commissioner chiu: welcome back

to the board of supervisors meeting of september 21, 2010. we are here in part for our special order at 3:30. i will be presenting the commendation today to the blackrock arts foundation, and i'd like to ask of some of the representatives. the president of the board, executive director, the secretary of the board, the vice president of the board, and one of the need artists of the wonderful installation, which i will talk abou last week, i have the honor speaking at a presentation in the southeast corner of my district. the blackrock arts organization was the organization behind bringing this great project to one of our spaces. they have been pioneering a very exciting new model for public

arts in which they partner with neighborhoods and communities and city governments to temporarily placed city art project. the products that are facilitated by it as collaborative one have generated tremendous social but as a patient brought the process of both the installation and participation. since the first installation that they assisted with several years ago, we have now had several major installations in various major public spaces throughout the city, which have been extremely well received from every neighborhood that has been in. most of the neighborhoods have come, what is known internationally known festival, which was born in san francisco 25 years ago. from my perspective and i think many of my colleagues share this perspective, i think we need to do everything we can to help our city really grow, not just the are cystic -- the artistic community but our city's artistic economy.

we need to promote breast core values of activity, community, and activism. i want to thank those of you with the foundation and the community for all you have been doing both for san francisco for the world and for our wonderful public spaces in our city. thank you. [applause] >> it is a real privilege to be able to serve the community with the black rock foundation's work. this is where our roots are, and this is where a lot of our activity happens. although we are expanding worldwide, the burning man organization is world renowned, and a lot of people do not understand or realize that the black rock arts foundation supports artists all year round, and we have a big presence in

san francisco. have you all see in the rocket ship down at pier 14? i highly recommend you go check it out. it is this beautiful retro futuristic looked from the 1920's or 1930's, and flash gordon comes to mind. when we were installing it, an elderly gentleman wearing a service cap -- they were veterans of foreign wars, giggling like schoolchildren, climbing up on to the concrete blocks trying to get photos of each other on the fence, so i offered to take some photos of them, and it was really touching. i was trying to make sure they got the mall in there, and they said they did not care about them, but just get the rocket. the action was not behind a fence half an hour later and were still taking photographs and having a good time.

that is the kind of work that black rock arts foundation is able to bring to a civic setting. it is work that is cutting edge and fun and play ball, and it is not just a guy on a horse with a sword -- fun and playful. i want to thank you for your support as well as the grants for the art -- the department of art environment, who we have a program with. i would like to thank our board members who were introduced, and especially the artist, one of which is representative. if it were not for them, we would not be doing what we're doing. if you have a neighborhood with a park that could use some art, you have a community that once some art, you know an artist that could use some funding, let us know, and we can help. thank you. [applause]

>> part of our mission is to promote civic opportunity end engagement, and thanks to a wonderful city you are helping to run in sentences, you make it truly worthwhile. it is a wonderful opportunity. thank you. [applause] >> item 19. >> madam chair, and 19 has already been called. commissioner chiu: thank you. i appreciate your patience. this is an item of significant importance to an institution within chinatown in my district, which has been in need of

significant and expensive seismic work. i noted to do this, we need some tweaks to the bonds are around transferable rights, and we considered this last week at land use and had passed out a version of legislation unanimously, but over the last few days, a number of representatives of other projects have come to a number of us asking for some consideration of changes, so what i would like to propose at this time, because there's not a complete meeting of the mines, is that we do the following -- that we send the legislation back to land use, but before we do that, we duplicate of your files, both of which will need to be amended based on some of the conversations open -- we duplicate two files. we need to meet some deadlines that are necessary, so at this time, i would like to make a motion to duplicate the file and to amend these two versions of

the file. the first version to have a minor amendment on language that would add information around making payments used to make loans used to finance the preservation and rehabilitation. the second version would be amendments that embody ongoing discussions with some of these owners and developers. if i could make that did look as if an amendment set of motions. -- duplicative and amendments set of motions, and if i could make a motion to send both of these back to land use. the intent is that we will work the issues out over the next few days hopefully and on monday passed out a version that would come back to the board next week so that we do not have to have a hearing here at the board, that we can actually do this business back the land use. >> moved that we continue this to committee, seconded by supervisor mirkarimi. as amended.

