So if we can go ahead to the next slide. This meeting will include a quick welcome by board of education president , mark sanchez, followed by a 20minute presentation on the proposed changes to Student Assignments. Well have 15 minutes for questions and answers about the proposed policy and 15 minutes to share your hopes, ideas, and concerns about these changes. Lastly well have five minutes to close this evenings meeting and share information about next steps. Ill going to play a video by mark san december. I wants to take a minute to explain why were making changes to the Student Assignment system and why this work is so important. As you likely already know, sfusd is in the process of changing our Student Assignment policy for our Elementary Schools. December 2018, we started this process by unanimously passing a board resolution and direct to develop a recommendation for a New Elementary School Student Assignment system. Now were nearing the end of a robust, multiyear process and the board of education plans to vote on a new policy on decembe. For the past nine years, sfusd has used Student Assignment process where families may apply to any Elementary School in the district. Despite our well intentioned efforts, the process has not worked as well as intended meeting goals related to diversity, predictability and proximity. In our Current System. Families must chose from 72 different schools and arent guaranteed an assignment to any of them. The families with the most time and resources are best able to figure out the application process, research schools, go on school tours, and ultimately receive one of the top choices. Despite the complicated process, our schools are just as segregated today as they were when we implemented the system. What weve heard we know that every family wants to send their child to a highquality school and that students assignment alone cannot create highquality stools but it does have a role to play in creating diverse robust enrolled schools. And sfusd our mission is to provide each and every student with the highquality instruction required to thrive in the 21st century. Each and every day were focused on creating highquality goals in every neighborhood regardless of how out Student Assignment system works, timeline for change. The board plans to vote on a new policy in december of this year but when the policy is approved, it wont go into effect for a couple of years. During this time, there will be plenty of opportunities for Community Input as we design zones and plan for a successful roll out of the new system. What we hope to accomplish tonight, tonights session is an opportunity for us all to learn. We hope the Community Members will learn all about the policy recommendations and that sfusd staff will learn about questions, hopes and concerns. We invite you to participate via thought exchange tonight and to ask questions about the policy, understand its key features, and provide input on how we will implement the policy in the coming years. District staff eager to hear from you and your questions, homeshopes and ideas will be heo we can make this policy work for each and every family in san francisco. Thank you again for being here. Wonderful. So as president sanchez said, its an opportunity to Learn Together and if we can click through to the next slide, please. Our hope is that Community Members will learn about the proposed changes to Student Assignments and to decide on the changes for the boards vote and we hope that sfusd staff will learn about the communitys hopes, ideas and concerns about these potential changes. Wore now going to watch another short video which explains how our current Student Assignment works and it will make sure everyone is starting with the same information about how the Current System works before we give feedback on a new Student Assignment system and if we can please play the video. Thank you. Hello, we created this video to help explain how our Student Assignment system works. To start y. Do we have the Student Assignment system. They have over 100 schools and each year students apply we rely on the Student Assignment system to make sure every student receives a school. The system is a set of rules which considers family choices and the number of open school seats. Tone sure that all students are equitably assigned to schools. This is a especially important when more students apply to a school than there are openings. Tie breakers are preferences given to applicants. These character is ticks were chosen by sfusd to do awe fie things, provide equitable access and help create diverse learning and give families opportunities to stay closer to home. Here are all the tie breakers ranked in order. One, siblings, two, pre ktk attendance area, three, test score area, ctip one. Four, attendance area. If your requests have tie breakers, for example, you are a younger sibling, live in an area of the city with the lowest average test scores or live in the attendance area of the school, you have a greater chance of getting into your requested schools. What happens if you dont get any of the schools you requested . Unfortunately, that can happen sometimes. Because, the schools you want are so popular that many students request them. When this happens, the computer looks at where you live and tries to assign you to your Attendance Area Schools if it has openings. If your Attendance Area School is full, the computer looks for the closest schools to where you live that has openings. And assigns you to that school. While we cannot promise that every student will be placed at their number one choice schools, we can promise that your students will be considered fairly and that the Student Assignment system strives to assign students nor more help, contact us by phone or email or visit sfusd at edu slash enrolled. Great, thank you. So, we just watched a video that told us how our current Student Assignment system works and the Current System isnt perfect and we clicked through to the next slide. You can see that in 2018 the board of education and passed a resolution to change our current Student Assignment and had hasnt been working as we intended. Here are some of the problems with the