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There are after-school programs for kids; English, computer, and parenting classes for adults. Tutoring, recreational activities, and even baby-sitting classes are provided. The Village, a housing project in the neighborhood, uses the school's gym for its sports program. The school nurse makes referrals to the clinic at the Village.
The school is arranged so that groups of teachers are assigned to groups of kids. The teachers are required to meet, to discuss the kids, and to include the social worker, the nurse, the tutor, or some other adult on campus whenever a particular kid is having a particular problem that a particular adult might be able to help solve. In one recent instance, a student revealed a family problem; the school team swooped in to prevent an eviction of the family.
"We are trying to, on an individual, case-by-case basis, figure out what they need," says Principal John Flores. "It would be fruitless to just work with the kids. We have to work with the whole family.
"You have to walk into the flow of what's happening in the Valley to figure out who's what. I eat in the Valley. I walk around in the Valley. I do my laundry in the Valley. The kids can't go anywhere without knowing that there's one of us who will see them."
And while the whole program is too new to have results that can be measured -- it began last year -- there are some indications that it is worth pursuing. Parents are coming to the school. The kids seem connected to the community. Their scores are rising.
"If people feel comfortable in the schools, they have a real say in their community, they will build real neighborhoods," says Beacon Director David Weiner. "I walk up and down the street, and parents stop me now. They're starting to know who we are. If we have a problem with the kids in school, we can go over to their house and deal with it directly. If their kids go to school here, they can walk over here.
"The beauty of having kids in the neighborhood is that if the store owners see them and know they're supposed to be in school, they'll tell us. I'm grateful for the situation where I'm at.
"It would be a real challenge if kids were bused from somewhere else."
There were good reasons for the federal courts to get involved with the San Francisco Unified School District in 1978. A significant portion of the city's schoolchildren were failing inside a substandard educational system that discriminated against some kids because of the color of their skin and the part of town they lived in.
But the desegregation consent decree signed in 1983 was a remedy that came late to San Francisco schools and was never fully, or properly, implemented. It never really had a chance. Proposition 13 made sure the San Francisco school district never had the money to do what it was supposed to do under the decree -- improve the education of minority students. And what money was available went to play a numbers game that may have desegregated public schools, but never came close to achieving the goal of desegregation -- a good education for the city's minority children.
After two decades of mindless body-shuffling, in the last couple of years the state and the school district finally began responding to conditions in San Francisco schools in ways that made sense. They tried to reduce class sizes and limit cross-town busing, among other things. But a bureaucratic tangle of financial and legal constraints has brought those responses to a halt. The legal-political paralysis that allowed San Francisco to sail so far off educational course now stands in the way of changes that might put the city's public schools back on course.
The current problems at the San Francisco Unified School District are complex and vastly different than those the district faced when African-American parents from Bayview-Hunters Point filed their desegregation lawsuit in the late 1970s. Now, low-skill, high-pay jobs are disappearing; affordable housing is scarce or nonexistent; immigrant children are illiterate in multiple languages; and a blanket of gang violence and drugs has fallen over much of San Francisco's inner city.
These are problems that decades-old court rulings and governmental responses to them can't address.
There is racial injustice in 1997, and it still affects schoolchildren. Now, though, that injustice is felt in dismantled minority communities, where kids have to travel across town to school and parents are prevented from participating in their children's education. Injustice surrounds the 4,000 children of the Tenderloin, who will get a neighborhood school only after eight years of political campaigning, and even then may not be able to attend it. Most of all, injustice falls on San Francisco's African-American and Latino children, who have less chance to succeed in life because the courts, the state, and the school district have, together, created and sustained an educational system that is utterly incompetent at delivering quality education to the underprivileged.
Neighborhood schools are no panacea, and building more of them will not instantly raise the test scores of San Francisco's poorest schoolchildren.
But the district's own schools argue in favor of neighborhood education. Anecdotal evidence and standardized tests both suggest that many children who attend school close to home learn more and perform better than children who do not.
"Ideally, parents want their children to go to school in their neighborhood," says Mary Beth Wallace, a staff liaison with the parent advocacy arm of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. "Kids are close to home, they get to know their community."
"It's really hard to take kids from Bayview, ship them to Lick Middle School an hour away in Noe Valley, and expect the same outcome as if they were going to school in their neighborhood," she says. "Everybody wants the 65,000 kids in this school district to achieve. That consent decree was supposed to do that. It doesn't seem to be working with what they do now."
