match up with the planning neighborhoods. >> when we did this map, we had not drawn the attendance down yet. >> this doesn't have the attendance boundaries. these are the planning neighborhoods. >> that's right. we did this a long time ago. this map, although it's dated july 2010 goes back a long time. >> the reason that the whole planning neighborhood is not in it is that the census tracks you use are significantly small. >> yes. >> and what you're looking at are aggregated census tracks.

the census track boundaries are not showing here. >> thank you. this map with the green area added to it. we drew geographic bound wi -- boundaries. the others are schools that are city wide or proposed to be city wide with special programs, special admission criteria, and they wouldn't work as attendance area school.

each student ended up living in single attendance areas. these don't have overlapping boundaries. they are interdistrict transfer students and we know who they are. they have home addresses outside of the city. so we can take them into account and assign them to different schools other ways than we would assign residents. students living in each attendance area get a tiebreaker to attend the school in whose attendance areas. parents are not required to choose the attendance area school and they're not guaranteed placement in that school.

but as i said, they would have a slight edge on enrollment in that neighborhood school. this nifty diagram that was prepared shows some of the variables that we took into account when drawing the boundaries. some of these ovals on the diagram actually include a variety of different measurements. but as the diagram shows, we looked at capacities and tried not to assign more students to the school than would fit in it. however, students are not distributed evenly across the district. some areas are very densely populated and there just aren't enough seats in the school in that area to accommodate everyone. meanwhile, schools in other parts of the district have more than enough space to adom date

everyone who live -- accommodate everyone who lives near them. so we maximize the capacity usage to the best of our ability while taking other things into account. we were always trying to not overenroll schools and not schools that were too terribly underenrolled either. we did take into account major roads and highways, trying to avoid having children need to cross major thorough fairs in order -- thoroughfares in order to get to school. the city has too many dangerous treats for this to be the guiding -- to be completely possible. there are some areas where students will need to cross dangerous streets in order to go to school.

and they do now for us as well. we tried for continue guety to assign children to the closest school or if there wasn't space available at the closest school with space available. so we made every elementary house is located within its own attendance area, but sometimes just barely. sometimes across a street there's another attendance area. and this, again, is because the schools aren't distributed the same way that the students are. if we could, we'd pick up the schools and put them right down in the middle of the area that they would serve. that would be adeal. but that is not possible. in fact, it isn't possible most of the time unfortunately. continuity and proximity are closely related to each other. proximity would mean every

student attends. that really isn't completely possible, as i said already. we also looked at school diversity, trying to maximize diversity at all the city's schools, but this is very difficult to do, because students are not randomly distributed across the landscape. there are concentrations of one sort here and another sort there. maybe we can create shares that will have equal shares. because that's not how the students live. it would be prohibitively expensive to transport them across the city in order to achieve this. we looked also at recent enrollment patterns. as well as i said already, where students live in the size and

location of school. so this is a really nice diagram that illustrates the juggling act. there are many subsets within these categories. that brings us to the draft recommended map. the map. hundreds of maps came before this one. hundreds of maps. this is our very best effort to date. some of her attendance areas are much bigger than areas. you'll notice that some of them look huge compared with others. that is, again, because the students aren't distributed evenly across the city escape. there are parks in which few, if any live. there are industrial commercial areas in which few people live.

and there are areas of the city where fairly large share of the children go to private school rather than public school, although, of course, this could change somewhat with the implementation of the new assignment system. that was another thing we thought about as we were drawing the boundaries. some encompass very large areas, because they have greater capacity than schools that can serve fewer students, and so that's another reason that the areas vary in size. the shapes of the attendance areas are dictated by the very factors that i talked about already, including the major thoroughfares and what seemed to be logical and reasonable places to draw boundaries. some of these boundaries are not drawn in the place we would

ideally draw them. all other things being equal, because we really need to have space available if possible at the local school for all of the children. so here's the other areas of the city with low test scores now. just showed you the test scores underneath. all those things, including the street. now i'm going to turn to the middle school feeder pattern. each of the 72 elementary schools, each of the k-5 middle schools will feed into a middle school. not all 72 of them. some of them are k.a. all k-5 schools are assigned a middle school. and they're listed on the sheet

that's in the f.a.q. handout as well as in a stand-alone sheet. one of the things i learned, by the way, while working on this is that san francisco doesn't seem to have a uniform way of naming its schools or listing its schools by name. and if you can't find your school on this list, think about other names that go by. if it's someone's first and last name, you could fit under the first name. star king is listed under star king, for example. it's done in ways so that people can identify them. if you can't find your school on the list, try to be creative about how it might have been listed. how it could be arranged in this

alphabetical order, either by first name or last name, or by some other name, like diablo. it's under c.i.s. the feeder patterns may be contiguous, and many of them are, but in some cases students will need to travel to another area to attend the science middle school. >> they feed into the old school -- they have not shown on these feeder patterns at all.

>> they are not assigned to a middle scoosm it's only the k-5. so if you want, on slide 18 to cross off all elementary schools , and all k-5 elementary schools, you can do that. we'll feed into a middle school. program coherence, including language program pathways, complete cohorts of students moving from elementary to middle school, so that all children can move with their classmates to middle school. and proximity, when possible. and the diagram for middle school feeder patterns is a lot

like the one you saw for elementary. this one has added to it the language pathways on the right. i think everything else is the same on this diagram. is that right? solange wadge -- so language passways are add here. children with a particular language program will go to a middle school in this feeder pattern. that has the same language program. and the next diagram, the diagram shows the current system , 65 schools. 65 schools with sixth grade