Education

Of borders and love songs

Steven T. Jones
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Of borders and love songs

esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL The way in which Diana Gameros first came to America is a world away from the heart-wrenching images we’re currently seeing in the news media of children who’ve been sent, on their own, to the U.S. border from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. At 13, she arrived on an airplane from her home city of Juarez, Mexico; the plan was to stay with an aunt who lived in Michigan for the summer. When Gameros visited her cousin’s school there, and saw that it had a swimming pool, among other luxurious-seeming facilities, her aunt asked if she wanted to go to that school and learn English. Gameros couldn’t say yes fast enough. She wound up staying three years, returning to Mexico for the second half of high school, and then moving back to the U.S. for college.

So no, no one ever sent her out on foot for the border, hoping that on the other side lay someone or something that could mean a brighter future.

And yet: “I’m kind of a fanatic when it comes to following this country’s immigration system and its history,” says Gameros, a fixture in San Francisco’s singer-songwriter scene for her thoughtful, melodic story-songs that contain both English and Spanish (she’s been referred to as the Latin Feist).

“I think there’s a lot that most American people don’t know. You hear people judging, calling these parents irresponsible…it’s so much more complicated than that,” she says. “People don’t know how the U.S.’s actions have affected these countries. People are risking their children’s lives because they need to be here. It’s not for the American dream, they’re not here to buy a nice car, a big house. They’re here because they want to eat, have a roof over their heads, fulfill basic necessities. It’s frustrating. There’s so much ignorance.”

Her unique perspective on border issues is one reason Gameros was selected to perform at MEX I AM: Live It to Believe It, a nearly weeklong festival organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in conjunction with SF’s Consulate General of Mexico. Bringing together musicians, actors, visual artists, and academics from throughout Mexico from July 31 through Aug. 5, the festival includes classical, indie, and pop music and dance, lectures and discussion of Mexico’s achievements and challenges, and a meeting of minds around border issues.

The program in which Gameros will perform, on the evening of Friday, Aug. 1, is called “Ideas: North and South of the Border,” and aims to explore innovation in the sciences, arts, and culture in Mexico. Among the other speakers: astronaut Jose Hernandez, who grew up in the Central Valley as the son of immigrant farmers; he’ll discuss his journey from childhood (he didn’t learn to read or speak in English until he was 12) through getting a degree in electrical engineering and eventually being tapped by NASA. Rosario Marin, the first Mexican-American woman to serve as Treasurer of the United States, will also be present, along with Favianna Rodriguez, a transnational visual artist whose work “depicts how women, migrants and outsiders are affected by global politics, economic inequality, patriarchy and interdependence” and the director of CultureStrike, an arts organization that works to organize artists, writers, and performers around migrant rights.

On the afternoon of Saturday, Aug. 2, actress-dancer Vicky Araico will perform her award-winning monologue Juana In a Million, which chronicles an undocumented immigrant’s quest to find home.

The other musical performances throughout the week run the gamut from Natalia Lafourcade, a two-time Latin Grammy winning pop singer, to Murcof + Simon Geilfus, an electronic audio-visual collaboration, the award-winning percussion ensemble Tambuco, renowned composer and jazz musician Hector Infanzon, and more.

Gameros, whose 2013 album Eterno Retorno (Eternal Return) features a song called “SB 1070” (after the racist Arizona law designed to prosecute undocumented immigrants), says she thinks her music can be a subtle form of education, an artistic entry point for people who might not know or think much about immigration issues.

“It’s a topic that touches me deeply, so my protest music is my offering, my way to say I’m with you and I stand with you,” she says. “Though if you listen to my lyrics you might think many [songs] are love songs, or written to a lover who didn’t treat me right.”

Gameros adds that she hopes the Latino community in San Francisco will embrace the festival and show up, a sentiment that carries a particular weight as housing prices in areas like the Mission are changing the local face of the local Latino population. “Unless its the symphony doing something with a Mexican artist, we don’t really have access to events like this that are mainstream cultural celebrations, normally,” she says. “And there’s such a fascinating group of people all here for it — I just hope as many people as possible take advantage of it, that they come and hear these stories we have to tell.”

 

MEX I AM: LIVE IT TO BELIEVE IT

July 31 through Aug. 5, prices and times vary

Most events at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org/mex-i-am

Everyone’s hospital

Michael Redmond
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15
Everyone’s hospital

rebecca@sfbg.com

“I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic,” Daniel volunteered, beginning to tell us his very San Francisco story.

He was diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s. Working in fine dining rooms of San Francisco hotels at the time, he had health insurance, and had gone to Kaiser for an unrelated procedure. That led to a blood test — and then wham.

“They just bluntly, without any compassion, just told me: You have it,” Daniel said. “Like telling you that you have a pimple on your nose or something.”

All around him, friends were dying from the disease. “I didn’t freak out, because that’s just my personality,” he recalled. “I know a lot of people who have been diagnosed, and they want to take their lives or whatever.”

Today, he’s unemployed and living on a fixed income. He lost his left eye years ago to an infection linked to HIV; he now has a prosthetic eye.

“I’m single, disabled, and low-income,” reflected Daniel, who didn’t want his last name printed due to privacy concerns. Originally from El Salvador, his family came to the U.S. when he was 10 and Daniel has permanent resident status. But despite the disadvantages he faces, Daniel still isn’t freaking out. His medical needs are met.

He got on MediCal after having to drop Kaiser. “And then I ended up at SF General,” he said, “with some of the most professional staff, doctors rated worldwide. It has some of the most professional health care providers for HIV, all in one place.”

