go in this county. for us, we have the largest percentage of preschoolers who actually attend preschool. what is the difference? in l.a., their numbers are half of that number. who are the children who are not attending in l.a.? they are your lower income children. pre-k looks different for them than it does for us. we have pre-k students who will do three years in an early education setting. two years in pre-k and an extra year in tk. the law, for us, is a little bit more problematic. the other issue around implementing tk in our city has to do with capacity. we have approximately 70 elementary schools. with 70 elementary schools and 300 possible students, that is about 4 tk-ers per school. is that a brand new classroom? or not? if you are in l.a. with 800,000 students, with a school that has 1200, you may have 4 or 5 or even 8 kindergarten classrooms. of those, you might be able to pull out a quarter of your kindergarteners and make them tk-ers and have a classroom. for us, that is not true because we do not have the space and we do not have enough students. even after three years of tk, we would have only had, if you average it out, we would not have enough tk-ers for one classroom. if you take 1000 students, 70 elementary sites, average it out and you have about 15 tk-ers. are you starting to see the issues here? >> very complicated. >> yes. these are all the little things we have been working with for it very robust pre-k for our county. not necessarily true in other counties. why can l.a. implement so easily and not us? it is because we are two different systems. we have different issues we have to deal with. what does all of this mean? here we are, trying to put together this new 25% of a grade. in the middle of it, the governor releases his first budget proposal. i want you to read what he said. he goes through this whole thing about how much money -- he wants to decrease the california deficit by. to do it, he is going to eliminate the requirement that schools provide transitional kindergarten. overnight, it created a flurry of, exactly what does that mean? tk is the law. what does that mean, you are going to take the money away from it? now we are having this dialogue with our state representatives about, ok, is it a now unfunded mandate? how are we talking about adding to our deficit if we implement without knowing the money is available? what is interesting about this, i call it the shopping. if you do not hear what you want to hear, you find someone to tell you what you want to hear. it was simple. if you call this advocate or that advocate and they all have their different perspectives about how to do this. the ones who said that the moneys were there, i asked them one question. can you guarantee it? not one would guarantee it. they would tell me they were almost positive. again, that made us have to think through, how can we implement tk in our county knowing that no one can guarantee it? we waited for the mayor revise. we got it and this is where we thought, for sure, he would clearly state that the moneys were there and there was no issues -- and that there were no issues and we could move forward. instead, he talks about the proposed elimination of transitional kindergarten requirements. it is still in the mayor revise even though we know that the houses all went against and declined to go along with this. we still had him fighting against this. he did not leave it at that. he went on to say, by eliminating the requirements and making it optional, he will be able to put back or restore the reductions to pre-k. so y -- so by taking back some of the money ofpre-k, instead of cutting pre-k as much, i can put the money over there. why is that important to us? in this county, we have a large percentage of students who are in pre-k. he had -- he commingled the issues. even with all of that, despite this uncertainty, i think the district has been bold. to basically say, we are going to go ahead and go forward for it we are going to just chance it. instead of having -- we are going to talk about this. instead of having just two sites, we now have five sites and we have pretty much covered the city. even after that, when we went back to meet with school services, this is what they told us, this is how they put it. in the main revised, the requirements to offer tk funding are proposed for elimination. tk would be optional and a local decision. we are good. it is a local decision. we decided to do it. i think we are safe. even though both houses of the government have rejected the governor's proposal, by the way, go ahead to plan to reduce tk but wait on staffing. these are the messages that we are trying to maneuver behind the scenes. on top of that, and i am telling you this for a reason, right behind that, preschool california has been amazing with trying to maneuver this tk issue. on the website, go to tk and it says it is fully funded. by the way, click here, sign this petition, send it to the governor so he will not eliminate tk. it is still on the table. i am telling you that because clarity is not going to happen in the next few months. this conversation will be ongoing. do not be surprised if we look up in one year and this whole issue is gone. i want to give you a heads up as you start to hear the confusion that continues around this issue. despite the confusion, we are moving ahead. despite it. how are we moving ahead? we act with his fate in a professional learning community. we need assistance with this. we meet on a regular basis with the following statewide districts -- l.a., santa cruz, alameida county. i had a great opportunity to sit with 12 districts in alameda county. i left there feeling so refreshed because i thought i was the only one struggling. there were districts talking about not doing it because it was just too confusing. but then you have oakland, who has gone full force. both sides of the story. we have individuals liked melissa, standing next to me, who will talk about how we move forward with this, how do we implement this process? the communication, we look at it in two ways. we are receiving information and trying to figure out what to do. at the same time, we are constantly in communication with the public. can you imagine -- and i have to say this, publicly. i am appreciative of the parents who are actually here who i've had ongoing conversations with. they will tell you that i am very honest. i tell them, no matter what happens, if they remove the money, i am not going to make you a promise but i will try to keep you abreast of the information. you may not be happy at the end, but i am not going to sell you a good -- our we communicating on our web sites? we communicate through letters. we have one-on-one interactions. i have received a lot of interactions from commissioners and supervisors to respond to your constituents if they have questions. we respond to every last one of them and sometimes multiple times. we have community meetings. we have been working closely with first 5. 