SFUSD

Endorsement interviews: Sandra Fewer for School Board

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The San Francisco School Board has long been a fractious crew, with members sharply disagreeing on a lot of issues. They still disagree — but according to all the board members we’ve interviewed, there’s a much-better working relationship these days. Sandra Fewer, who has served for four years, talks about that — and restorative justice, ethnic studies and how she wants to build on her accomplishments in a second term. You can listen to the entire interview after the jump.

Quick facts about City College of San Francisco

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• CCSF has 10 main campuses: Ocean (Ingleside), Mission, Civic Center, Chinatown, Southeast (Bayview), Evans, Noe Valley, John Adams (on Masonic), Fort Mason, and Downtown.

• CCSF also has single class “instructional sites” littered throughout San Francisco in various office spaces, spare SFUSD classrooms, and other locations. The exact number of these sites isn’t known by the college, but they are estimated at more than 100.

• CCSF’s English as Second Language (ESL) Department serves around 20,000 students annually, compared to an English Department that serves around 7,000.

• Non-credit courses at City College are tuition-free, as mandated by the state, although some charge nominal fees. Credit courses at CCSF are $46 a unit. A semester of full classes (12 units) costs less than a single course at San Francisco State University.

• The neighborhood campuses primarily provide non-credit classes including ESL, certificate training, and enrichment courses. Ocean Campus in Ingleside provides the bulk of credit courses, which are used to attain associates degrees or transfer to a four-year university.

• Tracking exactly how much each campus costs the school is difficult, according to school officials. Faculty and staff serve multiple campuses frequently, and many services aren’t tracked on a campus basis, making campus consolidation or closure something that will take time to evaluate.

• The state funds community colleges based on enrollment, a process known as “apportionment.” The enrollment time is measured in Full Time Equivalent Students (FTES), a measure of instructional time in hours.

• CCSF has been absorbing about $24 million a year in costs to non-credit courses when the state reduced the amount of apportionment it allotted to schools for non-credit courses. The school did not want to reduce classes in light of state cuts, and began paying for them out of pocket.

• Credit classes receive higher rates of apportionment than non-credit classes.

• In order to make up for the unique nature of its campus sites, the state offsets low apportionment at CCSF with money called a “foundational grant.” Essentially, the school receives anywhere from $500,000 to $1.5 million a year for specific campus locations. 

Phantoms of Asia

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Life. Death. The cosmos. What’s it all about? Bold new art – along with objects from the museum’s own renowned collection – explores spirits, spirituality, cosmic order, and the afterlife. This is a provocative interplay of 150 artworks from past and present, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, site-specific creations, and more by artists from all over Asia. Pause and reflect on your own place in the universe while taking in some amazing art. Check out Phantoms at the Asian Art Museum on Thursday nights when the museum is open until 9pm. After 5pm admission is only $5 while members, children and SFUSD students, and active members of the U.S. Military are FREE! Purchase tickets for Thursday nights online. More about Phantoms of Asia here.

To enter to win a pair of tickets, email sfbgpromos@sfbg.com with “Phantoms” as the subject and provide your name and mailing address in the message. One lucky winner will win a pair of tickets to the viewing on Thursday, June 28. Winner will be announced Monday, June 25.

Now through Sunday, September 2 from 5-9 pm @ Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin, SF | $5

Make it better now

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yael@sfbg.com

Noted queer writer and speaker Dan Savage sent a hopeful message to LGBT youth with his 2010 YouTube video, “It Gets Better.” But many queer youth in the Bay Area say they aren’t willing to wait.

“If my adult self could talk to my 14 year old self and tell him anything, I would tell him to really believe the lyrics from “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. There really is a place for us. There really is a place for you. And that one day you will have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community. And that life gets better,” Savage said.

Savage and his partner Terry Miller’s message went viral. It inspired hundreds of similar videos and eventually led to the creation of the It Gets Better Project, headquartered in Los Angeles. The videos were a response to a tragic cluster of suicides by children bullied for seeming gay, a trend that was only unusual in that the media picked up on it. And for many teens across the country, the “It Gets Better” videos provided crucial hope and support.

But last week, I was talking to Stephanie, Lolo, Ose, and Mia Tu Mutch, four Bay Area teens, about what its like to be a queer youth today. We were talking at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC), a center for queer youth in the heart of the Castro.

When I asked about the “It Gets Better” videos, they all had the same reaction: “Ugh. I don’t like those videos. I don’t like those at all.”

“Those videos are depressing,” Lolo said.

“Yeah. ‘Just wait ’til you’re an adult?'” Stephanie asked.

“Just wait ’til you’re an adult, and your problems will go away,” Mia said, shaking her head.

“And it’s celebrities, too,” Ose noted. “‘I got thousands of dollars, and it gets better!'”

The four of them are facilitators at LYRIC, leading weekly community-building workshops that deal with issues queer kids face. Between 17 and 21 years old, these youth are not waiting for it to get better. They’re doing it for themselves.

 

LYRIC’S OUTREACH

LYRIC definitely promotes pride and empowerment. Founded in 1988, LYRIC organizers worked to secure funding for a physical space a few years later. Since then, this purple house on Collingwood has functioned as a crucial center for Bay Area queer youth. It offers counseling, food, clothing, community building workshops that kids teach, and a safe place to hang out.

But LYRIC, like many nonprofits, has felt the impact of the severe government cuts to health and human services. As a result, its budget has suffered steady declines from approximately $1.2 million in 2008 to $954,000 this, year primarily due to shrinking government funding.

But LYRIC refuses to give up offering paid internships, a rarity in the nonprofit world.

“The City has made it clear that they no longer intend to invest significant funding into subsidized employment model programs — they want to serve greater numbers of youth at a much lower unit cost — even if we all understand that some of the most marginalized youth will no longer be getting the intensive level of support they need to make it to a successful adulthood” LYRIC’s Executive Director Jodi Schwartz told me, explaining that the organization is now growing support by more grassroots funding networks.

“We used to hire 60-70 young people per year, now it’s more like 20,” Schwartz says.

The organization still serves about 400 young people per year.

“I would guess we have 6,000 queer youth living in the city,” Schwartz said. “So we’re not reaching everyone. Not to say that all those 6,000 queer youth need a LYRIC, but they need community. We all need community.”

Youth from across the country come to San Francisco seeking that community. Often they have escaped intolerant, abusive, or dangerous situations in their families or hometowns. But when they arrive in this storied city, these youth are often disappointed.

“I was that kid who left a small town in Texas and who got to San Francisco as fast as I could,” Mia told me. “And I was like, you know, I’ll figure it out, I’ll find a job, and I’ll do this and that. And it was really hard.”

” I think that the difference is that there are more LGBT specific languages and policies, and organizations that are affirming. All of that is the best in the US, probably,” Mia said. “And there are all these cultural groups and all of that. But queerphobia and transphobia exist here just like it exists everywhere else.”

“So my big thing is how we have all these systems in place that make us a little more queer friendly,” she said. “But how do we actually get the public to stop hating people, to stop doing hate crimes, to stop bullying?”

Ose, who now lives in the Bayview, grew up closer to the city. But coming from a religious family in Modesto, he says, “I had heard things about the Castro itself. I always thought the Castro was the devil…I was a church boy.”

He remembers fear that someone he knew would recognize him in the forbidden neighborhood, that “my mom would find out and be like, what are you doing in the Castro? So I was scared to death my parents would find out I was coming to the Castro.”

That was two years ago. Now, Ose works in the Castro, and he was dressed in cut-off shorts and a slicked back Mohawk, long painted nails clicking on the table. “I’m hella gayed out,” he happily reports.

When Mia made it to San Francisco, she initially settled into the Tenderloin, rather than the gentrifying Castro.

“As a trans person, a lot of trans history is in the Tenderloin and there’s a lot of trans women who live in the Tenderloin and who work in the Tenderloin,” she explained. “So I feel more at home there. Even though it isn’t technically the gay neighborhood, it’s always been the queer ghetto and that’s where the low income and queer people of color live a lot.”

The Tenderloin is also the site of many of the services that queer youth use. Mia made some of her first local connections at Trans: Thrive, a program of the Asian Pacific Islander Center. And many of the kids at LYRIC, as well as the city’s other queer teens, benefit from Larkin Street Youth Services.

The homeless shelter oversees the only beds reserved for queer youth in the city, all 22 of them, a number Schwartz believes in inadequate. A report from Larkin Street in 2010 found that 30 percent of the homeless youth they serve identify as LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning).

LYRIC is part of the Community Partnership for LGBTQQ Youth and the Dimensions Clinic Collaborative, which includes service organizations like the queer-specific health clinic Dimensions, the nearby LGBT Center, the Bay Area Young Positives HIV health and support nonprofit, and the city’s Department of Public Health. But LYRIC is one of only a few organizations that focuses on fun, informative community-building workshops.

 

ACCEPTANCE NOW

Savage promised queer kids that, in the distant future, they would “have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community.” But LYRIC’s workshops, largely envisioned and run by the youth themselves, show kids that they don’t need to wait: they can create those supportive networks for themselves, in the here and now.

Another such community-building effort was on display at the LGBT Center on June 15: Youth Speaks’ queer poetry slam Queeriosity. The show, which was preceded by five weeks of free poetry workshops for and by queer youth, brought together young queer people from across the Bay Area, and one could feel the love and support in the air.

“Queeriosity is important because, in the poetry scene, we have so many people with so many different backgrounds,” Milani Pelley, one of the show’s hosts and a poet who works with youth in the workshops, told me. “A lot of times people who get identified in the LGBT category, they don’t have that space where they’re front and center and it’s a space for them. It’s very important that we celebrate everyone.”

Pelley, 24, has been working with Youth Speaks since she was 16. She said the message of the It Gets Better videos might be too simple.

“Thinking about being an adult versus a teenager, adults go through the same things,” she said. “The only difference is it’s not encouraged to speak out about it, you’re supposed to act like you have it together and it’s okay.”

Mia said youthful teasing and bullying are precursors to hate crimes: “Bullying and hate crimes are related because it’s all about people not accepting you, and then violently reacting to who are. So either throwing insults or beating you up.”

