Student Assignment Policy Update: What We Learned from Community Engagement
Latest News on Student Assignment Policy
The SFUSD Board of Education held a meeting on Monday, May 18 to hear the feedback gathered from community input gathered from January to March of 2020. You can see PPS-SF #BoardWatch live-tweet coverage of the whole presentation here.
PPS-SF partnered with SFUSD in this community outreach effort and participated in the presentation to the board committee.
The presentation covered many topics related to the proposed student assignment redesign, including:
research happening to understand the supply and demand for different types of programs in our schools.
policy simulations being done by a Stanford research team
options for a revised timeline for adopting and implementing a new policy
a summary of the community engagement process and findings
Timeline
The Board members present signaled that they hoped to move forward with a vote on this policy by December of 2020. It is unclear in this scenario when any new policy could be ready for implementation. It is still possible, but not a given if the board votes in December, that the new policy could be in place for those entering Kindergarten in 2022. There is also the possibility that smaller changes within the existing assignment structure could be implemented more quickly.
Committee members signaled interest in following “Option 1” and voting on a new policy by December 8.
Feedback from Community Outreach
We were pleased to be able to share all of the thoughtful feedback from families who engaged in community workshops, tabling events, and surveys about their priorities for student assignment.
The themes that emerged are captured in the following slides that we shared at the Board committee meeting. We encourage you to look through all of the slides, including those in the appendix for some very detailed depictions of the data we collected through this process.
We heard from participants that fairly closely mirrored SFUSD demographics.
Some themes came up in almost every Community Workshop.
Other common threads we heard.
Three “Initial Concepts” Presented: What Did the Community Think?
The following slides give an indication of the responses we heard to three conceptual ideas for a redesigned student assignment system that were presented at the Community Workshops. These were meant to spark conversation, and it is likely that any system that is ultimately proposed may draw from ideas in these concepts but is not likely to look exactly like any of the proposed systems.
Next Steps
SFUSD staff and research partners will continue working over the summer to model different policies and predict what how they would impact the priorities that have been identified by the community and by board members. Given the indication from board members that they would like to vote on a new policy by December, the current timeline anticipates another opportunity for the community to give feedback on any proposed new policy in early November of 2020.
Next steps…