i get more confused and less sure of how i feel about the whole thing. i appreciate the recommendation based on what you heard that you are saying do not go with feeders right now. but i do not think it is realistic to say the conversation about quality middle schools can be completely dissociated from the conversation about student assignment. i would love to start talking about student assignment, frankly. i think they are interrelated to some degree. i heard some and a common to appear tonight say, "why can't you focus on making the schools could -- good?" part of this is a numbers game. part of having the things we all want for our children is that

schools have to have ample enrollment to support those things. until we can figure out -- a poll strategy is great to a point, but you cannot have that strategy until you have the programs. you can't have the programs until you have the kids. i am more confused than when i started talking, actually. [laughter] i feel like we're going -- i think we are going in a good direction. i don't think we're there yet. i think that if i had to make a decision tonight i would say -- i would not be ready to make a definitive decree about fetor patterns for the coming year. you could do some proof of context for the families who do

not believe that we can pull this off. that is an idea, facing this in over a long time. really doing some demonstration projects for some proof of concept, to show we are serious. the trust issue is a big one here. if families don't believe we are moving in the right direction, they are not want to take the leap of faith we need them to take to fill the enrollment in order to build the program. that is kind of where i am. vice president yee: i am thinking. i really want to thank pps and

pac for what you had to go through. some people are so passionate about their opinions that they forget you are not really part of the school district, officially. they were yelling at them. but the fact is we are moving in a direction, or could be moving in a direction, where we are asking for changes. the e-mails that i have been getting -- they are not 100% one way or another. there is a mixture of people responding to the theater system.

usually, people right e-mails -- write e-mails when they want somebody -- one something rather than when they are agreeing with somebody. compliments are hard to come by. i agree with the commissioner and that through the six or seven years i have been on the school board one of the things many people have said is they want predictability. in fact, we started this whole discussion about the enrollment process and a feeder pattern as a way to provide some predictability. most of us thought that could be a good idea to explore. i think that is where it came from. it was not a question about diversity and a "and everything else, but the predictability peace -- about diversity and

equality and everything else, but the predictability piece was the essential one. where it will change things. six months prior to last year, we return to move into a new process for kindergarten -- we were trying to move into a new process for candor and. if you only heard the people that came here, and most of the people that came here said we want neighborhood schools -- is almost like 90% of the people who came said, "i want

neighborhood schools. " we did not come up with a process where it was a neighborhood schools, but we moved closer in that direction by putting that in as a factor, drawing attendance areas. so you think if we did that that 90% of the people would choose the schools that are closest to their homes in their first or second choices. even though we did a little more preference, it was the same results in terms of who was choosing neighborhood schools. it was 20%. >> that's right. vice president yee: the people in rolling in kindergarten decided there were not going to neighborhood schools. the point here is that it is really hard for us to sit here and get a real good gauge of

what is going on, because the people that come are certainly expressing what they want, but there is always that underlining bunch of people that i am not too sure what they want. the other thing i wanted to say is that i am inclined to at least try this, mainly because i have seen from my history in the school district as a parent, and even prior to being a parent -- if you look at the schools, i have told the story quite a few times. when my older daughter first decided -- when i decided shoe is going to a program, -- whe

was going to a program, they were begging for anybody to show up in the classroom. i found out later, when we were accepted, that the school was not even fall. it was probably two-thirds full. two years back, it was only half full. what happened? by the time my other daughter joined, three years later, people were fighting to get into that school. something changed about the school. i think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the program drew a certain kind of families that could provide the resources to turn around. all of a sudden, it became popular. that has happened over and over again with high schools in particular. i went to gallet, so to me it

was fine. if years back, before it got turned around, there were -- there was a strong principal who went in to turn it around. she did not do it by herself. i sought a bunch of parents that were reluctant and were assigned there. in fact, one of my friends, when it was running -- i said, "check out what has happened in the last year or so." she was so mad. "how dare you." a few years after that, it became the most popular high school in terms of enrollment. i think that got turned around. lincoln got turned around. balboa got turned around. a lot of times, we have this fear of going into a situation.