On April 29, Brandy Martell, an African American trans woman, was murdered in Oakland in a likely hate crime. CeCe McDonald’s recent case has also exhibited the dangers and injustice trans women of color face. The young Chicago woman defended herself against a bigoted attacker who she ended up killing, only to spend time in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, get convicted on manslaughter, and, last week, be placed in a men’s prison to serve her sentence.

I asked the four LYRIC teachers about the campaigns of national organizations like the Human Rights Committee — such as marriage equity or LGBT soldiers — and they all shook their heads.

“There’s a huge disconnect between the national platforms of the major gay organizations and the actual realities of queer youth,” Mia said. “Like they don’t even have queer youth in the majority of their meetings, but then they act like they’re the ones fighting for our rights, you know.”

For example, she said “marriage equality wouldn’t affect me at all. Yeah, it would be okay, it would be better if it was equal across the board. But when you have people dying because of hate crimes, and dying because of bullying, and dying because they don’t have a place to stay and they’re on the streets, it’s like, I just feel like those are a lot more pressing than getting a piece of paper from the government.”

 

SETTING THE AGENDA

Mia serves on the city’s Youth Commission, where she’s designing training programs for service providers to work with LGBT youth. Ose is working with Schwartz to create programming for LGBTQ youth who don’t want to take the common path of rejecting religion and spirituality as they come to terms with other parts of their identity.

“I go to church a lot,” Ose explained. “I grew up as a Christian. And I wanted to touch base on that because a lot of times, the youth that I come across, the majority of them are being silenced…I’m still going through some issues with my own church, especially with my pastor because just recently I’ve heard that he dislikes me over the fact of the way I dress, the way I act, my feminine gestures.”

Stephanie sighed and said, “I wish there were more LYRICS around the city. One in Bayview, one in every district. And Oakland too.”

“People who provide counseling, food, clothes, water if you need it,” Lola added. “A safe space to go to, a place where you can make friends, and make connections. There need to be more places like that specifically for queer youth.”

Even in San Francisco, harassment is a reality in youth programs and schools. In 2009, the SFUSD studied Youth Risk Behavior in San Francisco’s elementary through high school public schools, and found that more than 80 percent of students reported hearing anti-gay remarks at school, and more than 40 percent said they had never heard school staff stop others from making those remarks. The survey also found that students who identified as LGBT were significantly more likely than their peers to report skipping school out of concern for their safety.

Queer youth will never stop finding informal networks of support. But structured settings like LYRIC can be vital. At places like LYRIC, youth find the community, the love, and the friends that Savage promised would appear with time — before they turn 18.

“It’s easier to build relationships and to build community when its structured, when it has a little bit of structure like, hey, this is a queer specified setting, we’re going to talk to each other, we’re going to hang out, we’re gonna do this, and then you kind of build community off of that. And because it’s based on identity, you feel more comfortable to talk about that,” Mia explained. “You have to change your reality. And you have to be the one to change it for yourself. Because ain’t nobody gonna make it better for you.”

Mayor Lee’s priorities are wrong

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By Margaret Brodkin

OPINION There was much back slapping at City Hall last week as officials congratulated themselves on what was described as a welcome “philosophical shift” in San Francisco politics.

The beneficiary of the acclaim and virtual political consensus was Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed budget, the largest in history — including an unexpected windfall of new revenue. The budget’s signature element, described in glowing terms by the San Francisco Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius and warranting its own special mayoral press conference, is the expansion of the police and fire budgets — an $82 million increase over two years.

Amid last week’s ovations was an unsettling silence from voices normally willing to cut through obscure numbers and rhetoric. Not one official commented that the best way to ensure public safety is to build strong children, families, and communities.

The cumulative impact of the devastating state budget and years of inadequate funding on families and children should not permit celebration. In light of millions in unanticipated revenue, politicians should not be satisfied with addressing urgent needs simply by sparing a few city departments from cuts, as appeared to be the case. Here’s what they should be thinking about:

• Our schools face the worst budget cuts ever, with SFUSD preparing to lay off 400 employees, reduce the already-too-short school year, increase class size, eliminate most school bus lines and all high school after-school programs, and under-fund everything from food to special education.

• Our childcare system is being gutted by the state, with $20 million in losses this year on top of $9 million from last year. This will impact thousands of families and result in the closure of centers and family childcare homes. Many fewer parents will be eligible for childcare subsidies (no one with two kids earning more than $37,500 a year will qualify) — pushing parents out of work and onto “welfare,” and children out of quality care and into unsafe settings.

• Support systems for children with disabilities are being eliminated and reduced through simultaneous cuts in multiple agencies.

• Young people entering community colleges or state universities face years of uncertainty — including whether their campuses will even exist. Already, the majority of SF students who enter City College are unable to graduate — stymied by costs, lack of educational support, or the inability to get classes they need.

It appears that little of the new millions will address these problems. The mayor’s budget does not even fully fund the voter-approved Public Education Enrichment Fund, passed in 2004 to provide essential services to public schools and preschools. Funding falls short by more than $10 million. Providing schools the funds to which they are legally entitled is the least we can do when the city lands millions in new resources.

Let’s be clear: crime is at historic lows — and has gotten that way with 200 fewer officers than the mayor is now advancing. There is little rationale to suddenly swell the ranks, at a cost of $140,000 per officer. The Fire Department’s inefficiencies have been well documented by city budget experts, and many cost-saving recommendations have yet to be implemented.

Before signing off on a budget they have not yet discussed in public (as it appeared to last week), the Board of Supervisors must evaluate fiscal options in full view. Private meetings with the mayor are no substitute for a robust debate now that the revenue facts are known. This is the city’s first two-year budget, and its policy direction will impact us all for years to come.

What looks to Nevius like a positive “drama-free, signature moment” for San Francisco, looks to many advocates for children and families like an abdication of responsibility.

Margaret Brodkin is a former executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children, director of the Department of Children, Youth and their Families and New Day for Learning, and a veteran of numerous budget processes

Head of the (dance) class

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DANCE Complaining about the quality of public schools is about as ubiquitous as whining about MUNI. Admittedly, the quality of the former has a bigger impact on our future than having to wait for the N another 10 minutes. The good news is that the San Francisco Unified School District is not nearly as bad as its reputation; talk to some parents who have kids in it. While its art components are woefully underfunded, at least they exist. The yearly “Young at Art” exhibit at the de Young Museum (through Sun/20) has a selection from this year’s crop.

Dance programs, however, would probably not exist without outside funding. Zaccho Dance Theatre, for instance, has had but the minutest support from SFUSD for a program it has run for elementary school children in the Bayview neighborhood since 1990. On May 9, 125 kids packed Z Space with a rockingly exuberant and intelligent program in front of cheering, shouting, and stomping parents and friends. It was quite a show.

However, San Francisco does have one first-rate arts education program that is the envy of school districts with much better reputations: the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary. Its dance department is so good that students from around the Bay Area request inter-city transfers to attend. “I have one student who comes all the way from Vacaville,” says its director, Elvia Marta.

These dancers — 40 of them — will show their moxie this week at the Palace of Fine Arts with a concert of student and faculty choreography. Also included is a piece from alumnus Zack Benitez, who worked in Hollywood with Paula Abdul and is now coaching a musical, Adam and Eve, in Paris. (In French, of course.) At a rehearsal at ODC Commons, the students looked young, raw, and fierce. You could see these were dancers on their way, knowing where they want to be in a few years and having an inkling of how to get there. They were disciplined, focused, and attentive to the suggestions that Marta and Brittany Ceres Brown, who teaches choreography, gave them. In that way they are already professionals.

Getting into this public-school dance program is not easy. The application process is rigorous — questionnaires, grades, recommendations, essays, statements of commitment, auditions with small pieces of solo choreography — and sounds suspiciously like a rehearsal for college. Plus, according to the department’s website, students need “a basic ballet foundation.”

“Ballet focuses on alignment,” Marta explains. “It gives you an understanding of how the body and its skeletal and anatomical systems function.” But she also says that over the years she has had “kids who come from modern dance with a really good understanding of the body.” One way or another, this is not a program for beginners.

It also means that in all probability, the students come from families who have been willing and able to pay for ballet lessons in private studios or ballet-company schools. Criticism about “elitism” has wafted around RASOTA almost since the beginning. Marta is not deterred: “I let people talk. I don’t think it’s elitist. I think kids need something to be passionate about. It keeps them focused and on the straight and narrow. These [students] work very hard, taking academics in the morning and dance in the afternoon.”

Marta, born in Panama, grew up doing salsa. “Everybody knew how to do it. We didn’t have any training,” she says. At Balboa High School, dance teacher Yvonne McClung, who later became the first head of the RASOTA’s Dance Department, suggested Marta and her twin sister should take dance classes. At first, she didn’t know what a dance class was. She has since learned.

This year, all ten graduating dancers are off to colleges — many of which have distinguished dance departments. One of them, Marta says, was accepted at Juilliard. “It’s the second year,” she says with almost motherly pride. Juilliard is the country’s toughest dance program to get into. 

“RUTH ASAWA SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOL OF THE ARTS 30TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY DANCE CONCERT”

Fri/18-Sat/19, 8pm, $18-$28

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

www.sfsota.org

Low taxes are bad for business

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The teachers at San Francisco’s public schools are talking about going on strike. The contracts talks with the district are at an impasse. Things look bleak.

Well, they don’t look as bleak as things in Philadelphia, but that’s not really much in the way of good news.

Part of the issue: The district wants the teachers to accept up to nine furlough days next year. Even if the governor’s tax measure passes, four furlough days are still on the schedule.

The teachers are complaining — with good reason — that the forced days off and other concessions cost them money, as much as $5,000 a year. But there’s another issue here: Furlough days are horrible for working parents — and for the businesses that employ them.

Ron Leuty has a nice column on this in the San Francisco Business Times, which doesn’t let you read all the stories unless you subscribe, but here’s the gist:

For parents, SFUSD parents who already have barely managed through four furlough days each of the past two school years, nine each year becomes intolerable. That totals up to nearly two school weeks for which we must find some sort of childcare or one-day mini-camps — and it’s cash out of our pocket. Or it means time off. For businesses, that means lost productivity, down work time and employees who are paying more for — and worrying more about — childcare.

