Case of the Moving High School (edit this)
Newcomer is one of the jewels of SFUSD. Students throughout the world come to San Francisco and if they are between the ages of 14-18, they have a good chance of attending Newcomer for their first year.
Its campus is located on Jackson Street in Pacific Heights. As any real estate person can tell you, any investment in a building depends on three things “Location, Location, Location.” So it was deemed that the Newcomer campus would be sold or rented. City College’s staff saw the location and immediately saw the possibilities. So a deal was struck between the two district’s staff that City College would rent the site for $4.2 million over two years.
The students and staff at Newcomer were scheduled to move to Edision Charter Elementary School at 3531 22nd St. (Mission/Noe Valley) Newcomer staff and students complained about issues of students getting jumped at the BART stations and various bus lines to Edison. (Immigrant students are sometimes specifically targeted by gangs and others for robbery and assault.) But district staff proceeded and stated on the notices about the meetings on school closure that Newcomer was slated to move to Edison’s location. But they forgot one thing-they didn’t tell Edison’s students, staff and parents. Under state law, SFUSD has to provide facilities to all charter schools-and Edison immediately threatened a lawsuit on the forced move to another location.
So SFUSD announced that they were moving to Newcomer to Cabrillo Elementary School, 735 24th Avenue (Richmond). Cabrillo Elementary School was closed this year and there weren’t any concerns on being the Newcomer students being harassed on the transit lines to Cabrillo. But the District realized that Erikson School, a private school that provides an education to our special needs students, could be expanded if they moved to Cabrillo. Since Erikson does a great job and is less expensive than other schools provided the same services, it was decided to move Erikson from its location on Page Street to Cabrillo.
So District staff announced that Newcomer would moved to Mission High School. Mission High School immediately mobilized and complained that they were not part of the process of determining that half of their school would be used for other uses. Newcomer complained that they were being put in someone else’s location and would not be able to have the same space that they needed for their students. But on a positive note, the students and staff of Mission and Newcomer united together to protest the District’s plans to move Newcomer into Mission even “temporarily” (the District is noted to not move on temporary plans-and those temporary plans become permanent). To its credit, Mission’s staff and students complained to the District about not including Newcomer in its decisions on the move.
So the District relented and again decided to move Newcomer to Cabrillo’s former site in the Richmond. No word on what happened to moving Erikson to Cabrillo.
Meanwhile, the residents of Pacific Heights rallied against having City College move into Newcomer’s former site on Jackson. They took their complaints to the trustees of City College and City College’s trustees rejected their staff’s recommendation to rent the Newcomer site on Jackson.
Yesterday, as Newcomer staff were busy packing boxes to move to Cabrillo (the District is giving them a set rate of $175 per person to pack an entire school and all of its classrooms), they were told that the District has changed its mind again.
As of Wednesday, June 27 (13 days after school is out), Newcomer is now scheduled to move to XCEL Academy’s former location at 1350 7th Avenue (Inner Sunset).
Newcomer and its students are a valuable part of the mission of San Francisco Unified School District. Its welcoming staff allows our newest scholars to acclimate themselves into their new country, their new city and their school family.
Continually changing the location of their school without input from the staff, teachers and the students sends a clear message to the Newcomer community that they are not being given the respect that they (and every school community within SFUSD) should receive from SFUSD’s central office.
Newcomer (and its students, teachers and staff) deserves better.
June 29th, 2006 at 7:12 pm e
I would dispute at least one point about this — that the district could have avoided the threatened lawsuit by Edison Schools Inc. No matter when SFUSD told Edison Schools about its plans — we don’t know when it did so — Edison could have (and would have, given its foul history) threatened costly, divisive legal action, as it did when SFUSD exercised its completely legitimate right to cancel its contract with Edison back in ‘01. (The Progressive/Green BOE members were united with Wynns, Kelly, Chin, Ackerman et al. on this issue!)’
Current law gives charter schools the right to cause immense harm to other schools, entire districts and children. That’s because charter schools are INTENDED to harm public education. They’re a key, Bush-administration-backed weapon in the attempt to weaken, destroy and fully privatize public education.
Currently, charters have the right to demand space from school districts even if it means displacing existing programs.
So, we just need to be clear that the situation regarding Edison’s lawsuit threat is not the fault of the district but of the forces pushing charters, which have given them the power to do immense harm.