25% of all tk-ers are already in our district for it we talked to that -- we talk to them fruit site managers and our meetings. we are covering 25% of our population. we meet the other by a vote -- the other portion of our population by working with first 5. they were just as confused as we were at times but they worked with us. we have responded to individual requests from not only parents here, but ongoing conversations about what is happening and everybody has been really good about it. supervisor campos: could i ask you a quick question? if i am a parent watching this, listening to this, and so much has happened or not happened at the state level. what should i know about tk? >> this is what you should know. i'm going to turn it over to melissa and she is going to give you the good news. perfect timing. [laughter] >> just as carla was emphasizing, we do appreciate speaking to families regarding this transitional kindergarten shift that we are undergoing. i have been one of the people to take those personal calls and e- mails and face-to-face meetings with the parents and i absolutely understand their frustrations. we have been documented in all of the calls that we have received and i take it back to our planning meetings and tell parents that your feedback is being heard. because of all of the requests, we are finally able to -- are district has approved that we are able to have 5 tk sites this coming school year. there will be on our early education campuses. the 5 sites that we will have, the first is john mclaren. that site is in the bay view area. leola havard, in the bay view. we have three new additional sites. tule elk park, zaida rodriguez, and noriega, in the outer sunset. i started to make phone calls and some parents were absolutely thrilled to hear that we are opening up three new sites. so families now will have the opportunity to list their preference. they will do so by submitting new applications to the educational placement centers and those applications will be due on june 8. letters of notification will be mailed out on july 16. families are, this information is now up on our web site. families will be receiving letters in the mail next week. >> probably the two as requests, more sites and waivers. let me deal with waivers. let me answer the question up front, no waivers. we have spent a lot of time actually interviewing other districts. i think you interviewed 25 or 30 -- 27 districts. how many were actually going to do waivers? and how were they going to do them? supervisor campos: if you can speak into the microphone? >> the eight districts have shared that waivers are rare in their district. they have done maybe 2 in the last 10 years. it was either do it to some type of space or some type of exception. they emphasized it was very rare. >> what is the issue with waivers? even though waivers were addressed in the initial yield, the problem with waivers is they are driven by a board policy. the first thing that would have to happen before we could even entertain this is that we would have to change board policy. the next issue is to do the waivers, you have to create a system that basically says the children make a certain courage. -- meet certain criteria. it talks about children being in the 99th percentile. it requires us to do some testing. before we can even think about the process, we want to make sure we go through a long process, because you can only guess what is going to happen. who of the gifted children? the interesting thing about this is there are multiple ways to do this, but we want to make sure we really think this through before we randomly set up a waiver process. we are going to spend next year working with the various school districts that have people who have actually done it, how they have done it, and using that to make a recommendation to the board. we will not be doing waivers this year, but we are going to be looking at the possibility, not guaranteeing anything, of doing them next year. that is if tk is still around. questions? supervisor campos: supervisors, commissioners, any questions? i know for the day's meeting, there are prior commitments people have. we do not have a lot of time. it unless there is an objection, i would like to open it up to public comment, to give members of the public a chance to speak on this item. i have some speaker cards. i apologize if i mispronounce the names. [names are called] and anyone who would like to speak, please come on up. go ahead. thank you for being here, and think for the presentation. >> i will start. there has been a lot of change going on with the traditional kindergarten program. it has definitely been a bit of a roller-coaster ride for parents. parents cared deeply about indian -- about childhood education. in january, when the program was cancelled, that was very much in question. it was announced today, i think on the website. i think that is a step forward from where we were in january. thank you for that. however, that is still not a complete solution for every family. i do not want to color this, but that is not going to accommodate all of the families impacted by traditional kindergartens. we are one of the families were the closest school to our house is 2.3 miles away. i think they will be within 10 minutes of each other. i do not think that is something i can manage logistically. i need to be in a position of may be having no education for my son next year, which is not where i want to be. i do believe my son is kindergarten ready. i do believe that would be hopefully a somewhat cost effective solution for the district. one of the questions i do have, which was not answered, was the cancellation of the original program, which had children in the kindergarten classroom. i am still curious why that program was canceled. it was initially presented as being the cheapest way for the district to meet its commitments. we know the budget constraints. but it is surprising to me we have gone to these locations, which presumably are costing more money to set up, and everything that goes along with that. that is a question i am curious to hear the answer of. i am almost done. >> thank you very much. next speaker, please. >> i am going to take one minute to completely backed up heather. i have the same kind of issue. i have four kids. it is not possible for me to reach three different schools at the same time, twice a day. there are more preschools than teachers. that is