For low-income parents who have to miss a day’s work and a day’s pay every time the kids are out of school, it’s a serious economic issue. And the local businesses, particularly small businesses which aren’t equipped to deal with excess employee absenteeism, it’s a nightmare.

Leuty doesn’t place any blame or explain how we got to this situation, so I will: Prop. 13 (and later, Prop. 218) made it really hard to raise local taxes, and a handful of Republicans are making it hard to raise state taxes, so there’s not enough money for the schools. Americans today, particularly wealthy Americans and corporations, are taxed far less than they were for most of the century, certainly the post-War era.

Local business leaders love to talk about the value of public schools. I don’t think many serious people who have looked at the finances believe that the SFUSD is fat, bloated, or wasting a lot of money; these days, even the anti-government folks have to admit it’s a pretty lean operation.

So why won’t those business folks (and, for the matter, the Business Times) start campaigning for changes in Prop. 13 to allow communities to fund the schools and avoid these debilitating furlough days? What, is this problem supposed to get fixed by magic?

 

A new food-truck map

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Sup. Scott Wiener wants to compromise on the food-truck limits, and is working with the folks at SFUSD and the food advocates.

Dana Woldow, who is working with Nancy Waymack, director of policy and planning for SFUSD, Chris Armentrout, the district’s director of development and government relations, and School Board member Jill Wynns, told me that the advocates are open to the idea of allowing more trucks in the Mission:

As I have said, I (and other parent advocates wanting to maintain a viable school meal program which can afford to offer healthy food to all students) do understand the dilemma of gourmet food trucks; that’s why we are willing to reduce the zone around all middle schools in the City to 500 feet from the current 1500 feet. Additionally, we would consider looking at drawing a custom boundary, which could possibly be smaller than the current 1500 feet, around each of the high schools in the Mission district. That way, we could free up some prime parking for trucks while still maintaining a wide enough truck-free area to discourage students from leaving school at lunchtime.

She’s got a new map for me that shows where trucks would be banned under the compromise proposal — one that includes only public middle schools and high schools. Check it out here. (pdf) And compare it to the old map here.

This all seems eminently reasonable, and maybe we can have healthy school food and burrito trucks, too.

Teacher’s Union unhappy with SF school chief process

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Key Tray from the United Educators of San Francisco called me to comment on my description of the outgoing and incoming school superintendent, which he found a little too flattering:

I haven’t agreed with him on everything, but overall, he’s done a good job — the schools are better than when he arrived, enrollment is increasing, and there’s no more of the imperious attitude and gag orders of the old Ackerman days. The district is on the right track — although Garcia would be the first to admit that there’s a lot more work to be done. And I have nothing bad to say about his annointed successor, Deputy Superintendent Richard Carranza. He’ll probably do a fine job.

Tray’s point: Yes, on a lot of levels Garcia did well, but in the past few weeks he’s created a labor mess. “It’s a big disappointment,” Tray told me. “He’s poisoned the well and now he’s leaving the farm.”

The problem: Garcia decided this year to exempt 14 low-performing schools from the annual round of layoffs. The layoff process is annoying anyway — by state law, teachers have to be warned of layoffs in the spring although the state budget isn’t done until the summer so the schools don’t really know how much money they’ll have. In most cases, the layoffs are later rescinded. Out of the 500-plus layoff notices this year, “most won’t come to fruition,” Tray notes.

But the bigger problem for the union is that Garcia tossed out the seniority process when he made the decision to protect schools in the “Superintendent’s Zone.” And while some people think that’s just dandy, the teacher’s union calls it a disaster: Seniority is one of the most sacred elements of a union contract.

“Now he’s at war with the teacher’s union,” Tray said.

That, he said, won’t be pleasant for the new superintendent, who has been one of Garcia’s top aides: “Carranza’s walking into a toxic mess.”

Garcia, not too surprisingly, sees it very differently. “I’m the most pro-union guy you’ll ever find,” he told me. The 14 schools have a history of high turnover — and in an effort to keep a team of teachers, some of whom don’t have the highest seniority, in place, he exempted them from the layoffs. “We’re talking about 70 people,” he said. “And our figures suggest that this would have an impact on only three tenured teachers” who might face pink slips that they otherwise would have avoided.

As for the toxic labor environment? “It’s too bad they see it that way. We’ve worked together on every issue for five years, and I hope this one area where we disagree doesn’t ruin the entire relationship. This isn’t the only issue that matters in the world; I just wish they wouldn’t be this extreme.”

Good luck, Mr. Carranza — you’ve got some fence-mending to do.

 

 

 

 

The food (truck) fight heats up

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Sup. Scott Wiener and public-school parent and advocate Dana Woldow are flinging dueling opinion pieces back and forth over the food-truck issue — and it’s getting hot.

Here’s the background: San Francisco currently bans food trucks within 1,500 feet of a public middle school or high school. That was almost encoded in state law, but the sponsor backed down. Now Wiener wants to modify the local law to allow trucks within maybe 500 feet or maybe a city block (of varying size) from a middle or high school.

Woldow thinks that’s way too lax — that, as she told me in an email, “a one block distance is not an obstacle at all for a long legged 15 year old. They can cover that distance and back in 5 minutes flat. And if a school is even partially open campus, (ie – seniors with 2.0 GPA can leave, or seniors and juniors, or whatever), then the kids who leave bring back food for the kids who stay.”

The thing is, this is a crowded, dense city, and there are schools all over, and in some places, like the Mission, a 1,500-foot limit means no food trucks at all, since there’s no place that exists that isn’t 1,500 feet from one school or another. Here’s a nifty map that shows the problem.

Woldow is ferocious when she gets into this stuff, and she decries the low-end food trucks as “roach coaches” and compares the industry to Big Soda (which we all know is evil.) Wiener’s hitting back, saying that Woldow (who he doesn’t name) is specious and that her comparisons to the sugar-mongers is nothing more than a quack conspiracy theory.

There are lots of elements to this — it’s not just about the unhealthy food that kids will (and yes, they will, I can speak from parental experience) buy and consume if they have the slightest opportunity. It’s also about how San Francisco provides lunch for students.

The school lunch program is subsidized — but also lives, to a certain extent, off the money that the schools charge for non-subsidized lunches. That is, if the kids who can afford to pay cough up for school lunches, there’s more money around to make the food better for everyone, including the kids who don’t pay. (It’s the same way at hospitals — if people who have insurance and can pay only go to a few high-end clinics, then the public hospitals and the ones in poor neighborhoods get only the charity cases, and don’t have the cash to improve services.)

As Caroline Grannan points out in a letter she sent me:

Let’s say there’s a restaurateur who feeds low-income diners free, subsidizing their meals by charging full price (albeit a modest full price) to non-low-income customers. Tempting food trucks pull up outside, luring away all the paying customers who can afford the food trucks. The restaurateur is no longer able to feed low-income diners free.
 
That simplified analogy conveys the basic situation, though it leaves out both the labyrinthine regulations governing school meals and the inadequate government subsidy for low-income students’ meals. The SFUSD meal program will, of course, continue to feed low-income children even if it suffers economic setbacks. It will just feed them a little less and a little worse, in both nutrition and overall quality. (And when the school meal program runs a deficit, classroom resources take the hit, another blow that inflicts the most harm on low-income kids.)

There’s a big difference between middle schools and high schools. Nobody’s allowed out of middle school during the day — you eat what the cafeteria offers or you bring your own lunch in a bag. Some high school campuses allow some kids to leave at lunch time; if there are food trucks nearby, and they sell cheap junk food, they’ll get plenty of patrons.

So Woldow and the nutrition folks at SFUSD want a compromise — they’ll allow the trucks to come within 500 feet of middle schools, but they want the 1,500-foot limit for all public high schools. Since there aren’t as many high schools, that’s less of a burden and cuts out less of the city. But you’d still lose about five blocks in every direction around Mission High on 18th near Dolores Park (including the space where the city wants to have a food truck in the park, but Rec-Park property is exempt, so the kids can go there anyway), and the same around John O’Connell at 19th and Folsom and International at 23rd and York.

I don’t think there’s another neighborhood where food trucks are popular that would take as much of a hit as the Mission.

I wonder: Can you regulate what food trucks near schools sell? Could you, for example, license two types of trucks — ones that are allowed to sell soda and chips, and ones that have to meet certain nutritional standards, and allow the ones with higher standards near the schools? There are plenty of trucks in the city that sell more gourmet, high-end stuff anyway. Then you could let the trucks park within, say, 750 feet (or whatever) of Mission high schools, but keep the real crap at a greater distance.

I know: More bureacracy. More regulations. But food trucks are already regulated and licensed, and if the choice was between staying away from the (hungry, captive) audience near high schools and letting Dana Woldow and the SFUSD nutritionists have some say in what you sold, I bet some of the truckers would take the good-food deal.

But that still leave the problem Grannan was talking about: If the cool kids with money all run out to eat at the (moderately) healthy food trucks, the district loses a lot of money from the lunch program. That’s a real concern, even if it goes beyond the food-truck fight. And it goes back to something some of us have been pushing for a while: If SF had a central kitchen for the schools, there might be better, fresher food for the kids in the cafeteria — maybe even food that could compete with the trucks.

I called Wiener to talk about what compromises he’s open to, but I haven’t heard back yet. I’ll update when I do.

 

 

 

 

 

Pink slime and the SFUSD

7

Let’s start off with a basic assumption: This stuff is gross. If you eat hamburgers, you don’t want to know what goes in them anyway, since it’s never been pretty, but the idea of taking stuff so likely to be infected with e. coli that you have to run it through a centrifuge and the expose it to ammonia gas — and then call it “food” — is pretty icky even to me, and I eat sausage.

And like a lot of things in our world-class corporate agribusiness food system, nobody knew much about it until ABC News revealed that it’s in most of the ground beef sold in America.

Which leads to the obvious question that Dana Woldow asked in BeyondChron today: Are San Francisco school kids eating pink slime?

It’s actually not too hard to find out. The San Francisco Unified School District has a press office, and the folks there answer the phone, and it took me exactly four minutes to get ahold of Heidi Anderson, who told me that the district had contacted the Illinois-based food service it uses, and has been assured that pink slime is not on the mix or in the menu.

