Kindergarten For Some

Yet another way charter schools work to manage their student load in ways actual public schools cannot: enforcing their own Kindergarten entry cut-off dates.  Private schools do this too, officially or unofficially.  I've been told that some local public schools strongly encourage their own cut-off dates to some parents, but even if that's true it's not something they can enforce.

That said, I'm still leery of the new Kindergarten entry cut-off points - especially as TK disappears, I don't see any evidence that the earlier cut-off will lead to more socially and academically ready students.  I think they'll be bigger, but another year with nothing than more aging is not a panacea to Kindergarten readiness.

Budget Comes Back to Bite.

We use a big chunk of our site budget to buy mental health support at my site.  We are one of the District's schools in a partnership with UCSF, which provides us professional development and a post-doc therapist. That's free to us.  The STAR program buys you a half-time Learning Support Professional - more or less a school social worker.  Our school budgets to make that a full-time position.

We also have had PIP, a play therapy program.  I spend a decent chunk of my time scheming how to get as many of my students as possible into the sixteen available K-3 slots.  This is a state Early Mental Health Initiative program and I've been to the EMHI conference twice through this program (extremely worth it from a professional development perspective; also, I like to wear my nice clothes and breezily inform acquaintances that I am "traveling for work").

Last year, as part of our giant annual Edgewood contract, we had a full-time Behavior Support Coach.  The coach did social-emotional skills groups, one on one counseling, and worked with classes whose dynamic had taken a bad turn - for instance, the class whose teacher went into early labor, thereby leaving before expected, in a way frightening for some students, and without a ready-to-go long-term substitute.  This was a huge support, so we budgeted it in this year.  We couldn't afford it without support from Edgewood's own state grants.

We heard today that we won't have a BSC next year.

This is frightening, not only because we are expecting the same bunch of smart kids with more than anyone's fair share of trauma, but also because word has it that we will be getting a decent number of kids from Willie Brown.

Willie Brown's last year was apparently not so awesome.  This story hints at the problems a bit, but the teacher grapevine included really miserable reports, and any time the principal's replaced halfway through the year you know things are bad.  I think we can expect that the kids from Willie Brown are likely to be dealing with the psychological implications of their last year there, and it's not too hard to imagine that they will be academically behind.

It strikes me that if we're getting some of these kids, we really need all the help we can get.  A lot of high-needs schooling is relationships, and we don't have any with these kids.  Moreover, their last school experience puts us in the red to start: it's all the school district, after all.

Here's hoping something good happens to get us our Behavior Coach back.

It Really is an Apocalypse. Huh.

Since Governor Brown and the Legislature don't take welfare benefits, nor for the most part attend college, nor use Medi-Cal, the effects of the budget they just passed won't impact them.

Of course, it's plenty of pain for the neediest and not a bit of it for the wealthy.

This is a de facto K-12 cut, since the repayment of past IOUs to schools has been...limited at best.  I think it's fair to assume that the $3 billion dollars the state is delaying will be delayed a very long time.  And that's before the $1.5 billion cut we can look forward to when the revenue projections don't quite work out.

So this budget manages to burn the poor while not even lightly toasting the wealthy.  This isn't a scorched earth strategy, and it's not a dose of Brown's Reality Syrup for the voter.  It's just bad policy for bad reasons.

Budget Follies

I follow the California budget process because it has a massive effect on my livelihood.  It's also somewhat entertaining, in the sense an excruciatingly bad movie is entertaining.

For those who do not follow the budget, a recap: the May revise had improved revenues in it, so the state Republicans announced that there were to be no new or extended taxes and no cuts, either.  The Governor also lives in Fantasyland, so he continued to attempt to come up with some kind of pension-destroying/tax extension plan with four "moderate" Republicans while threatening an all-cuts budget otherwise.

The state Democrats, having already voted in ten billion dollars of cuts, gimmicked out the rest and presented their budget.  The Governor vetoed it, because he is a straight-talking forthright ex-seminarian ready to give the state - or at least its poorest residents - their medicine to score a political point.

Oh, wait: he vetoed it because we all must be honest and adult.  Except those of us who are largely inoculated from an all-cuts budget, like our Governor.

