What SFUSD needs: foreign language, child care, college counseling

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Here are three things SFUSD and the city of San Francisco need to work on together.

•   Increasing language immersion programs and non-immersion foreign language until all the demand is met. This is addressed to SFUSD.

 The popular blog TheSFKFiles provided an unprecedented view of the kindergarten enrollment process this year from the applicants’ perspective. It’s evident that when SFUSD opens a language immersion program, in any school (it could be in a dangerous ghetto, on a toxic waste dump – well, maybe that’s going a bit far, but only a bit), it immediately fills up. (Leonard Flynn Elementary, pictured, is a recent example.). Immersion parents attest that that’s one thing SFUSD does particularly well.

 One caveat: This would undoubtedly mean running some immersion programs without either the two-way or the 33-33-33 model. Two-way means 50% native English speakers and 50% native speakers of the “target language”; 33-33-33 includes those and 1/3 bilingual students. Is there an acceptable model without those percentages? I don’t know, but there needs to be one.

 If there were SFUSD schools with immersion programs in the Pacific Heights-Cow Hollow-Laurel Heights area, the private schools would be growing cobweks, whimpering for families to come back. Low-income students would benefit too from foreign language instruction, needless to say.

 Parents would also like to see lots and lots of regular foreign-language classes at all levels (currently they’re almost all in high schools only) outside immersion programs.

•  Providing assured wraparound childcare, stress-free and legwork-free, at all schools.

 This is really a city function, not SFUSD (as child care is a community need, not a function of educators), but the city and the district need to work together to fix it.

 Currently, here’s the situation: At every school you look at, you have to separately investigate the child care. It’s a patchwork – different programs at every school. And there’s no guarantee of getting your child into the program – though realistically, families eventually manage to work that out. But I know families who have initially been told there is no child care available to them for any price.

So families look at schools and struggle through the assignment process, and they still have to do the legwork and the applications for child care. Really, really bad set up. (With private schools, there's simply child care -- for a price, of course.) The setup in San Francisco schools needs to be overhauled so the family just gets access to child care, onsite or very convenient, on a sliding scale. This is an area that pushes families into private school -- including lower-income families who can still afford low-cost parochial schools.

•  Providing top-quality, thorough college counseling to every student at every SFUSD high school.

 This is something that screams for private funders. (S.F. Ed Fund?) Currently, every SFUSD high school has its own college counseling setup, and they vary across the board. Lowell’s Vicci Center is its college resource, and it’s staffed by parent volunteers. Balboa has an excellent setup funded partly by the state Bar Association. For the benefit of all our students, we need to get equal, excellent college counseling into every high school.