She sent me a March 9, 2012 memo from James Gunner, director of quality assurance at Preferred Meal Systems, which said:

Please be assured that Preferred Meal Systems does NOT use any lean fine textured beef in any of the burger or meat crumble products we produce. All of the beef we use comes from ‘block beef’, which are whole muscle meat trimmings. These trimmings are not pre-ground in any way similar to the lean fine textured beef. Preferred Meal Systems actually grinds its own beef from this block to produce its hamburger patties, Salisbury steak and crumbles which are then used in our customer’s meals.

How appetizing.

I have no reason to believe that’s untrue, although I bet if we really wanted to check, the chemistry students at one of the high schools could run a test for ammonia traces in the school hamburgers.

I get Woldow’s complaint — the district could have put this up on its website, could have issued a press release, could have made more of an effort to get out ahead of this story. On the other hand, what passes for the education coverage in the mainstream media could have been better (and I’m to blame too — I could have called SFUSD the minute the first word about this nastiness hit the news). In the old days, when the Chron and Ex had hundreds of staffers and TV news had big investigative teams and there were people scouring the city for stories, I suspect someone one would have asked this question a week ago, when the ABC news story broke.

That’s part of the tragedy of the decline of newspapers (I know, I know, the dailies weren’t much good even the glory days, and it’s their own damn fault that they didn’t keep up with technology, I get it, heard it, been there, done that, threw away the T-Shirt) — we still count on reporters to do the work of monitoring local government, and until we all figure out a new way to make enough money to pay the staff, it’s getting harder and harder to do. As Anderson told me: “We just haven’t gotten an official query from the press on this.”

Amazing. A week after a blockbuster story (and again, if ABC news didn’t pay investigative reporters, none of us would have known anything about this) and nobody in the local news media thought to pick up the phone and call the SFUSD press office.

My usual parental concern didn’t kick in on this one, in part because my elementary-school daughter alwasy brings her own lunch and my middle-school son, who loves animals, wants to be a vet and never ate much meat, has recently announced that he’s a vegan. That’s quite a challenge at the local school district — there’s not a whole lot of vegan fare in the cafeteria. Most of the protein in the veggie lunches comes from milk and cheese, which is understandable, I guess, since there’s probably not enough demand for vegan food to justifiy a special set of entrees. But, you know, beans and rice. And vanilla soy milk.

The bigger problem here is that SFUSD gets so little money for its lunches that there aren’t many options — and the district doesn’t have a central kitchen to cook better food locally. When Margaret Brodkin ran for school board, that was one of her issues, and I agree with it: In this food-obsessed (and rich) city, we ought to be able to figure out a way to get decent locally-produced food to the kids.

That, and the fact that the PR staff at public agencies need to start thinking like reporters, and getting news like this out to the public, because too often the reporters aren’t doing it for them anymore.

 

 

 

 

School Board to hire new sup’t — quickly

5

San Francisco School Superintendent Carlos Garcia is retiring, which is no surprise — most school superintendent’s rarely stay anywhere for more than five years, and Garcia’s contract was up in June. I haven’t agreed with him on everything, but overall, he’s done a good job — the schools are better than when he arrived, enrollment is increasing, and there’s no more of the imperious attitude and gag orders of the old Ackerman days. The district is on the right track — although Garcia would be the first to admit that there’s a lot more work to be done.

And I have nothing bad to say about his annointed successor, Deputy Superintendent Richard Carranza. He’ll probably do a fine job.

But it’s a little odd that the board simply handed the job over to Carranza (well, actually they’ve just agreed to enter contract talks with him, but that’s really the same thing) without any sort of public forum, search process or outreach. I mean, there really aren’t that many top-rate big-city school superintendents out there, and San Francisco is a tough place for any school chief to work, but still: Do we absolutely know that Carranza is the very best candidate we could ever find? Would it have been worth taking a month or so to check around first?

Again: I believe Carranza will be an excellent successor to Garcia, and if he carries on the same tradition and policies, the schools will be fine. He’s been groomed for the job, and won’t have to learn the local political scene. Makes perfect sense — on one level.

But that was awfully quick.

As Board Member Kim-Shree Maufas told me, “It’s a transition and things are going well. But where is the public process? Where do our partners — the unions, the city, corporate partners, the community — get to weigh in? To take SFUSD to the next level, they need to hear from the community. The board can make that happen.”

 

 

 

Families leaving SF: It’s housing costs, stupid

34

City officials continue to wring their hands over why families are leaving the city, and I’m sure there are a number of factors, but I can tell you that from the people I know — families who live in the city or want to live in the city — it’s all about the cost of housing.C

Critics of the SFUSD like to say that families are leaving for better schools, but those families haven’t been paying attention to the tremendous strides the district has made in recent years. Yes, middle schools are still a challenge in some areas, and yes, not all the public schools are great, but overall, most families that make the effort to find a quality school for their kids can do it.

The folks I know who work in the city hate the idea of living in the burbs. Nobody wants to commute across that bridge or through the BART tunnels every day; more important, nobody wants to be on the other side of the Bay from their house and their kids when the Big Earthquake hits. The problem is the money.

You want to keep families in San Francisco? Building housing for multimillionaires isn’t going to do it. If it were up to me, I’d float about a $5 billion revenue bond, buy up all the housing on the private market, put it all in a land trust and resell it — with the provision that the buyers had every right of ownership except the right to sell for a profit. That’s not likely to happen — but the city has to get serious about both building new affordable housing and (even more important) preserving what’s already there.

Yes, a lot of families want to buy a house, but a lot of families would be happy with a decent, affordable place to rent. Particularly if they knew that they wouldn’t be evicted so a richer person can buy or rent the place. What most families want is stability — they want to know where they’re going to live not just this year but when their kids are older. So many renters in this town live in such fear of eviction that it’s a huge incentive to move somewhere else.

You can talk about parks and playgrounds and youth programs, but San Francisco’s never going to be as family-friendly as we’d all like unless we can do something about housing costs and rental stability.

 

Mayor Lee makes demands on SFUSD

9

“You thought you felt an earthquake Sunday night. Actually, that was me.”

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano was on the phone, talking to me about Mayor Ed Lee’s plan to demand some changes in the way the San Francisco Unified School District manages its property — and to hold up the $6 million the city owes the district until that happens. The mayor says there will be “strings attached” to the rainy-day fund money that would normally go to help SFUSD avoid teacher layoffs — and while it’s not exactly clear what those strings are, except that the mayor wants surplus property to be developed or sold, it’s not what Ammiano had in mind when he created the fund as a supervisor.

“The mayor is trying to hold the school district hostage,” Ammiano said. “And it’s not well advised.”

It’s also really odd: For one thing, as School Superintendent Carlos Garcia told me in a phone interview, any money the district got from selling off surplus property would be earmarked for use in facilities development and couldn’t go to pay teachers or prevent program cuts. “He wants to see how we’re using the property, and that’s fine, I’m happy to share that with him,” Garcia said. “But selling property doesn’t help. Even if we sold everything, we’d still need the money from the Rainy Day Fund.”

The district is constantly looking at ways to use its surplus property, and does a study on the topic every two years. But it’s not simple — for one thing, enrollment is growing, and it’s entirely possible that some sites that are now surplus will be needed in the next few years. And Garcia is properly cautious about getting rid of public property without a very good reason.

He’s a little curious, too, about what the mayor has in mind. “This did come a little bit out of the blue,” he told me.

The whole situation creates another disturbing conflict, one I’ve been worried about for years. The mayor’s education advisor, Hydra Mendoza, also sits on the School Board. What happens when the guy who pays her salary at her day job — Mayor Lee — takes a position that’s directly at odds with the interests of the job the voters gave her, as a board member? I see that happening right now, and I don’t know how it’s going to play out.

With any luck, the mayor will come to his senses, cut the check and stop trying to tell the school district how to manage its property. If not, his education advisor is going to be in a bit of a pickle.

Mendoza told me she doesn’t see it that way — in fact, she said she doesn’t think the mayor will really hold up the $6 million. “It’s part of an ongoing conversation,” she told me. “People keep telling the mayor that the school district has all this surplus property and needs to sell it before they get any city money. The mayor is just responding to that, saying ‘is there another source of revenue?’ Because the rainy day fund is going to dry up.

“How that got portrayed as ‘strings’ I don’t know.”

She did say, however, that the mayor “has been very clear that he wants to look at other revenue streams” and wants to see a plan in place to use the surplus property. Even though, of course, it’s not that simple and Mendoza was quick to agree that you can’t just put a tech company in a building that’s part of a school site.

She also insisted that there’s no conflict here. “It works well for me and the district,” she said. “If I wasn’t here, the perception of the district at City Hall would be different.”

But still: We’re very close to a situation where the mayor is on one side of an issue and the school district is on the other, and there’s critical money involved, and Mendoza is in the middle. “We haven’t come to those crossroads,” she said. “I haven’t been put in that situation. We’ve had a lot of civil conversations.”

But it’s out there, and it’s a potential problem.

 

Adachi video attacks public financing

180

This is odd: An eight-minute video narrated by Matt Gonzalez in support of Jeff Adachi devotes a considerable amount of time to attacking public campaign financing — something Gonzalez always supported as a supervisor.

The video claims that the $4 million that “politicians” are taking to pay for their mayoral campaigns could have helped the city avoid cancelling summer school and cutting school bus routes.

Actually, the city doesn’t pay for summer school or for school buses; the school district does. But I suppose the city could have scrapped public financing and given the money to SFUSD. Unlikely, but possible. (The city actually does share some money with SFUDS, under a measure that Gonzalez opposed.)

The thing about public financing, of course, is that it allows candidates like John Avalos, who won’t get big business support, to run a competitive campaign. If it prevents special interests from buying elections, it saves the city far more than it costs. Public financing has always been a central part of the progressive agenda, nationally and locally.

The rest of the message is about what you’d expect — pension reform, Recology’s franchise fee, giveaways to the police and fire unions. All stuff that Adachi has made part of his campaign. It’s nicely (if inexpensively) produced, and, as always, Gonzalez is a great presenter.

But what’s up with the attack on public finance?