The Controller announced that the budget wasn't balanced, anyway, so now our state representatives are not being paid.  This is a case of the ballot initiative process striking again; it's also brought you anti-reality measures like Prop. 13, state-mandated racism like 187 and 209, PG&E funded campaigns, and a multi-million special election (courtesy our last Governor).  Not to mention Proposition 8.

Given that the legislature is not being paid, I think we can all assume a budget pretty soon here.  Today's Foreclosure Vulture Political Social Diarists column in the Chronicle reports the Rethuglicans have not been invited to the latest budget talks, Jerry Brown still wants 50:1 classrooms until Californians agree to pay taxes (not that, you know, they don't: Prop. 13 means we can't even vote on it right now), and the Democrats are eating Ramen and are therefore grumpy and not accomodating.

A position I hope they hold.

Hell hath no hincty like a charter school advocated questioned.

Hello, I am whining:

So it ends up if you wonder how charter schools are budgeting themselves into reduced class sizes, increased arts programs, more expensive food programs and better benefit packages on a regular school budget, you are totally anti-child.

Also, you may not be a teacher.  And any time you take off over the summer means you are a lousy teacher.

Additionally, if you ask about a school's changing demographics, this means you are racist, because you are inadequately colorblind.  If you suggest that colorblindness is a disease of privilege, you are mean.

So let me make myself abundantly clear in my own sandbox: I have yet to receive answers to any of my questions about Edison Charter School's financing.

I am over bothering to comment on the article, although I was intending to post this one but I think the site is broken:


You're inadvertently getting at the problem: if a charter - which is not a regular public school - has its arts program intact and the regular public schools don't, there is some kind of funding issue going on.


(The SF Weekly article suggested, by the way, that the difference in student services was entirely due to a slightly lower starting teacher salary.  That's not possible; it adds up to about $40,000 total and if Edison also offers better benefits is entirely offset.  I'm wondering if charter schools are exempt from paying the average teacher cost, because that would be a big pile of money if they have a young, low-seniority teaching staff.  For instance, although I am a high-salary teacher, I do not take benefits from SFUSD and therefore my school loses $25,000 annually by having to pay an average - just on me.)


It is almost always a funding inequity, since school finance in California works to provide charter schools with additional per-student dollars.


(This is true; there's a recent study out about it.)


That's unfair and inequitable to the vast majority of children in California who DON'T attend charter schools - which, AGAIN, have been shown to be no better than regular public schools.


(This is true, repeatedly demonstrated and reported.  Yet somehow it doesn't seem to catch on.)


We need an equitable school funding situation, not one that prioritizes some learners over others.  And minding one's own business in such a scenario doesn't help anyone; it condones inequality.  That's fine if you don't agree, and you're quite welcome to cast aspersions on my character and profession.  However, I am entitled to my opinion, and it is based on actual facts.  None of us are entitled to our own facts.


(Charter school advocates are hincty hinky!  Uppity and suspicious.  They're like a bunch of Birchers seeing socialism in the hissing of a gas grill - the best ever image in a New York Times story, by the way.)

Blah Blah Blah Nutrition vs. Budget

So the latest bugbear in the budget battle is School Nutrition Programs: in particular, those bad and rotten schools who are not getting the frightening looking, detailed, available only in a few languages* FRPL forms.

No doubt, $500,000 in uncollected lunch money is a drag.  However, if SNS wants 100% meal forms, they're going to have to stop demanding schools come up with them without support.  You want the forms?  Send out administrators and volunteers to sit with parents, to come to the after school programs, to do home and community center visits and get the forms yourself.  I managed to get a mess in at Parent Teacher Conferences this year, which necessitated getting a third set of forms, getting a list of whose forms weren't in, wasting conference time on getting the forms done, and paperwork.  These are not tasks listed in my job responsibility.

Also, SNS didn't send a letter on lunch balances until the end of the year, and if your child has already accrued a $300 debt...it's overwhelming, even for parents who can afford it.  Also, I am not going to be collecting money for SNS.  I do my level best to collect and retain all K money that comes in for lunches, and I stage this drama "Money Does Not Have a Name on It" with the custodian every year (it is a big, big hit).  If you want the money, send a letter by post biweekly and follow up with a phone call.