it does not have to be a large group of parents. it can be just a few. but it helps when you have a bunch of parents going in and saying, "we are going to raise the bar." i do not know if that is when to convince everybody, but that is my feeling as a parent or as anybody. a few of us can do things. i don't look at the situation where it is right now, in terms of a middle school. if we need to change, what can we do to change it as parents? as much as staff is moving in a direction to improve the quality, they can do it by themselves. they are going to do all they can. we are when to push like crazy.

i have more confidence when there are a bunch of parents getting behind with that are trying to do. with that combination, i think we can win. here is my question. antennas perio -- in this period of 2012 to 2016, we are not necessarily saying you have to go to a school with the feeder pattern. we do give a priority. so what happens? i am not trying to be funny or anything. let us say that most of the people who came today were really representative of all of san francisco. to me, it means that most of you would not want to go to that peter school that you are --

feeder school you are assigned to. what happens then? answer that, because i think that would help meet a lot. >> thank you. i think as you pointed out, 2012 to 2016 is actually a full choice system that has a tie breaker designed to encourage and support the creation of feeder patterns that would get fully implemented in 2016. it provides an opportunity for middle school communities and parents to start working together and to create robust enrollment rather than compelling parents to do something to do not want to do. we believe this will help us

creek "middle schools without taking away the choice that parents have been strong said they want. even tonight, we are calling for predictability. vice president yee: my take is this. if people are not going to choose this, we will scrap this. that is how i feel. right now, five years, you are saying, giving people the chance to vote with their feet, or something. if it does not work -- we may not need to wait five years.

we may find in one or two years that we want to just do this. i am in favor to allow for experimentation. we cannot keep doing the same things. it just does not work. i am willing to give some support to see what happens. chairperson wynns: commissioner mendoza has not decided if she wants to fight this this evening. i have some things i would like to say. one, i want to say that the issue of predictability, the call for more predictability, is one of the things that interest me to support both the attendance area preference we have in elementary school, and the feeder policy.

but i do want to point out that people are not choosing their area schools anymore than we did before, when they had little or no preference for those schools. i am not convinced that are not going to change their behavior. but it is very clear they did not immediately change their behavior. the same percentage of people did. i have not seen enough data to see if there were different people that are choosing than before. is everybody choosing their neighborhood schools? i particularly want to urge us not to put in a feeder

preference, even as a tiebreaker, that includes your middle school attendance area at all, until and at -- until and unless at least a majority of the people are choosing attendance-area schools as an elementary school. what we said about the middle school feeder pattern concept was that it would be about sustaining a school community. that might not be true if you are saying whatever school you have chosen, we are going to give a preference to people who live near this middle school to go there, not the people who are your school community from elementary school. i don't understand why the middle school attendance area is in here, particularly since this theoretically was made,

this recommendation was developed, after we saw the behavior in people in the current year which did not show many people were choosing that. i do not want to change the policy. i want to see what happens. i want to cut see if that will change. i am hoping that. i do not think we should switch back and forth. that is the first thing. second, we have not really talked about language pathways very much this evening. cristina has been sipping her this whole time, but we have not talked about it much. but appreciative commissioner -- i appreciated commissioner

murase talking about our language students. in the previous system, they got a programmatic preference. i was not always a big fan of that. i think some of those programs were placed at certain middle schools in order to give people a free pass into certain schools. "we'll not talk about is a real issue, the elected issue. it really is the resources to do that. i would prefer that we -- i think this is something we have an obligation to do before we tell people, "that is the middle school you are going to because you are in this language pathway. what the middle school immersion program might look like -- we do not have the money to make it what we think is an

actual program. if you choose that, you are not want to get any elective. that is one of the reasons people do not go to a them now. the have to give up one of the main reasons the light metals co. that is having more department position, more options, more opportunities. i actually think we really need to work on developing some of those middle school pathways, giving people programmatic preference as part of our quality middle school development. i would like to see if people really mean it when they say that is their highest priority. it would address the critical mass of students issue. the last thing i want to say is

this. i do want to reiterate that one of my problems with this is that this is not a desegregated plan. this, as far as i am concerned, is a plan for freezing the segregated west side. i don't want to do that. i want us to be even more courageous, if we could. i was the one who wanted us to just use race. if we adopt any plan, in the interim plan that has us on the road towards some kind of peter pattern, i would ask that we not have a date for this third part, for the implementation of the actual figure plan, and here is one of the main reasons. i don't want us to do that until

