interesting point was that if you see in the two simulations that show the feeder preference, the feeder tiebreaker first and the feeder tiebreaker second with c-tip, the results are exactly the same. now, the more i thought about this today, the more it seems to me is that what that tells us is that this isn't going to tell us anything because people were not actually making choices based on what might be the feeders. so that makes it difficult, i have to say. this was -- but, from my point of view, and i want to thank the p.p.s., ruth and others who were there last night and this evening for their careful ongoing, not only the outreach that they coordinated with the p.a.c. and for us, but also to keep at this throughout this whole process. i mean the whole time, but i particularly mean these last several weeks where we're trying to struggle with this and we've

had a number of meetings and people are putting different ideas forward and the fact that these people who have been working to coordinate outreach with the community and give us information have kept on coming to the meetings, participating in debate with us and making suggestions, i think, has made this a much better process. so since this was an informational item only, there was no action taken by the committee and therefore no recommendation and i think that's adequate report on what happened last night. commissioner mendoza: thank you. a need a reading of the resolution by ms. o'keefe. >> go ahead and read it and i'll make my comments. >> can i ask, are you going to do after you read the resolution some shortened form of the presentation? what i didn't do was to report on the changes that were made from when this proposal was made before to now, so you're going to do that?

>> if we do that, it would be very brief. >> good evening, commissioners, o'keefe, special assistant to the superintendent. subject 115-24 sp 1, revisions to board policy p5101 student assignment. requested action, that the board of education of the san francisco unified school district adopt the revisions outlined in the attached student assignment for policy p5101 as amended herein not withstanding any provisions in p5101 to the contrary, the revisions to p5101 shall be effective immediately. would you like me to read the background in also or the requested action? commissioner mendoza: i don't think we need to do the whole thing. thank you. no. superintendent garcia?

superintendent garcia: first, i do really want to thank the p.a.c. and p.p.s. for being such great partners. this has been an extremely long journey for all of us to take but we're glad you took it with us. we may have a few items where we disagree but i think the discussion over the last two years has been a really rich and rewarding discussion that has educated all of us, i think, staff, parents, the community, we've learned a lot through this process and i think just from the very beginning when we started this long journey on student assignment, we kind of knew that whatever system we did, the system itself is not what's going to create a quality middle schools. the student assignment system needs to be aligned to support that ultimate goal, but in itself would not do that, so that's something we're going to need to do. our proposal for the k-8 feeder addresses the board student assignment policy goals. it will help us strategically and efficiently use limited

resources to create quality middle schools and it provides families with a degree of predictability regarding where their children will attend. i think it also helps build community and build neighborhoods and where people know and get to know each other and work together to go together to a different school. between 2012 and 2016, we're proposing a choice process with siblings as the first tiebreaker, then feeder school and then c-tip 1. the choice process will change in 2017. students will receive an offer to their feeder middle school before the choice process even begins. we're not asking the board to make a choice between equity and feeders. we believe that placing the middle school feeder tiebreaker above c-tip 1 supports the board's goals and will help change enrollment patterns through a choice process. c-tip 1 will continue as a

strong preference in assignment and staff will monitor how it works and will bring information back to the board on an ongoing basis. additionally, i've asked deputy superintendent richard garansa to make a few comments. >> thank you, superintendent garcia, and thank you, president mendoza. as the superintendent has mentioned in his remarks, the k-8 feeder pattern and k-8 feeders will support building quality middle schools. our team is very, very excited to continue the development of the strategic plan to improve all of our middle schools. if we have k-8 feeders, we can begin to engage the larger k-8 school communities, including gathering input to support student learning and building stronger communities. to our freands in p.a.c. and p.p.s., this is the process we could not have undertaken without you and while we may disagree on some aspects of the recommendation, i think we are

absolutely unified in our desire to see quality middle schools and i will say to you that you will not only see the detailed plan for what quality middle schools will look like, you will be part of the plan development. so we're very excited about embarking on this next stage of the strategic development of what those plans will look like for our middle school communities. commissioner mendoza: thank you. so, i have three speakers speaking on this item. pardon me? shhhhh. two of whom i actually don't know if they're speaking on the middle school feeder piece but it says student assignment. so patricia mcfadden, eileen kenn and monica el amin. if you're speaking on the middle school feeder plan, come on up.