If these tasks are too difficult, then take the hit every year.  It's like the Lifetouch send-home-then-pay photos: I am not a cash collection service.  I do not encourage or countenance not paying, but my time needs to go into my classroom.  My credits with families are carefully built over years.  I am not spending them on becoming a collection agency.

Also, if you're going to publish these, you might take a moment to think about why southeast side schools "owe" more than, oh, Clarendon.  The blame falls unequally, and get this: it also accrues unequally.

Aaaaand don't blame me for you running out of cash for hot lunch.  This isn't a new line item.  Budget it.  Goodness knows the Central Office could pull it out of supplies and Legal Services (SFUSD: you lose so many access cases - stop litigating some of them!).

Aaaaaaand it's time for SNS to take the time to send out a damn flyer on how lunch needs to happen.  They assume the principals will do this.  Experience should show that they don't.  Everything I know about school lunch (don't touch it myself, make the kids take everything, etc.) I either knew before I started in this district or learned from the Chronicle.






*Online availability assumes computer access, SNS and friends.

Superintendents Can't Fail

During the first week of professional development before I started my first year of teaching, the Superintendent of the District came to do a meet-and-greet with Kindergarten teachers.  He mumbled genially about how boys and girls are different even in Kindergarten to a room packed with slack-jawed, horrified educators.

Within two months, he was out.  There were five different Superintendents (counting interims) that year.

The guy they finally hired came to my classroom on the second day of school the next year.  Our school had had massive renovations.  We were hoping to show him that these renovations had not included fixing a badly-leaking wet wall that would, along with a large hole in the roof, lead to the utter destruction of the Kindergarten storage room.  That did not happen, since this Superintendent arrived surrounded by a large entourage of educrats, all of whom apparently had critical things that had to be said while I was teaching.  Such was the affect of the Superintendent, coupled with the noise, that three children immediately burst into tears.

That guy didn't finish the year either, although before he left he was chased across the school lawn by our school secretary, bearing the (newly deceased) black widow that had occupied the lock mechanism of the Kindergarten bathroom.  (Really.)

None of these folks went into retirement, though: they just went on to new jobs.  Usually, they brought golden parachutes with them as thanks from their old Districts.  Those parachutes cushioned them from the fall of their eventual post-retirement pensions, which often were as much as fifty thousand dollars less than the several hundred thousand they were used to earning annually (not counting post-retirement consulting fees, of course).

Nor do they typically leave a long record of success behind.  I outlasted nine Superintendents in my old school District; none of them presided over increased achievement.  Rod Paige's "Texas Cheat-a-Thon Miracle" took him all the way to national office.  Chicago hasn't seen much from its Renaissance, but Arne Duncan sure did.  Jean-Claude Brizard left behind angry teachers and unhappy parents in Rochester to take on CPS.  And let's not start on ex-Chancellor Rhee.

These Superintendents like to talk about accountability, but they themselves are accountable for nothing. They're ever eager to introduce various value-added schemes for teachers, but never for themselves.  They criticize teacher pensions, but do not fail to take their own in full.  They preside over layoffs and budget cuts but find no reason to take any pay cuts themselves.  In short, they are far too often hypocrisy in action.

I haven't seen Waiting for Superplutocrats - I have this thing about controlling my blood pressure - but I understand that the lazy, rotten, nogoodnik public school teacher types sleep while their students fail to learn in this movie.

I don't actually know how that works.  If I fell asleep in my classroom, two students would immediately dispatch themselves to run to the office to alert officialdom.  Three more would make a child tower to get at the Magical Mysteries of the Top Shelves.  The rest would tickle and/or suffocate me.  I don't even have a teacher's desk to sit behind, brooding, while my students have snail races/give each other haircuts/become depressed in a miasma of union-loving child hate.  My class can more or less leave me alone to do Guided Reading and/or assessment, but that's due to months of training (and is made much easier this year thanks to having a Resident).  Moreover, part of the 'leave E. Rat alone' compact is that you will eventually get your turn with the teacher, and you don't want anyone to interrupt it.

