SF parents playing the school assignment lottery

“It gives me butterflies. I’m so nervous of what the letter is going to say. I have no idea how much of a fight I’m going to have to get [my daughter] into a good school.” --Jenny Benjamin, Sunset resident (Mike Koozmin/Special to The Examiner)

SAN FRANCISCO — Sunset resident Jenny Benjamin has been on edge for six months about her young daughter’s educational future.

Starting in October, Benjamin and her husband, Jeremy, visited 11 of San Francisco’s 70 public elementary schools knowing they could apply to as many as seven. They planned on visiting more schools in hopes of finding one well-suited for their daughter, but ran out of time.

The couple wanted a strong academic program for their 4-year-old, a large student body and a choice of after-school programs, since they both work.

Benjamin thinks The City has many solid public schools, but the difficulty was paring them down.

“It’s a lot of work,” she said. “Each tour is about two hours.”

After the Jan. 9 application deadline for the 2009-10 school year, all they could do was wait.

“It gives me butterflies,” the 35-year-old mother of two said. “I’m so nervous of what the letter is going to say. I have no idea how much of a fight I’m going to have to get [my daughter] into a good school.”

On Friday, the San Francisco Unified School District is scheduled to mail thousands of letters to families of students — the majority entering kindergarten, middle school or high school — notifying them of the school they could be attending.

Unlike suburban areas where students generally attend the school closest to their home, San Francisco uses a complex assignment system to provide students from all backgrounds an opportunity to attend the most popular schools.

Parents are asked to apply to seven preferred schools. Students are then entered into a computerized lottery that assigns them to campuses based on several factors, including socioeconomic class, home location and home language.

Parent Anne VanDerslice has been through the process twice, once for her son’s elementary school and then for his middle school.

Now, she and her 13-year-old son, Mateo VanHolland, are crossing their fingers for Balboa High School. The Excelsior district resident said enrolling her son in the right high school is nerve-racking.

“[The assignment] determines what happens after high school,” she said. “This feels really important.”

San Francisco is one of many urban school districts nationwide that has tried to integrate schools through an assignment
system.

In the 1970s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued the district, claiming that black and Hispanic students were not offered the same educational opportunities at neighborhood schools.

The result of a 1982 settlement was an assignment system that bused students to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to comply with a requirement that at least four ethnicities were represented at each school and that schools would not exceed 45 percent of one racial background.

But after a 1994 lawsuit from Chinese-American parents who claimed their children’s rights were violated because the district capped enrollment by ethnicity at desirable schools, race was no longer considered in student assignments after 2001.

Now, the district is considering another change following years of complaints about the system and data that show the number of schools with high concentrations of a single racial or ethnic group keeps increasing.

Models for a new assignment system are expected to be released this month, with a goal of adopting a new method in time for the
2010-11 school year.

“The current system is not working,” district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe has said.

Benjamin called the current assignment process “discouraging.”

“I’m putting out this effort and taking time to visit every school, then it’s up to SFUSD to make the final decisions,” Benjamin said. “It almost feels like a waste of time.”

Money matters: Parent Julie Kessler says she and her husband considered avoiding the public-school lottery system by sending son Clint to private school, but it was too much of a financial commitment for kindergarten.

Public vs. private shapes school choices

Bernal Heights parent Tom McVey said he is not worried if his 5-year-old son does not get into Flynn Elementary School, the family’s neighborhood campus and top public school choice.

“We’ve also looked at private schools,” McVey said. “No matter what happens, our kid’s going to get into a good school.”

Roughly 30.1 percent of students in San Francisco attended a private institution in the 2006-07 school year, the highest percentage of any county, according to California Department of Education data. Private school enrollment statewide is at 8.5 percent.

“We don’t know where they go,” SFUSD spokeswoman Gentle Blythe said. “We just know they don’t register with our
district.”

McVey said he and his wife, Rae Davis, visited 32 schools — public and private — and in January turned in a public school application with the maximum number of preferences, seven. He was “pleasantly surprised” with what he saw at the public elementary schools and choose schools that had language-immersion programs, in which students are taught in English but also a second language. They applied to three private schools, too.

McVey said in all schools, they not only looked at academics, but considered the overall feeling at the school, along with the structure of operation.

“We want to make sure whichever school he goes to, it fits his personality,” McVey said.

Parent Julie Kessler said she and her husband, who live in the Mount Davidson area, considered private elementary school for son Clint, but opted to apply for a spot in The City’s public-school system for now.

They are hoping to get into Miraloma Elementary School, which is close to their home.

“[Private schools] really to me seemed like something I’d wait for until fifth grade,” she said. “It’s a lot of money personally for us for kindergarten.”

Placement amounts to game of chance for some

The three public elementary schools that parent Jenny Benjamin and her husband picked for their daughter are all in high demand: Sunset, Lawton and Ulloa.

With slimmer odds, Benjamin said she is gearing up for the district’s second round of the application process.

“I know I’m not going to get my Round 1 pick,” she said. “So I’ll have to do this all over again.”

The deadline for the second round is March 27. Some parents say families have a higher probability of getting their top choices in the second round because some assignments at well-regarded schools are not taken by parents who decide to send their child to private school.

This year, a higher number of applicants may also diminish the chances of families getting a preferred school assignment.

According to SFUSD Superintendent Carlos Garcia, roughly 500 more kindergarten applications were received this year than expected. The increase is bigger than the previous two years combined.

Last year, 63 percent of applicants for kindergarten spots received their first choice in Round 1, according to the district. Roughly 80 percent of sixth-graders and 68 percent of ninth-graders were also placed in their No. 1 choices. Overall, 82 percent of applicants received one of their choices, leaving more than 2,000 families who were not placed in any of the schools they chose.

The odds are further increased when factoring in the number of spots given to families who already have a child at a school, thus receiving a sibling preference for their application.

Benjamin said despite her frustration with the assignment process, next year she might not take the advantage of sibling preference for her other son.

“They have different personalities,” she said of her children. “What’s good for her might not be good for him. That’s both the beauty and the terrible part of this system.”

What are the odds?

Percentages of parents who received one of their preferred choices for school assignments, their top choice, or none of their choices:

Source: San Francisco Unified School District

Process of elimination

A historical look at the San Francisco Unified School District’s school- assignment system:

• 1978: The NAACP files a lawsuit against the school district and the California Department of Education on behalf of a group of black parents whose children had been assigned to racially segregated schools.
• 1983: The lawsuit is settled with a consent decree, or court order, that mandates reforms the district must make to improve academic achievement and desegregate schools. District implements racial caps at schools that limit the number of students of one race to 45 percent.
• 1994: The families of several schoolchildren of Chinese descent file a class-action lawsuit against the state, the school district and the NAACP challenging the consent decree as a denial of their rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
• 1999: The lawsuit is settled with an agreement that race will not be used in deciding school assignments.
• 2001: The consent decree is extended until Dec. 31, 2005, and a new assignment system is created that uses a “diversity index,” which considers six socioeconomic factors — not including race — when assigning students to popular schools.
• 2005: A UCLA report on SFUSD’s assignment system concludes that there maintains “a pattern of continuing resegregation at close to half of the district schools since 1999.”
• 2005: Consent decree is closed on Dec. 31, by decision of a federal judge.
• 2008: San Francisco civil grand jury recommends dismantling current enrollment lottery system and reverting to offering families preference at neighborhood schools while redrawing school boundaries.
• 2008: Board of Education convenes an Ad Hoc Committee to create a new student assignment system for the 2010-11 school year.

akoskey@sfexaminer.com