you have two minutes. thank you. >> my name is patricia mcfadden, a parent of mckinley elementary. i don't know if you're actually considering changing the feeder map but that's what my main comment is on. and i support the feeder program. i like the ideas behind it, i just don't think the design is very good. i understand you had to meet many requirements and demands and you worked very hard for that and i know p.p.s. and p.a.c. assisted with that. i still was, as a parent, very disappointed in the missed opportunities and the favoritism in the middle school feeder map. the feeder system, to me, is extremely biased toward the high test score schools and while you may spare the most vocal parents from coming here, you do a disservice to those who tend not to have a voice by doing that. i don't put a blind faith in test scores.

it's just one of the measures of a school, but it is one way of measuring some of the intangibles like parent involvement, a stable classroom environment and one of your metrics that you put weight in. one of the things the feeder map has done is it's chosen to group the high test score schools together even when there are clearly closer schools that would greatly benefit from having a better mixture of test scores at that school. i feel you missed a great opportunity to create a better balance where every middle school was fed by a balance of test score schools so that every middle school had a chance to excel. ideally every middle valid two e schools above or below 800 so the rising tide lifts all boats. in the very least, i don't think any school should have more than three schools over 875 but that's what's done from prisidio and geninny, i guess, minimally,

because it impacts my child, i would ask that you look at taking graduaten and clarnden and moving them to everett and lick to create a better mix and allowing those other schools to benefit from being with presidio so i ask that you consider revising the map on that basis. commissioner mendoza: thank you. so if there's no other speakers on this item, comments from the -- did you have a speaker card, ma'am? >> yes, i'm monica el amin. i'm coming up here to let you than there's probably a mistake at that card because i was trying to address a student assignment, school assignment issue. can i address that right now? commissioner mendoza: is this a personal student assignment issue or speaking to -- >> yes, it's a personal issue. commissioner mendoza: so it's not speaking to what we're go b to vote on? >> no, it's a personal issue.

commissioner mendoza: i need you to speak on regular public comment. thanks for letting me know. i appreciate that. eileen, are you here? o.k., so you guys are both on the -- thank you. comments from the board? commissioner murase? commissioner murase: i thank p.p.s. and p.a.c. for working on this issue and the staff for the many hours that were put into this and i received exhaustil mail on this issue from both sides of the issue. i want to ask someone to explain c-tip. i'm familiar with it but for those listening, we throw around that acronym a lot and it's important for families to understand what c-tip is. >> thank you, commissioner. so c-tip is actually an acronym that stands for census track integration preference and what it is, there are geographic

areas of the city that have the lowest average test scores and they were determined by looking at multiple years of english language arts,c.s.t., california standardized tests, throughout the entire city and the city was then, because it's an average, you come up with averages so the city using those averages, there's five -- they're quintiles. the ranges were divided into quintiles and the lowest quintile is the area of the city with the lowest average test scores and we call that ctip. in our literature, we moved away from the ctip because as you mentioned it's hard to understand. what it is is basically the areas of the city with the lowest average test scores historically and we hope that will change. commissioner mendoza: thank you. commissioner norton? commissioner norton: so, i have

very mixed feelings in general about the feeder pattern. i am going to support the superintendent's recommendation tonight, but i also really feel that it is essential that we lay out a plan for what we are going to do for all our middle schools that are not offering equality in program because we know as we've been looking at this over the last few months and we've known for a long time that not all of our schools are offering the best program and as robust a program as they should for i think it is really -- i think a lot of what i have heard from parents who are opposed to this program is how are you going to make the school that my child will feed into a quality middle

school and i don't think that we have laid that out yet. we have talked a lot about the -- i know staff has created a tool and done some walkthroughs and evaluations of here are the programs available at this school and here are some programs that need to be -- whatever, fixed or improved or whatever. i think we need to be a little bit more transparent about that. i think we really need to lay out in terms of a plan saying here's what we know about the following schools and here is what we're going to do to fix that. so i would like to ask the superintendent if you could within a reasonable time frame bring back to the board here is our planning how we're going to work on some of these schools that are lower achieving, that parents are not sure they want to choose to put their children into. >> thank you.