This week was a bit difficult.  In addition to some time at the vet, it ends up that part of aging is developing really miserable allergies to life itself.  It was also a week featuring things I find difficult (paper management: field trip permission slips, forms for certain school programs, thank yous to mail) and anxiety-inducing (putting together technological items like incubators, making sure no one jumps in the pond on the field trip, eighty seven thousand little tasks that are in themselves exceptionally easy but become this Doomy Doom in my head).

Also, I had this at my home, waiting for perusal.  And someone gave me a set of these.

So what I really wanted to do was spend hours lettering folders, permission slips, awards and similar for my students, taking breaks only to read my exhibition guide and to blow my nose, cough, sneeze and rub my eyes.

What I did instead was run the annual Read an Eggathon (we have an egg hunt, but with words in the eggs and stickers for prizes), get a snootful of pollen on our buddy picnic field trip (DUCKLINGS!), set up the incubator and leave my new fancy book in its overwrap.

The stars therefore granted me a Donors Choose of fine, fine construction paper - the kind that is smooth, crisp, bright and probably miserable for the planet - and twenty boxes of glitter crayons.  Perhaps one day one of my Kindergartners will rate their own fine museum exhibition of couture, and I will attend as a guest of honor in a bespoke dress.  THANKS TO THE GLITTER CRAYONS.

In other news, SFUSD indicates that - Oops!  Sorry again! - the coming year is NOT the worst.  The one after that could be even more dire!  At this point, I am presuming that if the state passes a budget before August 15 I'll be laid off thanks to the late window.  I'm also frightened by the increasing class sizes forecast for SFUSD (and thankful to the district for keeping them low as yet in K-3).  I started teaching after class-size reduction; I have a hard time imagining 31 students.  And the supports that made 31 more manageable (paraeducators, AM/PM Kinder with co-teaching) are gone, while the standards for students are much higher (and the school year even shorter).

Moreover, what with the financial crisis, every year more of my students are under stress.  In the four years I've been at my school, every year student mobility goes up.  I got a new student this week, for instance.  Of my students who have moved away, most if not all of their moves were directly due to losing housing/relatives losing housing (often complicated by violence and family members' passing).  This year I've held SSTs for seven students; about half my class is receiving some kind of school-provided social-emotional service.  Those are services that we may not be able to afford.

So beyond the academic requirements, the empathy and care needed for a class of 31 at a high-needs school in an ill-funded environment is at the 'psychic vampire' level.  It's hard to listen to education reform rhetoric about failing schools, failing teachers and "we already tried money" and believe they are anything other than self-assured, knowing liars who have enough time to read their Savage Beauty catalogues and enough money to send their own progeny to highly-supportive, exceptionally expensive private academies.

Today is Kindergarten Day! Yay!

Hooray!  For once, the rain has stopped in time for a field trip.  Of course, since it's a picnic with our buddy class, even yesterday's rain is unfortunate.  We'll have to squash a bit on the benches.

This article on basic aid districts' finances (vs. revenue limit districts') gets at the vast inequity in school funding that feeds the ability of the haves to ignore the have nots.  It also features the basic aid districts' lament - their funding has taken a bigger dollar-per-student hit than revenue limits'.  In the last days of Gray Davis, when he threatened the inequity, you heard this a lot.

Of course, when you have three times as much to start with, a bigger dollar cut has less impact.  That can't be forgotten.  If the Governor presents an all-cuts budget that does not push state cash to basic aid districts down to the actual basic aid level, I predict a future one woman march in Sacramento.

In other news, it appears that this coming year may not yet be the worst for SFUSD finances.  I hope that we stop saying "This next one has to be the worst!  It has to get better!" because it's so depressing when the next budget cycle comes.

Happily, it looks like I will probably get a Donors Choose grant wrapped up pretty soon, so I should have construction paper next year.

Ponies, Pegasi and Ice Cream for All!

Confidential to the California state GOP:

If you're going to go around telling the media that all you wanted were a few little pension and regulatory reforms to allow a special election, maybe you shouldn't release your seven pages of demands to the LA Times.

Actually, never mind.  Go ahead: the New York Times will acknowledge that perhaps there were other issues, but largely back up your story.  Dan Walters will claim that the voters support your positions...while signaling in favor of an all-cuts budget with (presumed) political reprisals from the voters (that's cute.  I guess Dan doesn't have any school children).

