Each May, some 4,000 teens graduate from San Francisco public schools. But while the annual pomp and circumstance of high school commencement might feel routine, for some students, graduation is an achievement they had to fight for.
Makda Beyene, 18, graduated from Mission High School on Wednesday. Less than three years ago, when the recent immigrant from Eritrea was sleeping in church basements with her mother and three younger siblings, that goal seemed impossibly far away. Read More
Angered by budget cuts proposed by the San Francisco Unified School District, the teachers union is one step closer to striking after 97 percent of the nearly 2,000 teachers who showed up to a general membership meeting Thursday cast ballots in favor of calling a vote to strike.
“We’ve never had a strike vote with that many people voting and that high a percentage,” said Matthew Hardy, a spokesman for the union. Turnout was about 32 percent of the union’s membership. Read More
It isn’t often that Cesar Chavez Elementary in the Mission has out-of-town visitors, but on a recent afternoon school staffer Carlo Solis led a dozen people from as far away as Washington, D.C., across the yard.
As children in the after-school program tossed a rubber ball around beneath a colorful mural of the school’s namesake, Solis offered tips on how to get busy parents to come to school events. Read More
A well-regarded nationwide chain of charter schools is seeking to open a high school in San Francisco in 2013.
Knowledge Is Power Program, which is better known as KIPP and has operated two middle schools in The City for nearly a decade, has petitioned the San Francisco Unified School District for a charter to open a high school. The chain includes 61 middle, 30 elementary and 18 high schools in urban areas nationwide. Read More
As negotiations over an employment contract appear to have stalled, the San Francisco Unified School District’s teachers union will meet next week for the first of two votes that could authorize leaders to call for a strike. Read More
San Francisco’s school board voted unanimously Tuesday to levy a special property tax that will cover seismic and safety upgrades to schools.
The board’s decision to levy the tax in 2012-13 was a formality, as voters already authorized the measure by a two-thirds majority in June 2010. Read More
Richard Carranza will be the next superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, after the Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday in favor of a $245,000, three-year contract for him.
Carranza, who has been the district’s deputy superintendent for the past three years, will take over for retiring Superintendent Carlos Garcia in July. Read More
Mayor Ed Lee recently took the San Francisco Unified School District to task for failing to sell or lease its surplus property. But a new report suggests The City has idle hands of its own when it comes to extracting revenue from surplus property. Read More
An education advocacy group gave the San Francisco Unified School District horrible marks this week for the subpar performance of black and Hispanic students and the size of the so-called achievement gap between these students and their white peers. Read More
After months of touring schools and filling out applications, many San Francisco parents were finally able to relax this week, as their school assignments arrived in the mail.“I’ve been losing sleep over this for almost the last year,” said Grace Briones, who was relieved to learn Saturday that her daughter would attend Alice Fong Yu Alternative School, one of the highest-performing campuses in the San Francisco Unified School District. Read More