(UPDATE: Gonzalez emailed me to say that Adachi doesn’t oppose public financing but thinks this is a bad year to accept it. He also said when he chaired the Budget Commitee the city sent a lot of money to the schools. But he did oppose the measure that guarantees some city funding to SFUSD.)

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Editor’s Note: Protests and other events connected to the Occupy Wall Street movement, include OccupySF and Occupy Oakland, have been developing quickly. To take part, follow our Politics blog or check with the websites associated with this important economic justice movement: occupysf.com, occupyoakland.org, or occupytogether.org. And you can send tips about what’s happening to news@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 26

San Francisco’s budget crisis

Youth from the Bay Area Urban Debate League opine on solving the budget crisis in San Francisco. These electrifying young orators seek to engage the community in conversation and share their research about the current economic atmosphere.

6 p.m., free

SFUSD Board Room

555 Franklin St, 1st Floor

www.baudl.org


THURSDAY 27

Progressive prospects in fall election

Bay Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond holds a talk on how the upcoming election will effect the progressive community. Join in discussion, sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America, and ask questions regarding mayoral candidates and city politics.

7-9pm, free

Unitarian Universalist Center, Martin Luther King Room

1187 Franklin, SF

TGTGTGTGTG@aol.com

www.pdamerica.org


FRIDAY 28

White Picket Fences Reception

This multi-media visual and performance art exhibit highlights queer perspectives on the family unit and reflections of contemporary marriage and relationships. Artists like Midori, Monica Canilao, Harrison Bartlett, Mev Luna, Amelia Reiff Hill and Madison Young conjure dialogue in and out of the LGBT community on the dynamics of progressive life. This family oriented event is open to all ages and will be catered with food, wine and performances of featured artists.

7:30-10 p.m.

Michelle O’Connor Gallery

2111 Mission, SF

www.feminapotens.org


SUNDAY 30

Organize and fight back

The Party for Socialism and Revolution is holding its NorCal Regional Conference, with discussions on how big corporations avoid taxes, endless U.S. Wars, the cost of higher education, the prospects for capitalism and socialism, and other topics.

10 a.m.-5 p.m., $7-10

2969 Mission, SF

(415) 821-6171

sf@pwlweb.org


Making Democracy Work

Celebrate 17 years of social justice service with keynote speakers Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) and Imam Siraj Wahhaj, religious director of At-Taqwa Mosque in NY, at a dinner banquet. This fundraiser supports the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Islamic grassroots civil rights and advocacy group in the country.

5-10 p.m.

Santa Clara Marriott

2700 Mission College, Santa Clara

(408) 986-9874

www.ca.cair.com/sfba/event/17thannualbanquet

 

 

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

The real Leland Yee

53

tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s early January 2011, and the Four Seas restaurant at Grant and Clay is packed. Everyone who is anyone in Chinatown is there — and for good reason. In a few days, the Board of Supervisors is expected to appoint the city’s first Asian mayor.

The rally is billed as a statement of support for Ed Lee, the mild-mannered bureaucrat and reluctant mayoral hopeful. But that’s not the entire — or even, perhaps, the central — agenda.

Rose Pak, who describes herself as a consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce but who is more widely known as a Chinatown powerbroker, is the host of the event. She stands in front of the room, takes the microphone, and, in Cantonese, delivers a remarkable political speech.

According to people in the audience, she says, in essence, that the community has come out to celebrate and support Ed Lee — but that’s just the start. She also urges them not just to promote their candidate — but to do everything possible to prevent Leland Yee from becoming mayor.

She continues on for several minutes, lambasting Yee, the state Senator who lived in Chinatown as a child, accusing him of about every possible political sin — and turning the Lee rally into an anti-Yee crusade. And nobody in the crowd seems terribly surprised.

Across Chinatown, from the liberal nonprofits to the conservative Chamber of Commerce, there’s a palpable fear and distrust of the man who for years has been among San Francisco’s most prominent Asian politicians — and who, had Lee not changed his mind and decided to run for a full term this fall, was the odds-on favorite to become the city’s first elected Chinese mayor.

The reasons for that fear are complex and say a lot about the changing politics of Asian San Francisco, the power structure of a city where an old political machine is making a bold bid to recover its lucrative clout — and about the career of Yee himself.

Senator Leland Yee is a political puzzle. He’s a Chinese immigrant who has built a political base almost entirely outside of the traditional Chinatown community. He’s a politician who once represented a deeply conservative district, opposed tenant protections, voted against transgender health benefits and sided with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. on key environmental issues — and now has the support of some of the most progressive organizations in the city. He’s taken large sums of campaign money from some of the worst polluters in California, but gets high marks from the Sierra Club.

His roots are as a fiscal conservative — yet he’s been the only Democrat in Sacramento to reject budget compromises on the grounds that they required too many spending cuts.

He’s grown, changed, and developed his positions over time. Or he’s become an expert at political pandering, telling every group exactly what it wants to hear. He’s the best chance progressives have of keeping the corrupt old political machine out of City Hall — or he’s a chameleon who will be a nightmare for progressive San Francisco.

Or maybe he’s a little bit of all of that.

 

Leland Yin Yee was born in Taishan, a city in China’s Guangdong province on the South China Sea. The year was 1948; Mao Zedong’s Communist Party of China had taken control of much of the countryside and was moving rapidly to take the major cities. The nationalist army of General Chiang Kai-Shek was falling apart, and Yee’s father, who owned a store, decided it was time for the family to leave.

The Yees made it to Hong Kong, and since Mee G. Yee had previously lived in the United States and served in the U.S. Army during World War II, he was ultimately able to move the family to San Francisco. In 1951, the three-year-old Leland Yee arrived in Chinatown.

For four years, Yee lived with his sister and mother in a one-room apartment with a shared bathroom while his father worked as a sailor in the merchant marine. It was, Yee recalled in a recent interview, a tight, closed, and largely self-sufficient community.

“The movie theater, the shoe store, the barber shop, food — everything you needed you could get in Chinatown,” Yee said. “You never had to leave.”

Of course, after a while, Yee and his mom started to venture out, down Stockton Street to Market, where they’d shop at the Emporium, the venerable department store. “It was like walking into a different country,” he said. “If you didn’t know English, they didn’t have time for you.”

Yee, like a lot of young Chinese immigrants of his era, put much of his time into his studies — in the San Francisco public schools and in a local Chinese school. “My mom spoke a village dialect, and we had to learn Cantonese,” he said. “Every little kid had to go to Chinese school. We hated it.”

When Yee was eight, his parents managed to buy a four-unit building on Dolores Street, and the family moved to the Mission, where he would spend not only the rest of his childhood but much of his early adult life. He graduated from Mission High School, enrolled in City College, studied psychology and after two years won admission to UC Berkeley.

Berkeley in 1968 was a very different world from Chinatown and even the relatively controlled environment he’d experienced at home in the Mission. “You didn’t protest in school. You’d have been sent home, and your mother would kill you,” he said.

At Berekely, all hell was breaking loose, with the antiwar protests, the People’s Park demonstrations, the campaign to create a Third World College (which led to the first Ethnic Studies Department), and a general attitude of mistrust for authority. “I developed a sense of activism,” Yee said. “I realized I could speak out.”

That spirit quickly vanished when Yee lost faith in some of his fellow activists. “People would work with us, then get into positions of power and use that against you,” he recalled. “A lot of my friends said ‘forget it.’ I left the scene.”

Yee once again devoted his energy to school, earning a masters at San Francisco State University and a Ph.D in child psychology from the University of Hawaii. Along the way, he met his wife, Maxine.

With his new degree, the Yees moved back to San Francisco — and back in with his parents at the Dolores property, where he, Maxine and a family that would grow to four kids would live for more than a decade.

 

Yee worked as a child psychologist for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, starting the city’s first high school mental-health clinic. He went on to become a child psychologist at the Oakland Unified School District, then joined a nonprofit mental health program in San Jose.

In 1986, Yee decided to get active in politics for the first time since college, and ran for the San Francisco School Board. He lost — and that would be the only election he would ever lose. In 1988, he won a seat, and established himself as an advocate for students of color, fighting school closures in minority neighborhoods. He also tried to get the district to modify its harsh disciplinary rules, arguing against mandatory expulsions.

On fiscal issues, though, Yee was a conservative. For his first term, despite the brutal cutbacks of the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, he insisted that the district make do with the money it had. His solution to the red ink: Cut waste. Only in 1992, when he was up for re-election, did he acknowledge that the district needed more cash; at that point, he supported a statewide initiative to tax the rich to bring money to the schools.

The sense of fiscal conservatism — of holding the line on taxes, but mandating open and fair contracting procedures and tight financial controls — was a hallmark of much of his political career. When the Guardian endorsed him for re-election to the board in 1992, we wrote that “there’s real value in his continuing vigilance against administrative fat and favoritism in contracts.”

Over the next four years, Yee worked with then-Superintendent Waldemar “Bill” Rojas, a deeply polarizing figure who pushed his own personal theory of “reconstitution” — firing all the staff at low-performing schools — and later was enmeshed in a scandal that led to prison time for a contractor he’d hired. Yee told me he was the only board member to vote against hiring Rojas, but people who were watching the board closely back then say he didn’t always stand up to the superintendent.

He also became what some say was a bit too close with Tim Tronson, a consultant hired by the district as a $1,000-a-day facilities consultant. Tronson wound up getting indicted on 22 counts of grand theft, embezzlement, and conspiracy in a scheme to steal $850,000 from the schools, and was sentenced to four years in state prison.

In 1998, when some school board members wanted to build housing for teachers on property that the district owned in the Sunset, Yee led the opposition — with Tronson’s help. At one meeting at Sunset Elementary School, Yee went so far as to say, according to people present, that “Tim Tronson is my man, and I rely on him for advice.”

Yee acknowledged that he worked closely with Tronson to defeat that housing project. “He was the facilities manager,” Yee explained, “and I said that I trusted his judgment.”

 

Yee has either a great sense of political timing or exceptional luck. He ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1996, facing one of the weakest fields in modern San Francisco history. He was the only Chinese candidate and one of just two Asians (the other, appointed incumbent Michael Yaki, barely squeaked to re-election). In an at at-large election with the top five winning seats, Yee came in third, with 103,000 votes.