None of these sources will mention that you demanded a special election for not five years but eighteen months of tax continuances.  (I saw ONE mention of this, in the San Jose Mercury News.)  They will also fail to mention that you are demanding redevelopment funds be continued, for tort reform, end QEIA funding (even though it works!), and muck around with teachers' contracts.

Oh!  And all those teachers and state workers who've given up whatever they've put into Social Security should also accept our brutal changes to their pension plan - current AND future workers.

That's a lot of free giveaways in exchange for one and a half years of piddling tax continuances.

This is not a story with two sides that are equally partisan and radical.  This is a story of a deeply radical right wing and a center-right Democratic party.  Nor is there a winner and a loser: everybody loses.

Let's remember the Late Layoff Window.

The whole 15 March/15 May layoff thing is not entirely true, you know.  I mean, it makes its appearance in  every story about the catastrophic budget cuts awaiting us (possibly $1000 per pupil now).  But that doesn't make it true.

The Ed Code (44955.5) allows late layoffs within five days' of the state's budget being passed and 15 August...if per-pupil funding doesn't get at least a 2% increase (or, as I like to call it, "annually").

I don't know what exactly they mean by "state's budget".  Does that mean a complete budget, balanced and everything?  Or would the half-budget we have now suffice?  If the state has to have a complete and total budget, I think we can assume that it would be hard-pressed to have one by 15 August.

Still, this is a real possibility.  This 2009 Chronicle blog post reports that the late window may have never been used, but I think that's out of date now (I'm pretty sure they were used later that year.  Last year the budget was so late I don't think the window opened).

And given just how bad things are going to be, barring amazing budget dodges - maybe some of Speaker Perez's plans will be easier to enact since the budget only needs a majority vote this year - I think we better not assume there will be no late window RIFs.

...Or for that matter, late resignations.  I don't care what happens in November locally or statewide to provide school funding: we have almost three months of school year before then to suffer through.  And it will be suffering.  High needs schools, as always, will get the worst of it: more teacher layoffs, no cash-rich PTA to spackle over the gaping holes, more students feeling the outside-the-classroom impacts of the massive safety net cuts (you go to work with an infected abscess in your mouth and see how well you do, now that we've cut dental benefits for poor children) on the state level.

And we can look forward to federal cuts, too.  Nothing like a little starvation to ensure bad learning outcomes, and the food stamp cuts the Rethuglican* Congress is proposing will make malnutrition easier.

Given that, who wants to teach?  There is a huge emotional component to the work, but it shouldn't be ministering.  The situation we are in makes it missionary work, not education.  Teachers have lives outside the classroom; while their students so desperately need their emotional energy they have less left for their families and friends.  That's unfair to everyone and unsustainable for educators.

I have a science proposal on Donors Choose that is about to expire not fully funded.  I think I had better start writing some for pencils, socks and toothbrushes so I'm ready for when it does.

*Seriously.  If you do bad things to the neediest people - and unambiguously, that Congress does - you are a thug.  I am tired of civil behavior glossing over the real, brutal impacts of the budget cuts being demanded for economically imaginary reasons.

The Good, The Bad, The Irritating

GOOD.

• Going to the "Balenciaga and Spain" exhibit this week with another stylish Kindergarten teacher.
• Jeremy's Sweeps sale brought this Armani salvage dress I'd been admiring since November to my home.  It's a little big, which makes it just right for Kindergarten wearing.
• On break!  I'm going in one day to work and feed the snails and once to feed the snails and that's it.
• At long last, I am clearing my closet and divvying up the rejects.
• It seems reasonably likely that I will get another Resident Teacher next year.  I really think it's a neat program for teacher training and I love having a second adult in my room all the time.

BAD.

• Still at 7 of 15 classroom teachers laid off.
• What with the state budget and the all-talk-and-hand-wringing attitude toward equity in SFUSD, it's hard to imagine that changing.
• Because I got very sick and actually had to leave school to go to the doctor, I still have two conferences to do.

IRRITATING.

• I read my District email and in my SFUSD News Blast there were some platitudinous, Hallmarky sentiments from our Superintendent.  These were along the lines of "Even though we laid off half your staff and told you to come up with a budget that provides a generous twelve cents a child, y'all need to focus on meeting our goals of access, achievement and accountability.  It is just not Beyond the Talk to talk about all the stuff you're cutting and all your colleagues who are leaving."