>> madam chair, mr. president, that was without objection. commissioner chiu: the two versions will be sent to land use committee. madam clerk, are there any in memoriams for today? today's meeting will be adjourned in memory of the following individuals -- on behalf dufty of behalf, the late sgt margin anthony lugo, the late mr. william koblets. that concludes our business for today. commissioner chiu: colleagues, we are adjourned for today.

[roll called] >> mr. yee? >> present. >> ms. kim? >> here. >> thank you. president kim: if you'd like, please join news the pledge of allegiance. [pledge of allegiance recited] president kim: frank you. first on the agendas is approval of minutes for the meeting of august 24, 2010. may i have a motion?

>> so move. >> second. president kim: are there any corrections? roll call, please. >> thank you. [roll call] president kim: next is a presentation by superintendent garcia. >> yes. thank you. first of all, if you didn't catch it on the news yesterday, i think we have a lot to celebrate this year. not only did we start out the school year getting our great test results and seeing student achievement increase tremendously. but in the a.p. rankings, we learned that our district went up 16 points, the largest gain in the past five years, with schools serving some of the most vulnerable students in our district and actually had the

highest gains in the entire school district. it's really exciting to see that in spite of all the challenges, schools have really focused, the parents, the community, on really taking to heart what we talked about on our strategic plan of really doing something about the achievement gap or the opportunity gap and it's a good indication now for two years in a row that we've demonstrated a lot of success. sometimes there's a bubble and something that occurs and you're not certain why, well now we have good data that shows that we're constantly improving. i want to thank all the teachers, counselors, administrators, everybody in our organization that worked so diligently last year to make sure our students would be successful. for those of you who weren't here last night and it was more crowded than it was this evening. the district should take an additional year to further develop the middle school

placement changes and postpone the decision on the middle school feeder patterns. we went ahead with creating the areas for the elementary schools and we're moving that forward for the board meeting -- what is that, september 28? and that will come forward. for those of you that sometimes are critical that the district isn't listening to your input, a lot of it had to do with listening to all of community partners, everybody out there, parents, schools, and we decided that it would be premature to move the middle school when we have a lot of issues that we still need to resolve. we're waiting to hear about magnet school programs, all these different funding mechanisms that might kick in later on and they'll have an impact on the development of programs in our school district. so we're going to take a little bit more time with that. last, i want to mention that this evening i think it's exciting. you're going to have an opportunity to hear from our assistant superintendents and

our deputy superintendent about the superintendent zones. this is a vision and a plan that this school board, all of administration, all of us have been working on foor a long time and it's exciting to be able to present that this evening so you get an understanding of what's going to be different, where we're going, what are the thoughts behind doing something like this. and we believe that in looking at our data, by focusing in a little bit more and having the support that schools have to have in order to be successful, by developing these two zones in our areas that need the most assistance, because that's where our persistently low-performing schools are at. we need to intervene, we need to do something, and we can't wait any longer. even though they've shown phenomenal growth, i want to give a little shout-out to malcolm x. because malcolm x elementary school, believe it or not, has an a.p.i. score of 800 this

year. applause plause so they've grown by over 200 in two years. [applause] so it can be done. for those who don't believe it can't be done, get out of the way. because we at san francisco unified, we're getting it by the help of everybody. so i'm excited to do this presentation later on. i hope that the community and that the board has lots of questions, because that's what we're here for this evening. thank you very much. president kim: thank you, superintendent. actually, speaking about malcolm x, we want to take a moment, because we recognize often teachers and educators in our district, and we want to take a moment to bring up one of our malcolm x teachers, rebecca evans. [applause] and we do want to recognize you today. in 2009-2010 -- oh, no, you don't have to come all the way