commissioner nguyen? >> i want to commend them for doing this matrix of the programs at the middle schools. it is a curriculum committee, particularly it is titled what parents look for in the -- and so the questions asked are this i think is one thing we should really commend about this. not necessarily the questions we usually ask. so i appreciate that and their willingness to share that with us and have us work with the district on making that more robust. i do have to say that i was very impressed by this. truthfully the schools do not look as different as people think they are when you look at what is available at them. i'm asking all the parents and we have posted this on our website. is that correct? people should look at it. it will help us to get a little more reality and prudges in

terms of people's attitudes in schools. i wanted to say that i actually am -- i really like the three recommendations made this evening by the pack and p.p.s. or whoever was making -- articulated -- i am particularly interested in changing order of the -- of the equity mechanism. i think a good -- a good title. i don't think that we have support on the board to do that, obviously, but i do want to say that i think that we should consider that and that we should also think a lot about the second recommendation that they made about clearly articulating a mechanism for assessing the progress toward the goals that we have. and do want to say that i have to say that i think that the

goal of -- what is articulated isn't really a goal but what it says in the policy we passed last year that we sort of are supportive of the k-8 model and want to have virtual k-8's i actually am very conflicted about that. and as i said last night and as i said before, i think that we don't know very much yet about the -- we also made a lot of other prudgetses. predictability was the most important thing to parentsened that appears not to be true on the interim results we have on the process this year.

i am -- totally understand and am supportive of not making any changes yet because we would need to give it a few years to work but preliminary evidence tells us that predictability was not really that important compared to other factors for parents using our choice system. therefore, and it is on that presumption, we presumed predictability. i think that presumption upon presumption has left us with a weak foundation for some of the policies that we are proposing to put in place. i also wanted to say, and nobody did talk about the changes that were made in the proposal from when it was first introduced to now. i am more inclined to be supportive of this proposal though i would have liked to

change those priorities because the staff responded to the request to remove the middle school attendance areas, which i still don't understand where they came from in the first place. they just kind of popped up in and luckily they popped back down. because i think that that is one of the things that did lock in some of the segregating influenced that we saw. so for me that is a major change. that's a very important change that makes me more inclined to be supportive of this. so i still have huge doubts about this and i believe that for our -- as i said last night, i'll just repeat this very quickly, you know, if you -- because it is the only data that we have, if you look at the simulation and see that there is no difference, then i think that we should put the -- that the main purpose of the order in which we put these two

tiebreakers is philosophical. it tells -- it sends a message about what we think is more important. i would like to put equity at the top of that list. it could be because that's what i think is more important. but of course over time, this may change. we may see different results and if we do, then i want us to be able to and i want to put on the record here that we should very seriously, if we are unwilling to change the order of those tiebreakers before we pass this, it is something we ought to look at every year and consider changing. if we begin to see that there -- that unlike and i want to also appreciate the -- some analysis that was between yesterday and today for us that makes this look to me like the c-tip preference seems to be working. so there does seem to be a more equitable access for disadvantaged kids and kids who

have less opportunity in elementary school this year for middle school and that's what i want. therefore i'm at the moment thinking well, the c tip, it worked the way they wanted it to and if that is true, i don't know why we don't want to make it our highest priority. >> thank you. >> again, like everybody else, i want to thank all the individuals out there that participated in this process in the last two years. including p.p.s. and a staff that has been willing to stick it out this far and having all this discussion. in fact, we didn't pass this piece of our enrollment process last year was a response to the public in saying slow down. think about it more. and we have developed something that looks quite different from

a year ago. i'm actually pretty proud of our staff's effort in presenting something that really does look different from -- what we would have accepted last year. this is much better than last year's. i think one of the things that we're walking into is that we would be voting on something that is going to be new to us in how we're going to do things and as most of us know, any time you try something new, you could process that -- that new thing to death and try to get a totally correct -- without knowing all the factors. when you do that, you realize a year later you forget certain things or certain things didn't come up. i'm willing to take that risk. because we're not going to continue doing what we're doing

