The SFUSD is ridiculous

In an effort to keep this blog movin', I promised myself that I would post something every day before leaving work for as long as possible. Now it's getting hard. I can't get my camera to download pictures, so I have no easy way out. I think I'm going to have to write about something.

That something is going to be the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and their ridiculous enrollment policies. I have recently been semi-involved in applications for elementary school (or at least I've been an active observer). In other places, public school is public school. That means there's a school in your neighborhood, your parents at some point roll into the office and tell the school you need to go there, and you go. It's close, it's convenient, if the public schools are bad your parents start trying to figure out a private school option, but you've always got the back up of the school down the street.

In San Francisco, it is nowhere near that easy. They've got this whole system set up to promote economic diversity in each school. That means you can't just send your kid to the school down the street. You fill out an application with a bunch of personal information and a list of your top seven choices of any of the public schools in the city. Your kid has only an 80% chance of actually getting admitted to one of those seven schools. There is a waitlist for each school and a second round. Keep in mind your neighborhood school might be one of those that are really poor quality.

Essentially, they're trying to prevent having all the rich kids going to one school. They don't want the schools in the Marina to have a better quality of education, or more funding (there is a lot of fund-raising through parents and communities in the public schools here) than the schools in the Mission. That's an admirable goal, but I don't think they've seriously thought about the repercussions of this system. It means that a parent who lives in the Noe Valley and works downtown could easily have to somehow get their kid all the way to a school in the outer Sunset before heading into the office. That could easily add an hour to your morning commute, and you'd never be leaving the city. It also means they have to figure out someway to get their kid home at 3 pm.

I remember that I started coming home from school on my own in middle school, but a lot of the kids I went to school with took the school buses home. This system makes that overly difficult as well, because it's one thing to have a ten-year-old walk home or talk a school bus alone, but it's an entirely different thing to expect them to get from Cole Valley to Potrero Hill unsupervised.

I'm pretty sure that this whole system is why I see tons of kids under five in the city, but rarely see kids that are older. Unless you get lucky and get accepted to a decent school near your place, the system becomes unworkable since it's pretty much impossible to live in the city and support kids without two working parents.

And no, the fact that I'm thinking about kindergartens does not make me old. I'm going to go out and rage tonight just to prove it. And when I say "rage" I mean drink a glass of wine, watch a DVD, and fall asleep on the couch at 10:30.