Current Systems that were trying to solve. And the first problem, is that schools are segregated by income and by race and ethnicity. The Current System is also complicated for families and it isnt always predictable or transparent enough. We also know that choices seen as increasing inequities because the families who have the most time and resources are best able to navigate the choice process. Lastly, traveling across the city makes it difficult to build Strong Community connections. Weve already gathered a lot of feedback from Community Members. Last spring, we hosted 12 Community Workshops and neighborhoods throughout the city. Tabled in front of pre schools and Community Centers and attended meetings for feedback. In total we talked with about 600 people but we connist enterally heard is that the most important thing is to have access to highquality schools and Student Assignments are only an issue because not all schools are perceived as being the same in quality. We heard from a lot of families that choice can be inequitable because not all families have the same time or resources to engage in the choice process and many African American and latinx families wonder why the district was redesigning Student Assignments and were distrustful of the motivations for doing so. A neighborhood based system would harm families with the least resources and most family would prefer to send their children close to home. However, families wanted to be confident in the quality of their neighborhood schools before they would send their child there. We covered a lot and went through slides and watched videos. Lets pause and take a quick 30 second break. If you would like, this is a time to write down thoughts or questions that you have and get up and do a stretch and talk about whats in the policy, what are we recommending. I hope they had a chance of thoughts and questions that they had. Were going to talk about what is in the policy. If we can click through to the next slide, please. Thank you. Weve learned a lot about how the current Student Assignment system works and what some of the problems that the Current System are and what feedback weve already gotten from the community. Now wore going to jump in and learn about the proposed changes to Student Assignments. The new policy would move away from our current district wide choice process for Elementary Schools. Instead, sfusd would develop zones and allow families to chose from Elementary Schools in the zone that they live in. Families would still have choices of case and however, instead of choosing from all 72 Elementary Schools and sfusd each family would be presented with a more manageable list of choices and families would end up being assigned to one of the schools in their zone. The policy is to help assign students so that schools reflect the rich diversity of our city. To do that they will use diversity category to assign students so each school resembles the diversity of the zone its in. One of the biggest changes from the Current System is that sfusd would create zones and so this means instead of choosing from all 72 Elementary Schools in the city, each family would chose from a smaller number of schools based on the zone they live in and creating zones will help make the assignment process much more predictable for schools and families and will create Stronger Community connections. Each family will have access to all of the different types of programs that theyre eligible for and the only difference is that families will chose from a smaller list of schools so that the choice process is simpler,s year and more predict able. No matter where a student lives, theyll still have access to all the different types of language pathways that theyre eligible for. This might include duel language emersion or flex programs which are open to all students. Or by literacy programs open to english learners, bilingual students who speak the target language. Just like general education programs, families will receive a smaller, more manageable list of choices for language programs that they might be interested in. And this will be based on the zone they live in. This might mean that sfusd has to drive different types of zones for different types of programs so that every child still has access to all the different programs that theyre he will individual able and so so every student has access to language pathways and have access to a k8 school and based on the zone that they live in and every student will have access to appropriate special education programs. To apply families just need to rank their schools in their own to the order they prefer them so i hope this will make the choice process simple and easy for families. If we go to the next slide. After families are in the schools in their zone and submit their choices to sfusd, every student will end up being assigned to one of the schools in their own so this system is much more predictable. Families noah head of time that theyre going to be assigned to one of the schools on their listed. There already schools to chose from. So now that we talked about which choices are available to each student, you might be wondering how will students be assigned to one of the schools that they chose. This will use two important features to help assigned students to schools. One student submit their requests, the assignment system will troy to match everyone with one of their top choices. And as long as theres available space, the student will be assigned. If there are more requests for schools then there are open spaces, this system will use tie breakers to give preference to some applicants. The assignment system will look at where students live and try to assign students from different parts of the zone so that each school resembled and diversity of the zone its in. Ill explain these in turn. So tie breakers are the next important feature that im going to talk about. Tie breakers are preferences used to assign students to schools when the number of requests for that school is greater than the number of spaces available. And the newest Student Assignment system would use the following three tie breakers. The first one is a sibling tiebreaker. So this would be a