...which, you know, is a lot easier a sentiment to talk about than to have, and one easier to have if you're not actually laid off and, frankly, make more than four of those laid off teachers do combined yet have taken no pay cut beyond furlough days.  It's also easier to stand up for those important values if I will be doing all the actual standing while you blame the state funding situation.  And it's a whole lot easier not to think about the people who might not be there if they don't comprise half the teaching staff of your site.

• I filled out my survey about the 4 March PD.  Even though my actual name is on it, I tried to be honest, although I ended up putting in a lot of "don't knows".  (Also, the questions were kind of...I dunno, they were more about "Do you understand that we are doing inclusion and you better like it" than "Was the presenter good?  Do you feel we are ready for the important work of moving toward a services model?  What do you need to be ready for that model?" Of course, maybe these questions are only of primary importance to K-6-9 teachers this year.)  
• Since I read the big report when it was released, I did not learn a lot of new facts.  Since someone at my school sits on the committee for this redesign, I generally can have all my questions answered right away.  Yet I have no idea how this will work out next year, and the parking lot questions I submitted have not been answered.

...this worries me because I am getting the feeling that, barring an incredible amount of work over the summer, the rollout is going to be pretty atrocious.  Again, it's easy to have a plan for an overdue redesign and it's a lot harder to live out that plan, particularly in a budget scenario like the one we've got.

I may be feeling this especially hard this week because I have had a lot of interaction with various service providers over the last couple of months.  Some have been awesome.  For instance, I filed a PT screen and heard from the screener the day she received it.  The screener also said she'd be happy to provide suggestions on activities and/or modifications in general: YAY!  Some have been teeth-grinding.  I feel like SFUSD's over-identification of poor children of color has among some providers led to a refusal to do any screening of poor children of color, even when a room full of professionals and the child's parents agree that despite the child's remarkable gifts, we are struggling to provide the experiences that will allow the child to learn.  I still think that screening - or just observing and providing suggestions - would cut down on over-identification while helping all children excel.  Yet more than once I've had the experience of asking for advice/observation and being given the strong sense that asking for help means that I am abdicating my responsibility for going Beyond the Talk.

And I'm not alone in that sense.  The attitude that educators are getting is toxic.  It inspires educators to avoid asking for help.  The children struggle, the educators struggle.  No one is happy.  No one is supported.

...and don't even get me started on RtI.  I am of the strong opinion (it's the ADHD) that little modifications should be widely available to all people, and that children benefit from knowing when they need a fidget/a deep breath or that they need a pencil grip/noise-canceling headphones to succeed.  So the idea of RtI seems great.  But a lot of RtI actually requires supplies, and while I did sew my own weighted stuffed animals and bought my own special pencils and HWT magna boards, I can't spend all of my money this way.  (It cuts down on my New York vacation pin money, and quite honestly a little souvenir from the Met isn't going to cut it.  I'm thinking dress.)

A quick scan at the numbers

...suggests that I won't have to worry too much about reading people ripping on my school (about which they know nothing).  SFUSD has some enrollment statistics out, and I'm going to guess based on my read of these that the people who will not be happy to have been assigned our school are not also the kind of people to complain about same on the internet.


If the offers match the population we enroll, our school will remain fairly diverse but continue in its general direction (more Latino and Asian children, fewer African American children).  (Our school has been diverse but in flux for a number of years, and diversity should be understood to mean "few if any white children".)

In this we are not common, and I will be interested to see what the new assignment system does for district-wide school diversity.  There are some stunning numbers in the data release - 78% of offers at Grattan, for instance, are to white children.  (This would tend to suggest that the idea that the nefarious and secret discriminatory quota policies of SFUSD will finally die, but I both digress and doubt it.)

In other news, I think we must have won the Layoff Sweepstakes but SFUSD doesn't seem as inclined to let us have the data on that this year.  (Perhaps because we disseminated it so widely.  You should've seen Eric Mar!  I thought his eyes would pop out of his head.)  In between noting that there are solutions to inequitable layoffs that don't involve overturning unions or turning to education deform, I managed to get my crafty layoff posters up this week.  So now we turn up the noise.

