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School Board Commissioner Eddie Chin is sympathetic to Citizens for School Reform’s idea, but is pessimistic about the intent of the charter amendment. File photo.
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Charter Amendment Proposes District Elections for School Board
By Ethen Lieser
AsianWeek Staff Writer
If you can’t do the job right, it’s time for someone else to step in. That’s the attitude of several irate parents of the group Citizens for School Reform who have proposed a charter amendment that would implement district elections and term limits for San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) board members.
Currently, members of the Board of Education have four-year terms but no limit on terms. The proposal would allow for the maximum of two four-year terms and require a school board candidate to live in the same district he or she is running for at least 360 days in order to qualify.
Julie Wang, spokesperson of Citizens for School Reform and mother of a sophomore at Lowell High School, said the school board election would look similar to the supervisors election in which each board member would represent one of 11 already established districts.
“District elections will provide each of the 11 districts an education advocate who will act as a liaison between their respective supervisorial district and the SFUSD,” she said.
The charter amendment would also create a board seat for a parent in an advisory capacity. Currently, a student is allowed to sit with the board. Wang said the “representative should be an immigrant because SFUSD has historically neglected the representation of immigrant students whose parents are nonvoters with no or limited English speaking ability. Parent organizations and advocate groups that are privileged by SFUSD are primarily controlled by the whites, and they do not reflect the school district’s diversity.”
Jasmine Tong, a member of Citizens for School Reform and parent of a freshman at Lincoln High School, said, “One thing I’m sure is that this charter amendment will give parents like myself hope for a long, overdue district representation that reflects the needs, feedback and input of the neighborhood.”
The charter amendment would have been on the 2002 November ballot if the Citizens for School Reform had been able to garner 44,000 signatures by the deadline of July 8. At first, City Hall officials had mistakenly informed Wang that only 10,000 names were needed, and the School Reformers found out — less than two months before the filing deadline — that the actual number was some four times their goal. Wang and over 100 volunteers scrambled to fill the quota but knew they would probably not make it for this year. Nevertheless they said that the charter amendment will most likely be on the 2003 November ballot.
Wang said parents have been fed up recently with the Education Placement Center, which has been increasingly impersonal.
“The current school board members did not respond to the parents’ concerns and responded with usual rhetoric rather than taking responsibility for their adopted special-interest driven policies …” Tong said.
Wang, though, insisted that the proposed charter amendment wasn’t a reaction to the diversity index, a court-ordered mandate that tries to diversify students of various economic and educational levels throughout San Francisco’s public schools.
School Board Commissioner Eddie Chin was sympathetic to the parents’ reactions to the Education Placement Center, but along with Board President Jill Wynns he was pessimistic about the intent of the charter amendment. He said the Board of Supervisors knows “that they can’t just represent their own districts, because their work is needed across the whole district. That one person who works in the district just can’t say, This is my district.”
Chin added: “Just look at the supervisors the last two years. They have been split on decisions for a certain district many times.”
Wang, however, contended that with one commissioner focusing on one district, the board member and supervisor in the respective district could work together. Wang suggested that the networking between school board commissioner and supervisor would only help the schools in the district.
“Those who are concerned about district elections perhaps do not have confidence to win in their own district,” Wang said. “Citywide election is about maintaining the status quo and protecting the special interest.”
Wang added that the charter amendment is not a new idea. She said school boards in Oakland, San Jose and Sacramento all have district elections.
While over half of the SFUSD’s students are Asian Pacific Americans, only three APA commissioners — Eric Mar, Chin and Frank Chong — are on the board. Wang, though, said the charter amendment is not a ploy in getting more APA seats. In fact, Wang has been frustrated over the commissioners’ performances so far.
Wang called the Language Academy Olympics, an annual contest celebrating students’ achievements within a multicultural and multilingual world, “a misguided polarization of immigrant students and misappropriation of desperately needed funds that should be used for direct services to these students.” Wang was also frustrated over the APA Education Summit, in which the district spent over $100,000 on the event. She said the money was “appropriated wastefully for an event without substance, a pure special interest polarization.”
Wang was also confounded by the consent decree of 1983, in which many under-performing schools in the district’s east and southeast sides required overhaul with funds.
“It is evident that for the past 19 years, there was a lack of oversight on the part of the school board, district and school sites administration, particularly the Integration Department, that was charged with the responsibility of the consent decree funds,” she said.
Reach Ethen Lieser at elieser@asianweek.com. |