at the present. and what really helped me in terms of putting full support behind this particular recommendation is the analysis that was put forth to us two meetings ago at the ad hoc committee on may 31, i believe, the -- the analysis of the presidio school in showing that if the incoming sixth grader were following this process as a feeder school, it would show where they were coming from, the ethnicity and so forth. it showed a lot more diversity than i expected so that helped me a lot in terms of wanting to sort this -- and i concur with my colleagues that we really need to achieve constant evaluation on what's going on with this because as i said, we

will need to -- some of these things and look at it and bring it back before the board in terms of information and we're going to have real analysis in the year with real numbers so that is going to help us a lot. and the other factor is that we have to realize that we're making some assumptions about general -- the language programs and so forth. we're making aassumptions in -- in pretty much assuming that most of the language that we have it is going to remain constant and we may expand a little bit -- a little bit but there is a -- there is a real possibility that two or three years from now, the expansion that we had anticipated for language programs, for instance, was inadequate. and that is going to be shown with the demand patterns of -- at the elementary school level

of kindergarten. we continue to see the big demand that we're seeing now, we will probably have to discuss where are we going to place these new programs and what does that mean for the middle schools that they are feeding into with these elementary schools. that is something again that we don't have the answers for those things but we need to ask those questions and seek the answers. so that's what i want to say is thank you very much, staff, and the public in enduring this whole process. >> thank you. commissioner furyk? commissioner furyk: one thing that i have learned being on this board and doing this assignment, there are always people who disagree with you and are not happy. it sparked a petition to put something on the ballot against what we agreed on in our original student assignment program.

you can't please everybody. it is a very heated issue, i think, but i think that this recommendation actually we haven't tried this. and i've always said choice by the very design is ineck table -- inequitable. so we have choice in elementary school and we have choice in high school and we are just now putting in a little bit of more direction into our middle school. after having three children that attended middle school that went from one school to the next, i think a feeder pattern really isn't a virtual -- but what it is is it is a support system. every feared system that goes into sixth grade and is being funneled into a school with over 1,000 students or so and changing, starts at 4-feet and

comes out 5'6" it is a time of transition for them. it will help with instruction between the elementary schools and middle schools but i think the reason i'm most in favor of it is that the process that we had before isn't getting it through our strategic playing goals. so we're willing to try this. i just want folks remember that -- that this isn't really kicking into full force and also the c-chip 1. so those are not constant. but if we keep the middle school as the second it is just a

tiebreaker that i think actually that remains constant. as i said, i think the c-chip one will change. after looking at the results of where people are living, who is living there now, i think we're going to see some changes now. anyway, i think this is a really good effort on staff. i know there is a lot of considerations because i even went to orla about why is this school going there and there and there was always a very logical well thought-out reason why. and so -- and i also want to thank pac and p.p.s. for their work too. i also wants to thank all the parent whors engaged in this process. if i could say one thing to all the parents there, keep us out there. keep us accountable to our quality middle school program. it pretty much looks similar,

our middle schools. i'm just going to tell you i've been out to them and they are not similar. we have a lot of work to do. i hope that this board will have the fortitude to make those types of changes and our administration superintendent and deputy superintendents and then parents also. so we are building something for our children to be prepared for 21st century and push back on us and help us build it better. thanks. >> thank you. so i'll share just a few thoughts of my own. there are three of us that are actually on the board who currently still have kids in the public schools so you know rpgs this is really trying conversation for us across the board. not only with our own personal experiences but as we have been hearing for the last several months now from families both personally and through email. i know that we have some concerns around timing so i'm actually really pleased that we

were able to get through this in a reasonable a. of time after having kind of put the brakes on it and had to stop and think more clearly about the value and importance of the work that we are doing here. i think that there is going to be room to grow and to learn as we start to really analyze the results of this last round of student assignments. student assignments. and then with regards to c-chip over feeder, i actually struggled with this for a little while also. i think the clarity came to me the last several hours because there is a couple of things that i think we're trying to accomplish. so orla said to us last night that really the entry points for many of our students who can take advantage of the c tip is at the elementary school level.