preference for younger siblings of students who are currently enrolled in and will be continuing on. Will be attending that same school theyre applying to. [please stand by] these might include household income, race and ethnicity or academic achievement. Diversity category use multiple criteria to count for the many ways diversity enhances the educational experience for students. Lets pretend that the graphics down at the bottom of the screen, each represent three hypothetical blocks that are each assigned to a diversity category. In this example the three blocks are assigned to the orange circle, purple stripe or Blue Triangle diversity city category. In the every student in each block will be in orange circle, purple stripe or blue training. Every student will be assigned to same category every other student on the block. All the demographic information will be generalized for that block. Which means it would all be aggregated. We wasnt to call out that individual student characteristics will not be used to assign students to schools. Everyone who live on the same block will be part of the same diversity Category Base on aggregated demographic data. Thats the first step. The second step, the next slide, each school will have a certain number of spaces for students from each diversity category in its zone so the School Looks Like the zone that its in. For example, if a zone has 30 orange circles, 30 purple stripes and 40 Blue Triangle, school a will assign 30 seats to orange circles 30 for purple stripes and 20 for the triangle. Our hope is that this new policy will achieve these three goals. All of the things that i just described are trying to achieve these three goals. The first goal is diversity. We want to create integrated Elementary Schools that provides students with the opportunity to experience rich diversity in san francisco. Our next goal is predictability. We want to offer families high degree of predictability. Third goal is proximity. We want this new policy to create Strong Community connections to schools and happy felt enrollment. We dont students to have to travel too far. This is our policy development timeline. Weve been working on the system for quite a while now. Even since 2018. Were in the orange box of the dotted box thats part of the decide stage. These are the Community Information sessions. Next, the board of education will discuss the policy on december 1st at the the committee of the whole meeting. Will vote on the policy on december 8th. If the policy is approved in december, it will take at least a year and a half to implement. This includes actually drawing zones, updating district transportation routes, creating new application and enrollment process that is simple and easy for families. We expect that the earliest this policy will go into effect for students applying for Elementary School in the 20232024 school year. You can look at the timeline. If we go to the next slide, were going to take another quick 30 second break, again this is a chance to write down any thoughts or questions that you have so far, get up and stretch and when we come back, well finish up with couple of more slides and get to the interactive portion to tonights Community Information meeting. Well move on to the last portion of the presentation. Lets click through to the next slide. What comes next . The board of education decides to produce thee changes, what happens then . If the policy is approved in december, there will be lot of decisions left to make during implementation, which means lots of opportunities for community to give input. On the left hand side of the screen are things that are actually in the policy, the things that the board will be votings on in december. On the right are things that come after the policy has been approved. Some of the things, whats in the policy, this includes a series of actions, goals, guidelines for drawing the zones, the actual rules for assigning students to schools, including the tie breakers and the diversity category and on the process for monitoring policy, monitoring the impact that its having. What happens during implementation. This is actually drawing the zone. Developing the software and the assignment algorithm, updating transportation routes, developing and easy application process for families, preparing school for enrollment growth. If there are schools that have more students assigned to them, giving them the resources they need to be able to grow. Revisiting middle school feeder pattern. Making sure they are aligned with middle school feeders. Many changes will be phased in overtime. If you go to the next slide, one of the most important things that will happen during the implementation is drawing the zones. They know lot of people probably have questions about what the zones will look like ahow they will be created. The board are not voting on the actual zones december. Instead, they are voting on a policy that includes guidelines for drawing the zones. Here are the guidelines that will be use to create the zones. First, is that diversity is important to us. We want each zone to reflect the diversity of the city across many characteristics, socioeconomics, English Proficiency. Zones should limit the number of schools so that the process is simple and easy and predictable for families. Zones should cover reasonable geographic distance. We know diversity is important we have to cover a reasonable geographic distance. Zones shouldnt travel all across the city. We want to send students closer to schools closer to home. We also know that san franciscos demographics are rapidly changing. We cant just draw the zones one time and leave them unchanged. The recommendation calls for entire policy including the zones to be monitored and evaluated every year. If we find that the citys demographics have changed, the zones are no longer meeting their goals, then theyll be revised so they meet the criteria and meet the guidelines. With that, im going to turn it over to my colleague who will walk us through the next force n of this evening. Will have a chance to share questions, ideas and hopes and concerns. Hi, thank you henry. I appreciate you handing it over. I want to say that im very