He was never a progressive supervisor. In 2000, the Guardian ranked the good votes of what we referred to as Willie Brown’s Board, and Yee scored only 43 percent. He was against campaign finance reform. He supported the brutal gentrification and community displacement represented by the Bryant Square development. He voted to kill a public-power feasibility study and opposed the Municipal Utility District initiative. He opposed a moratorium on uncontrolled live-work development.

In 2002, Yee was one of only three supervisors to oppose Proposition D, a crucial public-power measure that would have broken up PG&E’s monopoly in the city. He stood with PG&E (and then-Sups. Tony Hall and Gavin Newsom) in opposition to the measure, then signed a pro-PG&E ballot argument packed with PG&E lies.

When I asked him about that stand, Yee at first didn’t recall opposing Prop. D, but then said he “stood with labor” on the issue. In fact, the progressive unions didn’t oppose Prop. D at all; the opposition was led by PG&E’s house union, IBEW Local 1245.

Yee was particularly bad on tenant issues. He not only voted to deny city funding for the Eviction Defense Collaborative, which helped low-income tenants fight evictions; he actually tried to get the city to put up money for a free legal fund to help landlords evict their tenants. He opposed a ballot measure limiting condo conversions. He opposed a measure to limit the ability of landlords to pass improvement costs on to their tenants.

In 2001, Yee voted to uphold a Willie Brown veto of legislation to limit tenancies in common, a backdoor way to get around the city’s condo conversion ordinance. Only Hall and Newsom, then the most conservative supervisors on the board, joined Yee. At one point, he started asking whether the city should consider repealing rent control.

He opposed an affordable housing bond in 2002, joining the big landlord groups in arguing that it would raise property taxes. Every tenant group in town supported the measure, Proposition B; every landlord group opposed it.

I asked Yee about his tenant record, and he told me that he now supports rent control. But he said that he was always on the side of homeowners and small landlords, and that property ownership was central to Chinese culture. “I was responding to the Chinese community and the West Side,” he said.

He wasn’t much of an environmentalist, either — at least not in today’s terms. He was one of the only city officials to support a “Critical Car” rally in 1999, aimed at promoting the rights of vehicle drivers (and by implication, criticizing Critical Mass and the bicycle movement).

His record on LGBT issues was mixed. While he supported a counseling program for queer youth when he was on the school board, he also supported JROTC, angering queer leaders who didn’t want a program in the public schools run by, and used as a recruiting tool for, the military, which at that point open discriminated against gay and lesbian people.

 

 

Yee was also one of only two supervisors who voted in 2001 against extending city health benefits to transgender employees.

That was a dramatic moment in local politics. Nine votes were needed to pass the measure, and while eight of the supervisors were in favor, Yee and Hall balked. At one point, Board President Tom Ammiano had to direct the Sheriff’s Office to go roust Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, who was ducking the issue in his office, to provide the crucial ninth vote.

Yee didn’t just vote against the bill. According to one reliable source who was there at the time, Yee spoke to a community meeting out on Ulloa Street in the Sunset and berated his colleagues, quipping that the city should have better things to do than “spend taxpayer money on sex-change operations.”

It was a bit shocking to trans people — Yee had, over the years, befriended some of the most marginalized members of what was already a marginalized community. “There was one person at the rail crying, saying ‘Leland, how could you do this to us,'” Ammiano recalled.

The LGBT community was furious with Yee. “I didn’t speak to him for at least a year,” Gabriel Haaland, one of the city’s most prominent transgender activists, told me.

Yee now says the vote was a mistake — but at the time, he told me, he was under immense pressure. When he voted for the queer youth program, he said, “the elders of the Chinese community ripped me apart. They called my mother’s friends back in the village [where he was born] and said her son was embarrassing the Chinese community.”

That must have been difficult — and he said that “if I had known the pain I had caused, I wouldn’t have voted that way.” But it was hard to miss that pain his vote caused.

On the other hand, people learn from their experiences, attitudes evolve, we all grow up and get smarter, and the way Yee describes it, that’s what happened to him.

In 2006, when he was running for state Senate, Yee met with a group of trans leaders and formally — many now say sincerely — apologized. It was an important gesture that made a lot of his critics feel better about him.

“He didn’t have to do that,” Haaland said. “People change, and he paid for his crime, and that’s genuine enough for me.”

As a former school board member, Yee kept an interest in the schools — but not always a healthy one. At one point, he actually proposed splitting SFUSD into two districts, one on the (poorer) east side of town and one on the (richer) west. “We strongly opposed that,” recalled Margaret Brodkin, who at the time ran Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. “Eventually he dropped the idea.”

For all the problems, in his time on the Board of Supervisors, Yee developed a reputation for independence from the Brown Machine, which utterly dominated much of city politics in the late 1990s. His weak 43 percent rating on the Guardian scorecard was actually third-best among the supervisors, after Ammiano and the late Sue Bierman.

In 1998, he was one of the leaders in a battle to prevent the owners of Sutro Tower from defying the city’s zoning administrator and placing hundreds of new antennas on Sutro Tower. He, Bierman, and Ammiano were the only supervisors opposing Brown’s crackdown on homeless people in Union Square.

When he ran in the first district elections, in 2000, against two opponents who had Brown’s support and big downtown money, the Guardian endorsed him, noting that while he “can’t be counted on to support worthy legislation … He’s one of only two board members who regularly buck the mayor on the big issues.”

(He never liked district elections, and used to take any opportunity to denounce the system, at times forcing Ammiano to use his position as president to tell Yee to quit dissing the electoral process and get to the point of his speech.)

 

In 2002, the westside state Assembly district seat opened up, and both Yee and his former school board colleague Dan Kelly ran in the Democratic primary. Yee won, and went on to win the general election with only token opposition.

His legislative record in the Assembly wasn’t terribly distinguished. Yee never chaired a policy committee — although he did win a leadership post as speaker pro tem. And he cast some surprisingly bad votes.

In 2003, for example, then-Assemblymember Mark Leno introduced a bill that would have exempted single-room occupancy hotels from the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict tenants for no reason. Yee refused to vote for the bill. Leno was furious — he was one vote short of a majority and Yee’s position would have doomed the bill. At the last minute, a conservative Republican who had grown up in an SRO hotel voted in favor.

When he ran for re-election in 2004, we noted: “What’s Leland Yee doing up in Sacramento? We can’t figure it out — and neither, as far as we can tell, can his colleagues or constituents. He’s introduced almost no significant bills — compared, for example, to Assemblymember Mark Leno’s record, Yee’s is an embarrassment. The only high-profile thing he’s done in the past several years is introduce a bill to urge state and local governments to allow feng shui principles in building codes.”

In 2006, Yee decided to move up to the state Senate, and he won handily, beating a weak opponent (San Mateo County Supervisor and former San Francisco cop Mike Nevin) by almost 2-1. His productivity increased significantly in the upper chamber — and in some ways, he moved to the left. He’s begun to support taxes — particularly, an oil severance tax — and when I’ve questioned him, he somewhat grudgingly admits that Prop. 13 deserves review.

He’s done some awful stuff, like trying to sell off the Cow Palace land to private developers. But he has consistently been one of the best voices in the Legislature on open government, and that’s brought him some national attention.

Yee has been a harsh critic of spending practices and secrecy at the University of California, and when UC Stanislaus refused in 2010 to release the documents that would show how much the school was paying Sarah Palin to speak at a fundraiser, Leland flew into action. He not only blasted the university and introduced legislation to force university foundations to abide by sunshine laws; he worked with two Stanislaus students who had found the contract in a dumpster and made headlines all over the country.

He’s fought for student free speech rights and this year pushed a bill mandating that corporations that get tax breaks for job creation prove that they’ve actually created jobs — or pay the tax money back. He’s also won immense plaudits from youth advocates and criminal justice reformers for his bill that would end life-without-parole sentences for offenders under 18.

Along the way, he compiled a 100 percent voting record from the major labor unions, including the California Nurses Association and SEIU, and with the Sierra Club. All three organizations have endorsed him for mayor.

Yee told me that he thinks he’s become more progressive over the years. “My philosophy has shifted,” he said.

Yet when you talk to his colleagues in Sacramento, including Democrats, they aren’t always happy with him. Yee has a tendency to be a bit of a loner — he’s never chaired a policy committee and in some of the most bitter budget fights, he’s refused to go along with the Democratic majority. Yee insists that he’s taken principled stands, declining to vote for budget bills that include deep service cuts. But the reality in Sacramento is that budget bills have until this year required a two-thirds vote, meaning two or three Republicans have had to accept the deal — and losing a Democratic vote has its cost.

“You have to give up all sorts of things, make terrible compromises, to get even two Republicans,” one legislative insider told me. “When a Democrat goes south, you have to find another Republican, and give up even more.”

In other words: It’s easy to take a principled stand, and make a lot of liberal constituencies happy, when you aren’t really trying to make the state budget work.

 

I met Rose Pak on a July afternoon at the Chinatown Hilton. She brought along her own loose tea, in a paper package; the waitress, who clearly knew the drill, took it back to the kitchen to brew. Pak and I have not been on the greatest of terms; she’s called the Guardian all kinds of names, and I’ve had my share of critical things to say about her. But on this day, she was polite and even at times charming.

After we got the niceties out of the way (she told me I was unfair to her, and I told her I didn’t like the way she and Willie Brown played politics), we started talking about Yee. And Pak (unlike some people I interviewed for this story) was happy to speak on the record.

She told me Yee had “no moral character.” She told me she couldn’t trust him. She told me a lot of stories and made a lot of allegations that we both knew neither she nor I could ever prove.

Then we got to talking about the politics of Chinatown and Asians in San Francisco, and a lot of the animosity toward Yee became more clear.

For decades, Chinatown and the institutions and people who live and work there have been the political center of the Chinese community. Nonprofits like the Chinatown Community Development Center have trained several generations of community organizers and leaders. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the Six Companies, and other business groups have represented the interests of Chinese merchants. And while the various players don’t always get along, there’s a sense of shared political culture.

“In Chinatown,” Gordon Chin, CCDC’s director, likes to say, “it’s all about personal connections.”