not where we want to be. we want them to have an education. i think there needs to be a solution for that. supervisor campos: next speaker, please. >> i am in the same position as the other parents. we want the district to offer waivers to children who are ready for kindergarten but do not meet the state cut off. this was a key provision of the legislation, which enabled the bill to be passed in the first place. the governor's office and has raised a solution to the problem of children who are left out of the system. maybe they will stay in preschool when they should be headed for kindergarten. i want to say, with due respect to ms. bryant, the difficulties we are facing with budget uncertainties -- the process in handling this issue has been completely opaque. it has been behind closed doors, with almost no public disclosure of their thinking that led them to completely terminate the initial plan. the plan for the new transitional kindergarten and any responsiveness to questions from parents such as myself -- i have gone to three board meetings and spoken publicly, and i have not received any sort of response. and where does that leave me? that leaves me shopping around for other school districts, wondering if i will stay in san francisco. i would like to stay in san francisco. i live here. i work here. i have a son in public school. i do not want to have to go somewhere else and start over. thank you for holding this hearing. thank you for listening. we are still going to push for the waivers. >> thank you very much. next speaker, please. >> my name is forest great. i have spoken publicly a couple of times at board of education meetings, regarding this topic. i will speak to the relationship between the school district and the parents. we were treated like garbage, to be blunt. we were pulled something clear and specific by every school we toured. my wife and i spent numerous hours touring over 15 schools. we were told they would be integrated into regular kindergarten classrooms. we turned in our application, after a lot of work, figuring out which school would be the best fit for our daughter. she missed the cut off by a month. after turning in the application, two days before the end of the registration process, the entire program was canceled. we were told we were out of luck and would have to shop around. almost the end of may, we were told there are three additional locations to consider. i am not sure what kind of family planning the board of education does. i have a lot of responsibilities. i cannot figure out where my daughter is going to be going to school five months from now, and we want to look at decisions a month in advance. to what cassandra was speaking to, why are we here? why are we in san francisco? why are we sending our child to the public education system, if this is the way we are going to be treated? at this point, we have to look at other districts and private. i am a public school kid, but this is highly frustrating. it is disrespectful to the parents. i have written a lot of letters about this. i have done everything i can. there has been no communication whatsoever. we have not received a single e- mail, a single phone call. we have turned in waiver requests. we have had no reaction, no notice from the district. the idea that we are being communicated with is absolutely false. please give us a reason to stay here. supervisor campos: thank you. next speaker, please. >> week as parents understand this, but it has been complicated for us. moving the cutoff date sounds good in theory, but if we are going to write a bill, let us figure out how we are guinta implement it. sb 1381 said it was up to the district. our district apparently decided our kids were going to be in kindergarten. that is what we planned on. if your kid is ready, they will go ahead. if they are not, they will stay back. why did this all changed? we do not know. that is fine. it changed. but give us an option for what to do. my daughter was born november 2. you are telling me some of the 24 hours alder is ready and she is not? we have to see who is ready and who is not. if we do not have a system in place, we better get one. the test english learners. why can't we test for kindergarten readiness? same concept. the relationship with the school board and the parents is extremely important. i think there needs to be transparency, accountability, and trust. the blame game of the focus on the road blocks. we as parents would like to see a commitment toward the education of our kids, and an eagerness to solve the question at hand, especially for kids b orn in november of 2007. thank you. >> anybody who would like to speak, please come up. >> my name is jennifer welch. i will start by saying i was in your meeting. supervisor campos: please speak into the microphone. >> i was in the meeting at the school district two days after the announcement that transitional kindergarten is going to be implemented. it still is chaotic as it was at that moment. i know everybody is trying to work this out. my major concerns are the number of children. where is this number coming from, the 300 students and the five classrooms that are going to be available? i know that rodriguez does not have room to go. noriega has one classroom. their hours are 7:50 through 1:50. there is no after-school. i am really concerned about availability. how are we going to decide which of these 300 students get into these five classrooms? i am fired up. every time i have tried to get in touch with the school district, they have referred me to 20 cook street. every time. thank goodness they have been very accessible to me. i go in there and get information. what is the number game? how are we going to figure this out? how are we going to know that our kids are eligible? are there going to be enough classrooms? supervisor campos: thank you. is there a member of the public who has not spoken? seeing none, public comment is closed. colleagues? supervisor olague: i guess i would like to understand a little bit better how the district can better in gauge the parents that are going to be affected. it does not sound like the number is going to be that large. i keep hearing 300 families. we want to keep families here. the city keeps pledging that it is a priority. we want families to send their children to public schools. this is one of the few cities in the state where we have seen a decrease in numbers of students in public schools. i am wondering -- is there a way we can encourage a better conversation between the parents to develop a policy around this, and make certain the parents are involved in every aspect? since it is a state issue, it will be coming up again and again as a way of bouncing the budget.