Parents Keep Kids Out of First Day of School
August 29, 2003
Parents banned their kids from attending the first day of school on Aug. 25, all in the name of civil disobedience, to protest what they view as an unfair enrollment process that would exclude their children from schools in their own neighborhoods.
On Monday morning, the class-cutting kids gathered at the San Francisco Unified School District headquarters at 555 Franklin Street, flanked by their angry parents, instead of sitting behind desks and thumbing through text books.
The 58 members of the Parents for Neighborhood Schools Association say, as of press time, that they’ll keep their kids out of school until they are assigned to a school they want, even if it means missing weeks of education. They have been protesting the school-placement process on the steps of the school district’s headquarters and at City Hall since Aug. 8.
The reason for the standoff, parents say, involves the harsh consequences that they fear their children will suffer if they have to attend a school far from home: a long commute across the city, a possibly unsafe environment in an unfamiliar neighborhood and the added difficulties they might experience should they end up at a school with a history of underachievement.
The issue has become so divisive that the parents protesting the process have become divided among themselves.
The Parents for Neighborhood Schools Association recently broke from a larger group of parents protesting the enrollment method.
In May, led by parent John Zhao, 75 parents from the first group muscled past security at district headquarters and into Superintendent Arlene Ackerman’s office.
Zhao’s current group, which split from the other parents, originally intended to protest on the first day of school alongside members of the Parents for Neighborhood Schools Association. But after Ackerman offered to meet with parents last week, the parents in Zhao’s group decided to send their children to school on opening day.
Zhao, a Sunset District resident, launched his fight against the school district after his daughter was assigned to Philip and Sala Burton High School, located on the southeast side of the city, even though the family lived within walking distance of Lincoln High School.
Holding out to the end
Parent Catherine Chan, vice president of the Parents for Neighborhood Schools Association, said, at press time, that she was willing to keep her son out of school and wait for a spot at Lincoln High School, which is located near their Sunset District home.
“We will wait every day until we get our school,” Chan said.
Chan’s son was initially assigned to Balboa High School in the Excelsior District. Chan, however, rejected the Balboa assignment, and her son was reassigned to Mission High School.
Chan refused the Mission placement as well and said that Lincoln was the only school where she was willing to enroll her son. More than 3,000 applicants vied for Lincoln’s 600 open seats for the 2003-2004 academic year.
Concerns about whether her son would fall behind in his studies as a result of the scheduled protest had been outweighed by what she viewed as the “bigger picture,” Chan said.
Preferring to settle
With the deadline for school registration having passed on April 11, Zhao said that most of the parents in his group were worried that they would have to settle for a school that was low on their list of preferences. He said that with the first day of school upon them, most were scrambling to take a spot at whatever school they could get.
“Right now, everyone is really nervous,” Zhao said last week.
When Zhao declined to accept his daughter’s original assignment to Burton High, in favor of signing onto Lincoln’s waiting list and hoping for the best, he gave up his daughter’s Burton placement. The district then reassigned Zhao’s daughter to Balboa High School, the only other campus available. Now, Zhao is hoping that his daughter can be squeezed back into Burton.
In correspondence sent out by the school district, parents were given the choice of either accepting a school assignment, accepting it as a fallback plan while electing to be placed on a waiting list for a preferred school, or declining the assignment and going onto a waiting list. They were to indicate their choice on a tear-off sheet to be returned to the school district.
Zhao said that he found the enrollment process confusing and didn’t understand that he was giving up his daughter’s spot at Burton at the time. He also said that parents who declined their initial school assignment thought that their decision would somehow prompt the school district to grant their wish for a school in their own neighborhood.
Although district officials have met with chafed parents since early spring, members of the Parents for Neighborhood Schools Association say they feel as if nothing has been resolved.
Parents with children not enrolled still have placement options, district spokesperson Lorna Ho said.
“Every [child] got an assignment,” Ho said. “We have spaces at schools still available, and we welcome parents to see our schools.”
Ho cautioned, however, that parents still needing to enroll their children should do so soon, as spots were filling up quickly due to a flurry of last-minute applicants.
Divisive diversity
Triggering the inflexibility among the protesting parents is a court order requiring the district to diversify schools without using race as a placement criterion. To fulfill this, the district now uses an in-house computer system, called the “diversity index,” to assign students to another school when their campus of choice is full.
The diversity index takes into consideration six factors when assigning a student to a school: a student’s socioeconomic background, academic achievement, mother’s educational background, performance at his or her previous school, language status and home language.
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