The controversial principal of Paul Revere Elementary School in Bernal Heights was sentenced Tuesday to community service hours instead of jail time in connection with a DUI arrest last month in which she allegedly sideswiped two vehicles just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. Read More
Lisa Willson and her partner, both emergency medical technicians, know firsthand how important it is for children to learn how to swim when they live in a city surrounded by water.
“We both see more than we want to, near-drownings mostly,” said Willson, whose son, Zachary, is 5. “It’s hard, especially with children.”
Click on the image to the right to see more information about the pool situation in San Francisco. Read More
Vianey Espinoza can still remember what a school official told her class when she began her freshman year at the Sunset district’s Abraham Lincoln High School.
Asking the assembled 14-year-olds to look around at their peers, he predicted that half of them would leave school without a diploma. And most of those dropouts would be black or Hispanic.
“You guys set yourself up for failure,” she recalls him saying. Read More
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