here. i'm sorry. 83% of the students in our classroom scored proficient or above in math, and 72% scored proficient or above in english language arts, and i believe the year before you had very similar scores as well. and we just want to recognize you and also give you a moment to talk a little bit about the work that you and the malcolm x community was able to do to bring up the a.p.i. 108 points, so that we as a board can kind of learn from the best practices that are already going on in this district. >> thank you. definitely. first, i'd like to say good evening to superintendent garcia, president kim, all the other board members, faculty, staff, students, teachers, everyone who's in the crowd right now. it is truly an honor to be up here action accepting this award on behalf of my students. and i say that, because they're the ones that deserve the recognition for all the hard work they put in to achieve

those scores. but not surprisingly, i offer them a pizza and smoothie party, and they took that. so i'll be the one that shares these words with you guys. when dr. kim first asked me to speak, i was a little bit nervous, because i figured i'd be in a room with people who have been educators for far longer than i have. so i won't go and give you guys a laundry list of things i did in my classroom, because i'm sure you've heard of everything. formal assessments, yes. tracking student data, yes. planning lessons with clear objectives -- you know, if we're not doing that, then we have bigger issues. so i'll just go and give a few of my experiences as a classroom teacher. i was fortunate enough to have a really great support team from my team at teacher america, to district mentors to the two principals i worked under who had strong and clear visions for malcolm x academy. we worked really hard -- and i

mean really, really hard on our balance scorecard, making sure that our access an equity and student achievement goals were clear. we internalized our goals and really took them to heart. you know, we heard superintendent garcia and many others speak on many occasions about eliminating the predictive power of demographics, and we knew that what people were saying about our kids, that they were failures, they couldn't learn, they weren't smart, they weren't going to go to college, they weren't going to get good jobs, and we took that to heart. i actually spoke frankly with my second graders about that. one day we were doing a social studies lesson studying map skills, a second-grade standard, and i had a printout of our city and we were locating the bay view hunters neighborhood on the map. we got into this discussion about why people would assume such terrible things about our children, and they, the students themselves, they vowed to be different, and they vowed

that they weren't going to be that demographic. and they really took it to heart to be better. and 7-year-olds, they understood what equity meant. they understood that equity didn't mean giving each child the same thing. they knew that equity meant giving each child what they needed to have in order to succeed in the classroom. so, for example, if china needed a timer on her desk that she flipped every minute and she got to mark a star next to her name if she didn't yell at someone in order to succeed in the classroom, then that's what she got. if i had to listen to justin bieber for five hours as her reward, then that's what i got, and i did that. and it was no problem, because we were investing in our students and investing in our parents and making sure that they got what they needed to succeed. in terms of accountability, we set goals. we set really big goals that were very ambitious, yet attainable and measurable. and we tracked those goals. so in my classroom i had a printout of two shoes brains,

and every time my class achieved mastery, we colored in that section of the bane. that way they got to see what they knew and also what they didn't know. i always reminded them that it's ok not to know something, because if they knew everything, then i wouldn't have a job. so we really worked hard on making sure that we set those goals and we tracked them. we also made sure that we planned lessons. all the teachers at malcolm x worked hard collaboratively to plan lessons that were engaging for our students. we made sure they were culturally and socially relevant. so, for example, my kids weren't getting what summarizing meant. so i set up a glalry walk with teams from the "high school musical" movie, where they went around with clipboards, writing, and going around from scene to scene summarizing. that's how they are learned summarizing. so it was taking the curriculum

that we were given and adapting it to what was relevant to our students. so we read books that was about their cultures and nationalities. we encouraged them to speak in their homes in their native language. i had students that were vietnamese, african, latino, so they embraceed that in the classroom and that made them feel important. and once they feel important, that keeps them engaged. and when they're engaged, they learn and that leads to student achievement. student achievement is ultimately our goal. and just speaking on student achievement a little bit more, we had to set high expectations in order to get our students to achieve. kids really internalize what we say. they remember everything. someone will come up to you and say, miss evans, i remember three weeks ago you said if we brought in this form you'd give us popsicles. so they remember everything, and they