There’s a lively infrastructure of community-service programs, some of which get city money. There’s also a sense that any mayor or supervisor who wants to work with the Chinese community needs to at least touch base with the Chinatown establishment.

Yee doesn’t do that. “He doesn’t give a shit about them,” David Looman, a political consultant who has worked with many Chinese candidates over the years, told me.

Yee’s Asian political base is outside of Chinatown; he told me he sees himself representing more of the Chinese population of the Sunset and Richmond and the growing Asian community in Visitacion Valley and Bayview.

Pak is connected closely to Brown, who Yee often clashed with. For Pak, Brown, and their allies, strong connections to City Hall mean lucrative lobbying deals and public attention to the needs of Chinatown businesses. Then there’s the nonprofit sector.

CCDC and other nonprofits do important, sometimes crucial work, building and maintaining affordable housing, taking care of seniors, fighting for workers rights, and protecting the community safety net. Yee, Pak said, “has never shown any interest in our local nonprofits. We all work together here, and he doesn’t seem to care what we do.” Yee told me he has no desire to see funding cut for any critical social services in any part of town. But he has also made no secret of the fact that he questions the current model of delivering city services through a large network of nonprofits, some of which get millions of taxpayer dollars. And the way Pak sees it, all of that — the nonprofits, the business benefits, the contracts — are all at risk. “If Leland Yee is elected mayor,” she told me, “we are all dead.”

I ran into an old San Francisco political figure the other day, a man who has been around since the 1970s, inside and outside of City Hall, who remains an astute observer of the players and the power relationships in the local scene. At the time we talked, he wasn’t supporting any of the mayoral candidates, but he had a thought for me. “This town,” he said, “is being taken over by a syndicate. Willie Brown is the CEO, and Rose Pak is the COO, and it’s all about money and influence.”

That’s not a pleasant thought — I’ve lived through the era of political machine dominance in this town, and it was awful. In the days when Brown ran San Francisco, politics was a tightly controlled operation; only a small number of people managed to get elected to office without the support of the machine. Developers made land-use policy; gentrification and displacement were rampant; corruption at City Hall turned a lot of San Franciscans off, not only to the political process but to the whole notion that government could be a positive force in society.

A few years ago, I thought those days were over — and to a certain extent, district elections will always make machine politics more difficult. But when I see signs of the syndicate popping up — and I see a candidate like Ed Lee, who’s close friends with Brown, leading the Mayor’s Race — it makes me nervous. And for all his obvious flaws, at least Leland Yee isn’t part of that particular operation. If there’s a better reason to vote for him, I don’t know what it is.

YEE HOME PURCHASE RAISES SUSPICIONS

Rose Pak has a question about Leland Yee. “How,” she asked me, “did the guy manage to buy a million-dollar house on a $30,000 City Hall salary?”

Pak isn’t the only one asking — numerous media reports over the years have examined how Yee raised a family of four and bought a house in the Sunset on very little visible income. And while I’m not usually that interested in the personal finances of political candidates, I decided that it was worth a look.

Here’s what I found: Public records show that in July 1999, Yee and his wife, Maxine, purchased a house on 24th Avenue for $875,000 (it’s now assessed at slightly more than $1 million). At the time, Yee was a San Francisco supervisor, earning a little more than $30,000 a year. (The salary of the supervisors was raised dramatically shortly after Yee left the board and went to the state Assembly.) His wife wasn’t working. And his economic interest statements for that period show no other outside earnings. So the disposable, after-tax income of the entire Yee family couldn’t have been much more than $25,000.

That, by any normal standard, shouldn’t have been enough to float a mortgage that, records show, totaled $516,000. In fact, the interest payments alone on that mortgage alone would total $3,600 a month — more than Yee’s gross income.

Documents in the Assessor’s Office show another paper trail, too. In 1989, Jung H. Lee, Yee’s mother, transferred the deed on a four-unit Dolores St. building where the family had been living to Maxine and Leland Yee — for no money. And a few months before the Yees bought the Sunset house, they took out a $320,000 home-equity loan on that property. That was the down payment on the Sunset property.

Still: At that point, the Yees would have been paying off two mortgages, with a total nut of about $5,000 a month — and supporting four kids, in San Francisco. In 2002, Yee’s economic interest statement’s show some modest income from teaching at Lincoln University — but nowhere near enough to pay that level of expenses.

What happened? Yee explains it this way: “For more than 10 years, we were living rent-free in my parents’ property,” he told me I an interview. “We were a close Chinese family, and my parents provided the food and helped pay for the children’s clothing. So we had almost no expenses and we lived very frugally.”

During that period, Yee was working for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the Oakland Unified School District, and a San Jose nonprofit, earning, he said, between $50,000 and $90,000 a year. If he saved almost all of that money, he would have had more than a half-million dollars in the bank when he bought the Sunset house.

There’s nothing on any of his economic disclosure forms showing any ownership of stocks or other reportable financial interests during that period, so he wasn’t investing the money. In fact, he says, it was, and is, all in simple savings accounts. A bit unusual for that large a sum of money.

How did he get a mortgage? “Back then,” he said, “banks were willing to lend a lot more freely than they do today.”

Starting in 2003, Yee was in the state Assembly, making a higher salary — but still not much in excess of $100,000 a year. After taxes, he was probably taking home about $75,000 — and $60,000 was going to the two mortgages.

How did he do it? “We have been supplementing our income with our savings,” he said. “We don’t take vacations, we are very careful with our money.” And they clearly aren’t desperate for cash — Yee’s daughter occupies two of the four units in the Dolores St. building they own, but the other two units are vacant.

It’s possible. It’s plausible. But I don’t blame people for wondering how he managed to pull it off. (Tim Redmond, with research assistance by Oona Robertson) 

 

 

 

BIG CORPORATIONS HAVE BACKED YEE

Yee became a prodigious fundraiser in Sacramento — and a lot of the money came from big corporations that had business in the Legislature. And while he has perfect scores from the Sierra Club and the big labor unions, he’s taken tens of thousands of dollars from some of the biggest corporations, agribusiness interests, and polluters in the state. And at times, he’s voted their way.

Since 1993, for example, campaign finance records show Yee has taken more than $20,000 from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Valero, Conoco Phillips, and BP. He’s received another $22,450 from the chemical industry (and industry employees). Most of it came from Clorox, Dow Chemical, and Dupont.

And while the Sierra Club may not have considered it a priority, Sen. Mark Leno has worked hard to pass a bill limiting chemical fire retardants in furniture. In 2008, Yee voted against Leno’s AB 706.

That year he also refused to support a bill that would prohibit the use of the chemical diacetyl in workplaces. The industries that opposed AB 514 (including Bayer, Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson) have given Yee a total of more than $60,000.

In 2003, Yee voted against a crucial tenant bill, one that would have prevented the owners of single room occupancy hotels from using the Ellis Act to evict tenants. He received a campaign check for $2,500 from the San Francisco Apartment Association the next day. Landlords in general have given Yee close to $40,000.

Then there’s agribusiness. Yee gets a lot of money from the farming industry, despite the fact that there obviously aren’t many farms in his district. Why, for example, would the California Poultry Association, the California Cattlemen’s Association, and the California Farm Bureau give him money? The Poultry Association’s Bill Mattos told us that Yee “has taken a keen interest in California’s poultry industry.”

Yee also took immense flak from the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers over a 2003 vote against a bill to limit emissions from farm vehicles. In an editorial, the paper wrote that he was “doing dirty work for the lobbyists.” In the end, under immense public pressure, he switched positions and voted for the bill. I asked Yee about all that money from all those bad operators, and he told me — as most politicians will — that campaign cash has never influenced any of his votes.

So why do all these groups give him money? “It’s about whether you will sit down and listen,” Yee said. “I will talk to all sides and at least consider the arguments as a thoughtful human being. Then I vote my conscience.” (Tim Redmond, with research by Oona Robertson) 

Kids on bikes

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news@sfbg.com

To meet San Francisco’s policy goal of having 20 percent of all vehicle trips made by bicycle by the year 2020, advocates and officials say the city will need to make cycling more attractive to the young and old, from age 8 to 80. But there are some built-in challenges to getting more school children on bikes, even if there has been some recent progress, as demonstrated during the Bike to School Day in April.

“I see more and more middle and high school teams out there,” Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, said of the group rides to and from school that parents have been organizing.

According to a 2009 David Binder poll, seven out of 10 residents in San Francisco use a bicycle (this includes regular commuters and once-a-year riders) and last year’s city count of bike ridership from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s annual report saw a 58 percent increase in the number of cyclists on the road. At any given time during regular business weekday hours, some 9,210 riders pedal through the streets, according to last year’s results.

Children account for some of that increase, as demonstrated by the Bike to School Day event and its 3,000 riders — the most ever. Shahum attributes some of the increase to the new separated bikeways on Market Street, Alemany Boulevard, and Laguna Honda Boulevard, which allow children and their parents to feel safer. “When the bikeway was introduced, the numbers increased — there is growing demand.”

Programs like the Department of Public Health’s Safe Routes to School and SF Unified School District’s Student Support Services Department are helping to raise awareness of the improvements to encourage more cycling by young people.

Safe Routes to School Project Coordinator Ana Validzic said cycling is often more convenient than driving to school, particularly given the difficult parking situations at schools. Martha Adriasola, a committee member for the program, said parents and students also are attracted by the increased physical activity from cycling.

But a large portion of San Francisco’s grade school-bound population has yet to join the pedal revolution. Adriasola mentioned several reasons that prevent children from biking, including getting to schools on hills or far from home as well as the lack of bike storage at schools.

“There used to be a lot of concern about where to keep the bicycles,” Adriasola told the Guardian. But that’s changing thanks to a recent grant from the Department of Sustainability will provide bike racks for students at all schools in the district.

“That was one of the missing pieces,” Shahum said of the bike racks. “The district understands that it is good for the city for folks to ride their bikes.”

With new racks lining the campuses, the question remains whether there will be enough riders to fill them. Efforts to improve diversity in the school system and parent preferences for certain schools mean many kids travel across town to school.

Gentle Blythe, SFUSD’s executive director of public outreach and communications, said that last year the school board modified its school selection system to encourage more students to attend their local schools by resolving ties between applicants based on whether the applicant lives in the school’s attendance area. Currently, Blythe said, three out of every four applicants list a school that is not the one closest to their home as their first choice.