excited for this. Tonight were going to be using a platform bot exchange to gather input. Step one, is the shared step where you will share your thoughts independently and anonymously. Step two is the star step where you go there through and rate the thoughts of others. Step three is the discover step where well see whats most important to the group. In a moment, you will all be able to participate. I will put the qr code up on screen. Ill have a link and code that you can use to participate in case you dont have that availability. You dont need to download an app. You dont need to sign up for anything to participate. Once youre in the exchange, make sure you choose your language if you like to participate in from the dropdown, share one to two thoughts, rate at least 15 other thoughts and based on what you agree with and what you disagree with. Five strongly you agree, one being that you strongly disagree. We encourage you to use full range of stars that reflect what your priorities are. Remember, this is confidential, so your identity will not be known or associated with any of the thoughts that you share. Im going to switch it over. I will share one more thing, this event is being recorded for we leave thought Exchange Open. If you submit your questions and hopes, ideas and concerns, they will be read and they will be considered after the event. Right now, at home, you can use this to you can scan the qr code to joining the exchange in the question were asking, what questions do you have have proposed changes. If you dont scan the qr code, you can go to that website, pejoin. Com and enter this nine digit code that will tack you to thought exchange to answer that question. Remember this is totally anonymous. Youll be able to share your thoughts independently. While everybody does that, i will play some music. Were at about 2 minutes 13 seconds. Thats about half way. Im loving the participants. We have about 100 people participating right now. 35 thoughts shared and 117 rating. Thats great. Just reminder, once you share one to two thoughts, rate about 15 other people thoughts on that scale of five you strongly agree and one you strongly disagree anywhere in that full range depending on your priorities. This confidential. We wont be able to associate your identity with any of your thoughts and feel free to share. You got about 1 minute 30 seconds left before we move on to the next part. Okay. Awesome. That was about four minute of time. Were going to move on to the next step. Which is the discover phase. As you can see, right to the left we have a visualization of all of the participants, 112 participants inside of the thought exchange now. If you like to continue to participate, we are going to leave the thought Exchange Open and you can go to tejoin. Com and use that nine digit code to go through and continue to participate in this thought exchange. Now, we will have henry and carla reflect some of these thoughts. The first thought that we have here that we have, lot of people will parents be able to ask for reassignment within the zone if unhappy with the school . Thats a great question. Im going to invite my colleague, orlo to jump in if she like for this one. Thats a great question. The policy does not include the number rounds that are from different assignment rounds. I think thats something to be decided after the policy is approved. Do you want to elaborate . Im happy to. Our goal is to create a predictable, simple Student Assignment system. The more changes there are in the process and the more complicated it is, less simple it is. Were hopeful, we havent come to the level of detail. The feedback that we receive so far makes it more stressful for families and our goal is to make it as simple as possible. Thank you. This question has risen up to the top. Based off socioeconomic, racial, English Proficiency disability, is that also reported . Thats the sub text there was that, there were questions about the validity of the data, when try to game the system and misreport. Yes, at a certain sometimes everything is selfreported whether we use student level data or census data. We have to rely on people to report either their race, ethnicity, things like that. All of the data will be aggregated. No student will have no incentive to misreport their own individual data. It will be census data or sfusd administrative data. To add on to that, it will not be part of the application process. We will not be asking for any data like that at all. We want to know where you live and what your choices are in rank order. The census data is supported. Any data that exist, selfreported data. We will be pulling on that data and will not be asking for individual student data. Well be working on data thats readily available in the city to a variety of sources including the census data and sources like that. Thank you. This question is risen to the top. How will this affect the middle school enrollment. Were anticipating that when we draw the zones and we will need to revisit the elementary to middle school feeders. We anticipate fully that infrastructure will continue and that anyone whos currently enrolled in elementary, if there need to be changes to the middle school, students will not be impacted. They will be grandfathered in their middle school feeder. Thank you. I saw another question. Neighborhoods already are segregated, how are you going to ensure that this is going to work . Thats a great question. There are two parts to my answer. The first is that the zones cant just replicate an existing neighborhood pattern. We worked really extensively over the summer with the team of researchers at stanford to simulate some hypothetical zones. What we found if the zones are too small and just reflect existing neighborhoods then they dont help to create more diversity. Zones have to connect couple of different neighborhoods in order for them to be diverse. Second piece, we need diversity categories that i talked about. If we just draw diverse zone and we let everyone choose and match everyone with their highest rank choice without considering diversity categories. We find that choice pattern pate segregated and schools become segregated through the process. Thank