I mean, like to 11.  That's the problem with laying off all the young things: they can still organize and get loud AND show up to teach tomorrow.

Simply, SFUSD cannot claim to be going "Beyond the Talk" if they are willing to lay off nearly half of our staff.  How many elementary classroom teachers got pink-slipped?  Less than fifty.  There are what, eighty elementary schools in the District?  And my school gets seven of those?  It's not about seniority: it's about equal opportunity.

The district's courage should not rest entirely in its southeast side teachers - but it does.  Their annual reward for doing a job that the state refuses to fund and the district refuses to value is a pink slip.  What does that say about access and equity?  Given SFUSD's long history of failing poor children of color, there is a pressing need to build relationships and trust.  Boo-hoo-hooing about seniority and legal requirements is fine - but you can't also pretend that you aim to build that trust.

Hence: 11.  Or louder.

So, Those Administrators Got Their Contracts Yet?

Teacher layoff notices went out.  At least 40% of our staff is getting noticed.

I'll go ahead and predict that will put us toward the top of the list of most heavily affected schools.

I'll go one step further and predict that all of those top schools will be located on the southeast side.

It's not even a step to predict that those top southeast side schools would all qualify as "high needs".

Of course, this has no implication for equity and equal opportunity AT ALL.

And by making this an annual course of action, SFUSD does not in any way question its real commitment to radical, "Beyond the Talk" change.

...oh wait.  No, it actually IS inequitable and worsens the systemic problem of high teacher turnover at high needs schools.  And again, we receive annual proof that when it comes to the real tough decisions - the kind that take more than a press release and are unlikely to provide awards to Superintendents - are so far Beyond the Talk that we can't even talk about them (SFUSD Legal said so!  And they've never been wrong, nor has any other lawyer or court ever disagreed...which is why we don't actually need a judicial system.).

I haven't personally received a letter (or communication from the union, which is typically what I get first - I haven't actually picked up or signed for a layoff letter in the last couple of years.  I leave them at the post office to rot sullenly in a miasma of wasted certificated mail fees).  Looking at the numbers, I have to figure I finally have enough seniority to not get laid off until the 60 day window (hee hee).  Of course, if I'm not getting one, then I need devote less time to personal worry and more time to raising Cain for those committed to equity administrators leading our District in these sad times.

In other news, I have created a monster.  I have a student whose name has the same letter twice in order.  One day that kid spelled it with three of the letter and I commented on that, which the child found hilarious.  The student now always spells the name with five of the letter.  We occasionally pronounce it accordingly.   Now that kid's best friend's name, which has its own doubled letter, is growing exponentially too.

We are big into fish printing right now.  The girls who are in after school are mad at me presently.  They snuck away from the program and came in the room to find me testing out a craft project.  Sneaking away from after school to explore The School By Late Afternoon is not allowed, so I sent them out, thereby selfishly hoarding all the good toys and games for myself.  As they see it.

I have an official request to make west African-inspired masks to go with the maracas and tambourines that will accompany our promotion performance.  I need to think on this one for a little bit.

Your Fat Cat Public Schools

Among the services cut for the year: hot breakfast.  During Hot Breakfast Month (February), we served 0 hot breakfasts.  Student Nutrition Services can't afford them anymore this year.

For me personally, this is great: I can't stand the smell of sausage.  For my students, particularly those for whom food insecurity is an issue, this is not so great.  As a statement of societal priorities: tax cuts before kids eat well! - it is moral bankruptcy.

Oh, SERIOUSLY.

Dear My Union Leadership,

While I recognize that official District notification of the Special Board Meeting would have been the right thing for the District to do (and that their failure to do so is offensive to their certificated staff and its collective voice)...

if I knew there was a meeting and by Saturday had already read the agenda, then you could have done the same.  I do not have mystical ESP.  The Superintendent does not update me on his nefarious plans to lay off teachers, yet refuse to share the pain personally.  Human Resources doesn't let me see the memos they send to the administrative officials whose contracts aren't getting renewed until after the teachers are officially out the door.  Etc.