According to SFUSD’s 2010 fall enrollment maps, which show all the district’s elementary schools and compares them to the students’ residences, most of the 72 schools have as many students traveling from across the district as those living within a mile of the campus. Parker Elementary in North Beach is such an example, with an almost equal number living inside and outside the neighborhood, including some who live as far away as Visitacion Valley.

With such a long way to ride, it’s difficult for parents and those concerned with safety to feel comfortable allowing children to ride. But Shahum believes it’s still possible. SFBC’s Connecting the City project advocates for safe, cross-town bikeways throughout the city, which could draw more children onto the streets.

Shahum noted that bicycling increased dramatically even when there was a court injunction barring new bike projects. “Imagine the change we can expect when the changes do come,” she said.

She also said that events such as Sunday Streets, the monthly carfree streets events, are attracting families and encouraging them to start cycling together. So the answer to encouraging more youth cycling may be to make the streets safer and more inviting for everyone.

“We hope, through the Connecting the City vision, to see people riding on cross-town bikeways — for everyone from 8 to 80.” she said. 

Mystery of the school lunches — revealed!

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Editors note: My son, Michael, constantly complains that none of the reporters who cover the public schools (including me) ever talk to the students. We listen to school board members, adminstrators, parents, sometimes teachers — but the kids never get a voice. I agree — it’s a problem. So when his sixth grade Language Arts class at Aptos came by the Guardian for a field trip (thanks, Ms. Oryall), I decided to let them write their own story, about whatever was bothering them. Here’s the result; I have edited it only for style.

Did you know that the school lunches are made in Illinois? They’re not always organic; in fact, at best they’re only organic once a month.


The district spends $18 million a year on about 4 million lunches.

They’re shipped in a refrigerated truck about 2,000 miles – releasing CO2 emissions.

We got this information by calling Nancy Waymack, executive director of policy and operations for SFUSD.

The lunches are made, she said, by human beings but are packaged by machine. The salads are grown in California and the bread is made in the Bay Area, but those are the only local parts of the lunch.

Aleta Oryall, sixth grade teacher who has worked at Aptos for 12 years, said that for the first nine years she was at the school, food was made at the cafeteria. “They would bake real chickens,” she said. “They served turkey over sweet potatos. It was good.”

Why has it changed?

Waymack said the reason the district can’t go back to local cooking is that it would take more labor, more time and more money. “The district would have to charge $5 or $6 for lunches.”

Students at Aptos are not thrilled with the quality of the lunches. “Most lunches are good, but they are not priced well,” said Jimmy Paterson. “They should be made in the kitchen.”

Jie Tao Tan said that “some are good, but the ones that aren’t good are disgusting because they are soggy.”

Emmanuel Nwabueze said that they lunches were “bad because they’re cold, and they should be made by real people.”
 
Editor’s PS: When Margaret Brodkin was running for school board, she proposed the district do a bond act to pay for a new central kitchen so all the district’s lunches could be made locally. She didn’t win, but it’s still a good idea.

Free Muni for kids

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Sup. David Campos is talking about offering free Muni rides for some of San Francisco’s youth, and he’d like free passes for all school kids next year. That’s a great way for the city to work with SFUSD; the school district spends a huge amount of money on buses. In fact, transportation is the second biggest item in the district’s budget (after salaries). There ought to be a way for kids (above a certain age; maybe fifth grade) who now take SFUSD buses to get on Muni instead.


And let me tell you all a little secret: Most of the middle-school kids who ride Muni never pay anyway. They all pile on the bus after school and some have passes and some don’t and the driver can’t possibly keep up with who’s got what when 50 young people are climbing aboard all at once.


So if we can let them all ride free we can save money for the schools, which can go into the classrooms, and make life easier on the drivers and kids who can avoid the crazy scramble.


And if we can’t do that, or if the city wants some sort of reimbursement, there’s an easy solution: Sell Muni passes in the schools. Not to get too bureaucratic, but SFUSD already keeps track of family income levels (that’s how they do the free lunches) and it wouldn’t be that hard to issue Clipper cards that allow low-income kids to ride free. Kids who can afford it would get a card at the beginning of the year and their parents could put money on it at the Clipper web site (or the kids could do it themselves with a machine in the school office.)


I know it sounds complicated, but it’s way more complicated now; you have to take your kid in person to buy a youth pass and present a birth certificate. Way easier to do it at the schools, where that data is already in the system. A good deal for all: SFUSD agrees to devote one staffer at each middle and high school to the (part-time) job of issuing bus cards, and in exchange SFUSD students get to ride Muni free or cheap — and SFUSD gets to cut its transportation budget.


Why is this not a no-brainer?  


 

School kids and Muni

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So SFUSD just decided to cut half of its school bus routes (including, I believe, one that my son sometimes takes to Aptos Middle School). I should be outraged — but I’m not. Jerry Brown has made it clear that even if he raises taxes, it’s going to be an ugly year for schools and everyone else, and I’d rather see cuts in transportation than in teachers and classes.


But if this is the approach, then the city and the school district need to do a better job coordinating around Muni.


Elementary school kids shouldn’t be on Muni; I’d save the school bus routes for them. But older kids can use the city system, and many do — and more would, if it were just a little easier.


My son often takes Muni after school — to the library, to his Tae Kwon Do class — and soon I’ll let him ride the bus home. But to buy him a youth pass, I have to take him personally to a Muni pass outlet, once every month, and it’s a pain. I understand why they won’t sell me a youth pass for my kid; I could cheat (well, nobody would really believe I was under 18, sigh; I don’t even get carded in bars). But why don’t they sell youth passes in the schools? 


It would be pretty simple: Muni issues a number of youth passes to each middle school and high school, the schools sell them out of the office and hand kids Muni maps with routes near the school marked off. I can use Nextbus to tell my son when to head out to the bus stop; there’s no reason the schools couldn’t do that, too. Post the schedules; sell the passes. Maybe even change a few Muni routes to make them more convenient for students.


It seems silly for a city as geographically small as San Francisco to have two parallel transportation systems. With a little creativity Muni could work for the schools, too. 

Advocates say Steve Li is DREAM Act eligible

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The Board of Supervisors plans to introduce a resolution at their Nov. 9 meeting denouncing the deportation of Shing Ma “Steve” Li, a  20-year-old DREAM Act student at City College of San Francisco, calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to grant him deferred action status, and urging Congress to pass the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act.

The move comes the same day San Francisco Unified School District Board President Jane Kim (leading in the as yet unresolved race to replace termed-out D6 Sup.Chris Daly) plans to introduce a similar resolution at the SFUSD Board meeting, and a week after City College Board Trustee Lawrence Wong introduced a resolution supporting Li, who has lived in California since 2002 and is studying to be a nurse , but is now in an immigration detention center in Arizona.

“It’s unreal how fast things change”, Li said in a statement made from Arizona, just seven weeks after ICE raided his home and arrested him.

Li, who is ethnically Chinese, was born in Peru as his parents fled political persecution in China. And  ICE is allegedly preparing to deport him to Peru, which he left when he was 12. (Calls to ICE had not been returned as of blog post time, but I’ll update this blog, when I get a reply.)

“He knows no one in Peru,” said Li’s lawyer, Sin Yen Ling, senior staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, as she described how Li’s grandma returned to China, when his grandfather died.

Five years ago, the U.S. denied Li’s parents political asylum from China and issued a removal order. But Li says he was unaware of his immigration situation until his home was raided, and advocates and community members believe his case illustrates how the U.S.’s immigration system tears up families and targets contributing members of society.

Li’s Sept. 15 arrest occurred one week before Congress failed to vote on the DREAM Act, which would provide a pathway to legalization to undocumented students who’ve grown up in the US and atten two years of college or served two years of the military.

“It’s critical to pass the DREAM Act before the new Congressional session, but Steve literally cannot wait and is set for deportation any day now, that’s why we need our Senators’ leadership today,”  Li’s attorney Sin Yen Ling told me, noting that so far their has been no response from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and that advocates are planning to target Sen. Barbara Boxer, now that the election is over.

In their resolution, Board President David Chiu and Sups. Eric Mar, John Avalos, David Campos and Ross Mirkarimi note that the DREAM Act is “bipartisan legislation that addresses the situation faced by young people who were brought to the United States years ago as undocumented immigrant children, and who have since grown up here, stayed in school, and kept out of trouble.”

These five supervisors note that each year, 65,000 U.S.-raised students who qualify from the DREAM Act’s benefits graduate. They also note that Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar asked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on April 21, 2010 to halt the deportation of immigrant students who could earn legal status under the DREAM Act, which has the support of the House and Senate leadership, all of the relevant committee chairs, the nation’s military leaders, and President Barack Obama.

“I will do whatever it takes to support efforts to pass this bill so I can sign it into law on behalf of students seeking a college education and those who wish to serve in our country’s uniform. It’s the right thing to do,” Obama told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on September 15, 2010—the same day that Li was arrested in San Francisco.

Update: Since writing this blog, I got a call back from ICE’s Lori Haley, who said she was limited in how much information she could share, but sent me this statement concerning Li:

“Shing Ma Li was taken into custody by ICE Fugitive Operations team officers on September 15, 2010, based upon a final order of removal issued by an immigration judge in 2004.  In 2005, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) reviewed his case and upheld the immigration judge’s decision.  Shing Ma Li currently remains in ICE custody while the agency seeks to make arrangements for his removal.”

 

Endorsement interviews: Natasha Hoehn

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Nataha Hoehn got her start in public education teaching junior high English in the South Bronx, and she’s now working for an education nonprofit. She chairs the After School for All Committee, and is a big fan of community schools for every kid.


Hoehn also wants to see more local control over education spending. The SFUSD, she pointed out to us, has to apply for state funds in 136 categories — textbooks, transportations, etc. “It ought to be a block grant,” she said.


She supports the new school assignment system, including the middle-school feeder; she argues that “moving students in cohorts is an important model.”


Hoehn doesn’t oppose charter schools, but questions the need for many of them, and suggests that the total be capped at 5-7 percent of the district. You can listen to our full interview here:


 

hoehn by endorsements2010