you. It is 7 20. Would you like to move on to the next thought exchange . Theres one or two other things in here that might be worth responding to. I saw a few questions about siblings. Student who doesnt attend zone school in that zone. The answer is yes. Thats one of the tiebreakers well continue to support preference for younger children to be enrolled in and attending the same school as their older siblings. Siblings will be very limited number of students who maybe allowed. Others being foster youth, student experiencing homelessness. Then theres a question about what if children want to send what if parents want to send their children outside the zone. This is one of the major differences in this new system. Were moving from being able to choose any school in the district to limited number of schools. Under this proposal, families will be able to choose from the schools that are listen their zone. They will be the only schools theyll be able to choose. With the exception of the sibling if you got an older sibling at another school. Excellent. I wanted to share reminder that this thought exchange will be open, we will be looking at all of the responses not just the ones that we responded to after this townhall, we can get a full breadth of the information shared with us today. This meeting will be recorded and posted to the sfusd website and along with the link to the thought exchange. Which will remain open for the next few weeks. Right now i will switch over to the next thought exchange. In this thought exchange here, we are asking what are your hopes, ideas and concerns about this policy that will work for you and your community . I want to share that this is a new thought exchange. Youll have to go through and either scan the qr code again or scan the new qr or go to tejoin. Com and use that new nine didnt code to participate. This question has a couple of survey questions at the beginning of it. Please take your time. Well give you additional time to participate. Just reminder that the thought exchange has three steps. Were sharing our thoughts independently, anonymously, star step and step well be able to see whats important to the group and respond to that. Once you get into the exchange, please select the language you like to participate in. Share one to two thoughts and rate about 15 other people thoughts based on how much you agree, whether you strongly agree, five or one for stronging disagree and once again, encourage you to use the full range of stars while participating. While people are logging in to participate, i will go back to playing some music. While people are logging in, i want to appreciate all the Great Questions that surfaced. Acknowledged that we did it have time to answer them all tonight. We fully intend to turn this into an faq which we will send out. We will make every effort to respond to all the questions that were surfaced. Were at 1 minute 32 seconds. Please feel free to share those final thoughts and rating. Well discuss a few and go over them. Please continue to share your thoughts. We appreciate this and answer those survey questions so we know how to further engage you on these subjects. I want to bring us back. We have about 81 people participating and 79 thoughts shared and almost 1000 rating. Lets dive into some of these hopes, ideas, concerns about what this policy will bring for you and your community. The thought thats been ranked the highest is i hope that all citywide language programs will remain citywide access and equity for all students to learn a world language. Henry or ola if you like to comment on these as they come up. Sure, i see a theme with couple of of them. First and third, which is around access and equity. Looks like families concerned schools in the zone will not offer same access to programs, whether its after school, language, etcetera. Theres another commenter noted that they are worried that the best schools will remain in wealthier neighborhoods and other families wont have access to healthier schools. We hear that, we know that how we draw the zones will be incredibly important. This has to be open and transparent process that involves Community Members. Should we scroll through and read out a few more . Absolutely. You covered those two big topics of equity and transparency. Lets see what else has been bubbling up. Henry, i heard you speak about this before, about providing high quality education to all students across the city. Can you speak to how this might tie into that . I can address it. I think that quality schools are far more important. Its regardless of student assigned to a system. This is a massive concern for us. While Student Assignment wont create quality schools and we do believe that it has a role to play in helping create diverse and robust enrollment. Which we think is, really important to our goals and our vision at the district. Regardless of which student system we use, this question is something that must be addressed on a daily basis. I dont know henry, if you want to add anything to that. I think thats perfect. I couldnt agree more. I see lot of the thoughts and concerns are about quality. We definitely heard that and definitely understand that quality schools are the most important thing. To be respectful of everyones time. Were couple of minutes over. Maybe we can transition back to the slides and wrap up this evenings meeting. I want to remind everyone that the thought exchange is going to be left open. You can participate after the fact, maybe if it was difficult to get it up and working right now. Were going to leave it open and were going to revisiting this and reviewing and incorporating any feedback that we hear. With that, i want to thank everyone so much for coming tonight. Folks can stay up to date if folks are interested in following this process. You can visit sfusd. Edu studentassignment. Were posting all our resources related to the development of this new policy on that web page. With that, i want to thank everyone once again and wish everyone a good evening. Thank you, there are some watch parties that are posted on the web if folks want to join and give more feedback
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