In closing, I find your outreach initiative kind of amusing when I am not assuming best intentions.  Otherwise it's great.  It just strikes me that you might try to increase your outreach to your own members, particularly those at non-active school sites and those schools with young staffs first.

Cordially,

I remain,

E. Rat

P.S.  Please do continue to stand strong against "collaboration".

Optics Again, Scattered Pondering.

So long-term, I don't think it's such a great idea for SFUSD to claim annually that they are laying off 140 administrators.  They're not; they never are.  This year they have pretty much everyone except Garcia on the list of no-renewals.

Still, every year they non-renew-notice 140 or 168 or 100-odd administrators and mention it to the press.  Then they fail to mention the contracts they offer those people in the end.  I think this feeds the idea that administative offices are hugely bloated; if you are not following closely, SFUSD is losing 100+ administrators a year and always has another 100 that can be cut.  It suggests thousands of out-of-the-classroom jobs that don't exist.

Apparently SFUSD only wants 37 elementary layoffs, which is nice from a class-size perspective.  Schoolwise, not so nice (I think the number must be all of the first year teachers in the District?).  That's at least a third of our classroom staff.  (On the other hand, if that's really all they're doing this will be my first year without a certified mail on or around 15 March since I started working in SFUSD.  Huh.)

I'm wondering if there's going to be another round of letters in June for the 60 day window if the budget proposal and tax vote fail.  Certainly the 1 March meeting should be the only Board vote for March, right?  Running another list at the 8 March meeting would be skeevy.

I have this image of our school site and its highly photogenic, television-ready and quoteable educators as the Beckets to the District's King Henry.   Low layoffs or not, going Beyond the Talk means pushing for critical analysis of our decisions from an equity lens.  We'll be pushing that again this year.

Some things NEVER change.

Preparing for a $19 or a $330 cut per student in funding next year, SFUSD is as usual planning for massive teacher layoffs: 300 to 400, presumably with EduJobs and maybe with retirements counted in already.  This year, my school can actually anticipate more layoff letters; presuming the same plan as last year, the following will definitely be noticed:

• all of 1st grade
• 2/3 of 2nd grade
• all of 3rd grade
• 1/2 of 4th grade
• all of 5th grade

with an additional four notices if they also send layoff letters to teachers with four years' seniority in SFUSD (in which case, they will notice all but three classroom teachers).

Undoubtedly there will be plenty of hand-wringing about how terrible it is that the Superintendent and BoE are required to utterly upend high-needs schools, but they're going to do it anyway and get hinky if anyone suggests that it's their fault.  It's that mean state!

So let me be the first to assure SFUSD that it is, ultimately, their decision.  Going "Beyond the Talk" is a radical action.  Inequitable layoffs are a status quo action.  You can't balance these things out.  Blaming union contracts, seniority, etc. doesn't exonerate you.  The shady self-dealing of the state GOP (I can balance the budget and increase school funding, leaving a three billion dollar reserve: bet you can too!) doesn't exonerate you.  We need to take responsibility for our actions.

I do think SFUSD has options other than massive layoffs that still allow them to sign off on a budget (although I am tired of hearing about STATE TAKEOVER from those who would lose their jobs in that case, gotta say!).  Some of them are straightforward: time to make some big cuts at the top at the Central Office.  Frankly, 25% paycuts to all EDs, Senior Directors and Superintendents of every ilk are not too much to demand.  Legal needs to cut down on its use of the unrestricted General Fund, and like the Special Ed redesign, should be forced to account for its legal decisions (SFUSD: Fighting Every Access Ramp Since 1901).  I recognize that Legal is used to being the end all on all law, but I must note that their opinion is just that.  (FYI, Legal?  Your opinion on layoffs and equity?  LAUSD settled.  Because they were going to lose ugly.)

In other news:

• I have an offsite PD thingamajig today, which means that I cannot walk to work and must get on the bus.  BOO.
• As of yesterday afternoon, I was 40% to filling a Donors Choose grant to get a big big fan and a space heater for my classroom.  We have already lost heat twice this year, and 40s classrooms with full-wall window exposures need the heavy artillery in air circulation technology.  Of course, going Beyond the Talk might be construed to mean the District should undertake liveability issues, but I still have lead pipes in my classroom so I suppose not.