we have willie brown online, and until we have an elementary school in mission bay, the east side of town is going to look different. if we support a feeder pattern that ignores that, even more than freezing the segregated reality on the west side, -- we will be telling people that we think what it is quick to look like in five years, when we know it will look significantly better. -- significantly different. those are my thoughts. >> it is not that -- president

mendoza: it is not that i don't want to participate. this is a very complicated process, a conversation we have over and over again. for me personally, it is sort of a trick. our family, just because of our own personal choice, did the thing everyone is complaining they don't want to do. i have a hard time hearing we do not want to go to the school for whatever reason. i get that. we make choices to go to fairmont before it became fairmont, or james lick. these are schools everyone was for a skeptical about. it is one of the things we are all afraid of. we all have personal connections to any school we attend. we have all heard personal stories about why schools should

be set up the way they are. our job is to really think about is what we said we needed to do, which is desegregate our schools. make them quality schools. insure that kids have six places to go and are engaged. these are all things we need to take into consideration as we are doing what we need to do. having said that, i think it is really difficult to agree to implement a plan without having everything in place. we have done that before. we have gotten ourselves in a little bit of -- we have had some challenges around that. i will be the first to say that even as we implemented the immersion program -- as a regular parent, a push. as a board member, i pushed. but not everything in our immersion programs are what they

should be. but we continue to send kids to those schools. now part of our feeder program is encompassed around what we think our immersion plan needs. i know you are getting there and it is starting to really gel. i think the way we do program placement of the years has been haphazard. we talk about the west side. people are traveling all over the school -- over the city to get to programs. mainly, they want to live near the elementary school that are sending their kids. it is not quite there. i think we still have work to do.

i don't want to lose the momentum we have and that you have done for us in gathering information. we are endeavoring data and making sure our schools are becoming quality schools. but i think there is a desire, to mature there is more there before we make solid decisions. people are jumping ship to go to schools where they know the middle school is going to be a middle school they want to go to. what are those unintended consequences of our schools where the population has been full all these years and now parents are bailing so they are in the right elementary school to get into the right middle school? we have to be mindful about what happens on that and to. now you know why i have been

sitting quietly. there is just so much. and i don't know what to do with this, quite frankly, because it really is a big decision that we are going to make. it is going to be long term. it is not that we can't change our minds later, but i think we want to come up with a plan we can all live with, based on having a solid foundation. and i want to work more around the solid foundation than i do around sending kids to schools that are quick to be close to where they want to be. once again, the data does not show that they want to be close to where they live. that is where i am sitting right now. i think we are on the right path. i think our strategic plan speaks to where we want to go and what we want to do. as long as we stay focused on that, we will get there. this is a hard puzzle to put together. there are just too many elements that i think are still missing

before i can be released here with what i think is the right thing to do. thank you. chairperson wynns: i will finish by thinking everybody for coming. there is not enough thanks for the pac and pps. we will keep saying that every time you see us, and forever, i hope. i appreciate that. also, i want to just recognize -- i just don't want genie to think we are ignoring everything you said to us. i think it is a lot to digest. i am sure the rest of the board will be thinking seriously about that. i am sure we will have many more conversations about the work you are doing. i want to thank everybody.

>> thank you. just to make sure we are clear, one of our intense this evening is to get direction from the board. -- one of our intents this evening is to get direction from the board. while we appreciate the community input, the nuts and bolts will be done by staff. we need to know and be very confident that the direction of the board is to continue to move forward to put some meat on the bone in terms of what equality middle school will look like, the specific plans for equality middle school, and to explore, perhaps, a different alignment of feeder patterns. is that what i am hearing? the third thing i am hearing, which i may not be hearing, the

third thing that i think i am hearing is that we should continue along the same path that we are going and exploring, with further recommendations to the board. >> our recommendation represented this evening -- it is what it is. i would suggest that in the meantime if the board has suggestions, that the communicate them to orla. otherwise, we will be in the same place and we come back the next meeting. i really think that is important. the only thing i want to remind the board is that one of the reasons why we talk about the programs, the different programs being a part of this, was that if you look at our strategic plan, and i don't have to remind the board -- one of the