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Busing and other attempts to respond to the desegregation decree have all but dismantled neighborhoods, creating a cruel Catch-22 situation.
It is poor children who are in most severe need of community support at school. They are the ones who have survival issues to deal with before they even get to the classroom. They are the ones who most need contact with responsible adults.
But in many cases, their schools are not connected to their communities, to their parents, or anything else in their lives, because inadequate funding and crazy responses to a 14-year-old federal court decree forbid any such connection.
Poor parents often cannot participate in their children's schools because those schools are across town. And for the same reasons, their children often are separated from the extra attention -- the social, after-school, and preschool programs -- needed to help them succeed academically.
If it has failed to improve the education opportunities of children, the court-mandated desegregation plan of 1983 has achieved a certain type of equality. It has managed to anger and alienate parents of every ethnic group in the city.
Feeling the pressure of that anger, the school district has attempted in recent years to decrease the amount of school busing by reconfiguring attendance zones surrounding neighborhood schools. The district also opened a few new neighborhood schools in places where they could draw diverse groups of children and fit the desegregation decree without significant busing.
These steps have stopped or reduced busing at 27 schools. But there won't be any more new neighborhood schools for a while. The school district is out of space and money.
"I dream of the day when all children can go to school in their neighborhoods, and they will be ethnically balanced," says the Educational Placement Office's Wells.
She's not likely to stop dreaming, or be out of a job, anytime soon.
Cesar Chavez Elementary School stands out from the heart of the Mission District because of the brightly colored mural that adorns its exterior. The school stands out from the rest of the school district because of its absurd combination of programs.
At Chavez Elementary, the legal system and ethnic politics have combined to create a situation that can only be described as schizophrenic.
Because of space limitations and the ethnic caps contained in the desegregation consent decree, many Latino children who live near Chavez Elementary are bused to school in other parts of the city. Meanwhile, to satisfy the caps, children are bused to Chavez from Chinatown and other parts of the city.
Once students from the neighborhood and elsewhere arrive at school, they are divided into several distinct programs: Chinese bilingual; Spanish bilingual; an Afrocentric track created in response to parent demand; deaf education; and a multicultural regime for all the children who don't fit into one of the others.
In other words, children are bused to Chavez Elementary to satisfy the racial dictates of a court decree -- and then, for academic reasons, they spend most of their days in classrooms with other children of their own ethnic groups.
Chavez Elementary has a Healthy Start Program and makes other efforts to provide the community benefits of neighborhood schools.
Still, Chavez Principal Pilar Mejia says, it's hard to get parents involved in the school when they don't live nearby. And the families of many of the school's students have no historical, geographi-cal, or logical connection whatsoever to Cesar Chavez Elementary School.
"They're having to work so much, having to care for their families," Mejia explains. "Having food [at school events] helps, whether it's a potluck or whether they all pitch in and have one or two parents make something."
Otherwise families miss dinner by the time they get to school and back.
From its perch atop a hill near Highway 101 and the Cow Palace, Visitacion Valley Middle School has a view of the entire valley for which it is named. It is an appropriate location for a school that's sticking its nose in everyone's business.
In the last three decades, Visitacion Valley has gone from Italian enclave to African-American community to Chinese neighborhood. Now, the Valley's an ethnic grab bag. The school is populated almost entirely by kids from its surrounding neighborhood. The kids speak a variety of languages. About 75 percent of them live in poverty, which is well above the average for San Francisco.
Otherwise, though, Visitacion Valley Middle School is the happiest of ethno-educational accidents: It is almost perfectly racially integrated. No one is bused to or from the school for racial reasons, because it is within the ethnic dictates of the federal desegregation consent decree naturally.
The school appears to be headed in the right direction educationally, too.
Three years ago, the school got an internal makeover, via reconstitution and a new principal. And last year it got money.
Beyond its educational functions, Visitacion Valley is home to two government programs that are running simultaneously and appear to be working, separately and together.
Funded by a $400,000, three-year grant from the state, the Healthy Start Program has brought an array of social services from the state departments of Health Services and Public Health, St. Luke's Hospital, and various family service agencies onto the campus. And through the Mayor's Office of Children, Youth, and Families and a handful of private foundations, the school has obtained another $350,000 for a so-called Beacon Program. Started in New York City, Beacon programs are designed to turn schools into community centers.
The two programs provide the school with social workers to deal with social problems; a public health nurse to care for physical problems; and a handful of administrators to make sure the programs run smoothly. There are coaches and tutors, lawyers (San Francisco Bar Association volunteers do pro bono work for families), and cops (via the S.F. Police Department's Wilderness Program).
