Kids may be the losers when improvisation hijacks budgeting process

Maybe it’s politics as usual, but San Francisco's city budget includes a new windfall of money for children’s programs, and a confused and inconsistent process for allocating it means that the money may well not go where it’s needed most. The Citizens Advisory Committee to the Department of Children, Youth and their Families, which makes recommendations on the Children’s Fund budget, seems to agree strongly with that point.

During the budgeting process, the Mayor’s Office swooped in at the last minute with proposals that had not been subjected to the sunshine and scrutiny that are supposed to be part of the process. It’s as if they cut the line when everyone else had patiently followed the rules and waited their turn. It’s not that those proposals had never been heard of at all, but they had not been discussed as part of this specific process.

That means the public never got information about all the various projects proposed for funding, which were discussed at scattered meetings, some of them obscure and poorly noticed. The projects were never weighed against each other; decisionmakers were never able to look at them all together and decide which would most benefit the community’s youth.

I have a horse in this race, because some months ago I helped write two proposals for funding for school cafeteria enhancements. (I did this as a volunteer, part of my service as a parent member of SFUSD’s Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee.) One was for salad bars in more SFUSD school cafeterias to add to the 25 existing ones, which overall have been popular and successful and, naturally, promote healthier eating. The other was for a debit-card system in school cafeterias, which would eliminate cash handling. That has several benefits, a key one being to reduce the stigma for low-income students who get subsidized lunches rather than paying cash.

It’s complicated, but those two proposals were for funding from Prop. H, a pot of city money approved by voters to be provided to the schools. SFUSD Superintendent Carlos Garcia recommended funding the salad bar and the debit card proposals – but then the discretionary money that could have funded them was frozen because the state budget crisis caused a local school budget crisis. The money was set aside to save staff positions in schools, if needed.

But meanwhile, elsewhere in the workings of city government, decisionmakers were discussing how to use an unanticipated windfall of $3,250,000 in Children’s Fund money. Below are the proposals for using that money that came from the Mayor’s Office without being part of the public sunshine process. I’m not saying they’re not worthy proposals. I’m saying they should have been available for public scrutiny as part of this process all along, and decisionmakers should have been able to weigh them against all the other proposals.

• $50,000: Permanent Campaign – Social marketing campaign to raise public awareness of and support for public schools.
• $100,000: Science and Technology K-8 school – Planning resources for program development of a new magnet school in Mission Bay.
• $250,000: San Francisco Promise – Expansion of a college track program guaranteeing admittance for all SFUSD students who meet San Francisco State University entrance requirements.
• $70,000: Mandarin Immersion – Expansion of a collaborative to increase availability of Mandarin and other language immersion programs throughout SFUSD.
• $60,000: Community Service – Infrastructure to link public school students to community service.

I attended a discussion of these items by Mayor’s Office staff at a July 2 meeting of the Children’s Fund Citizens Advisory Committee. To me, that further emphasized why proposals need public airing and need to have been presented all along the way alongside all the other proposals.

For example: The new science and technology school is being proposed just as a Grand Jury report is urging the district board to close schools. As I’ve posted, that Grand Jury report has many problems, but better-informed insiders also see the likely need to close schools in a district with dropping enrollment. All that emphasizes the need for public discussion of a proposed new school – even of a $100,000 initial planning expenditure that gets priority over other proposals. As others have said: $100,000 here, $100,000 there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

The presentation at yesterday’s meeting seemed unclear about whether the new school would actually be in Mission Bay or the low-income southeastern part of the city; whether it was envisioned as serving its neighborhood or as a magnet specialty school; whether it was intended to serve middle-class residents of the new Mission Bay development or low-income students from other neighborhoods. Someone wondered whether the developers might fund the planning. (The written materials, by the way, describe this proposal as a high school, but staffers say that’s an error and it would be a K-8.)

The Mandarin immersion item raised questions too, because it’s about promoting language immersion programs rather than actually providing any new seats in Mandarin immersion programs. Reportedly, every language immersion kindergarten in SFUSD is full for next fall and has wait lists, so in that sense they don’t really need promoting. I would add to the discussion the question of expanding non-immersion foreign language programs, which are currently hard to find in SFUSD K-8s. Again, there’s a lot that needs to be discussed, even if the item is “only” $70,000.

Also under discussion is what the city will provide to SFUSD and count against its Prop. H obligation. It was stated at yesterday’s meeting that the five above items wouldn’t be counted as Prop. H contributions, but written materials state that some of them in fact will.

Meanwhile, the salad bar proposal dropped off the table some time ago, when Sup. Garcia froze the Prop. H request process to reserve that money to save school staff positions. I’ve wondered if the mayor himself would have found the salad bars as worthy as some of those other items, had he known about that proposal.

There was some discussion, in confused terms, of whether and how the city might end up funding the cafeteria debit-card system.

In any case, I know it sounds boring and bureaucratic to complain about process, but it seriously is a problem here. A Mayor’s Office spokesman at yesterday’s meeting was reasonably apologetic and promised to do better next time, but they still need to hear that this process did a disservice to San Francisco’s citizens and its children.



 

Topics: children's programs , funding