Daniel is one satisfied San Francisco General Hospital patient, and he might as well be a poster child for how public health is supposed to work in big cities. Rather than being deprived of primary care and then showing up at the emergency room with preventable complications stemming from his disease, he’s keeping everything in check with regular doctor’s visits — and he can access this high level of care even though he’s on a very tight budget.

There’s a concerted effort underway in the San Francisco Department of Public Health to give more patients precisely the kind of experience Daniel has had, while also expanding its role as the region’s go-to trauma center.

But a difficult and uncertain road lies ahead of that destination, shaped in part by federal health care reform. The new course is being charted amid looming financial uncertainty and with more patients expected to enter the system and the doors of SF General.

Not every General Hospital patient is as lucky as Daniel. For scores of others, SF General is the last stop after a long, rough ride.

 

EMERGENCY CARE

Craig Gordon and Dan Goepel drive an ambulance for the San Francisco Fire Department, regularly charging through congested city streets with sirens blaring as they rush patients to SF General and other care facilities. They see it all: Patients who are violent and psychotic and need to be restrained in the back of the ambulance, folks who’ve just suffered burns or gunshot wounds.

Sometimes, in the thick of all of this, SF General’s Emergency Department is closed to ambulances — in public safety lingo, it’s called being “on diversion” — so the medics will have to reroute to different hospitals.

SF General might go on diversion because the Emergency Department is too slammed to take on anyone new, or because it’s too short-staffed to take on new patients without pushing nurse-to-patient ratios to unsafe levels.

For serious trauma cases, strokes, heart attacks, or traumatic brain injuries, however, the doors are always open. Patients with less-serious cases are the ones to be turned away when the hospital is on diversion.

Patients who wind up en route to SF General in Gordon and Goepel’s ambulance might be living on the margins. “If you’re kind of living on the cusp … you’re not likely going to pursue getting a primary care physician,” Goepel pointed out. “When something comes up, then you find yourself in the emergency room.”

Or their patients might be getting rescued from a spectacularly awful situation, like a plane crash. In this densely populated, earthquake-prone region, there is only one top-level trauma center between Highway 92 and the Golden Gate Bridge: SF General. Anyone in the city or northern San Mateo County unfortunate enough to experience a life-threatening incident — a car wreck, shooting, nasty fall, boating accident — winds up there, regardless of whether they’re rich or poor, indigent or insured. Ranked as a Level 1 trauma center, SF General is equipped to provide the highest level of care.

“In the summer, when school is out, we have a high season of gunshot wounds and stab wounds,” explained Chief Nursing Officer Terri Dentoni, who recently led the Guardian on a tour of the Emergency Department. “When it’s really nice outside, you have a lot of people who get into bike accidents, car accidents. … Last week, we were just inundated with critical care patients.”

Around 100,000 patients flow through SF General’s doors each year, and more than 3,900 need trauma care. On July 6, 2013, when Asiana Airlines’ Flight 214 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport, more than 60 crash victims were rushed to SF General with critical issues ranging from organ damage to spinal injuries.

“It was a very big tragedy,” Dentoni said. “But it was amazing how many people we took care of, and how well we took care of them.”

Aside from being the sole trauma center, SF General is also designated as the county’s safety-net hospital, making it the only healthcare option for thousands who are uninsured, poor, undocumented, homeless, or some combination thereof. This makes for complex cases. Patients might require translators, be locked in psychiatric episodes, or need a social worker to help them get to a medical respite facility after being discharged if they’re too weak to fend for themselves and don’t have anyplace to go. There isn’t always a place to send them off to.

“We’re seeing people who are dealing with poverty, and often homelessness, in addition to mental health issues,” explained Jason Negron, a registered nurse in the Emergency Department. “You’re seeing patients who often have a number of things going on. Someone who has multiple illnesses — HIV, heart failure, Hepatitis C — even under the best of circumstances, they would be juggling medications. So what happens when they’re out on the streets?”

San Francisco ranks high on the list of health-conscious cities, a haven for organic food aficionados, yoga addicts, and marathon runners. It’s also a world of high stakes struggles and mounting economic pressures. With the city’s skyrocketing cost of living, sudden job loss can spell disaster for someone without a financial cushion. SF General is the catchall medical care facility for anyone who’s slipped through the cracks.

But while rank-and-file hospital staff must tackle grueling day-to-day problems, like how to juggle multiple patients with complex health issues when all the beds are full and the hospital is understaffed, hospital administrators face an altogether different challenge.

For the past several years, the city’s Department of Public Health has been preparing for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, the federal policy that is reshaping the health care landscape. Since public hospitals are mandated to provide safety-net care, they are uniquely impacted by the ACA.

Even with a sweeping new rule mandating health insurance for all, some segment of the population will nevertheless remain uninsured. But they’ll still need medical care — and when health crises come up, they’ll turn to SF General. Trouble is, no one knows exactly how much funding will be available to meet that need as the financial picture shifts.

 

FUNDING CUTS LOOM

Even as ACA aims to increase access to medical care, it’s also going to trigger major funding cuts at the local level. With both state and federal funding being slashed, San Francisco’s county health system stands to lose $131 million in financial support over the next five years, a budgetary hit totaling around 16 percent.

That’s a significant shortfall that will directly impact SF General — but the cuts are being made with the expectation that these gaps will be filled by reimbursements riding in on the waves of newly insured patients enrolled in ACA. Before federal health care reform took effect, around 84,000 San Franciscans lacked health insurance. At the start of this year, 56,000 became eligible to enroll in a health insurance plan.

SF General serves most of the area’s MediCal patients, the subsidized plan for people living on less than $16,000 a year. And since the county gets reimbursed a flat rate for each patient, the expansion of MediCal under federal health care reform will presumably help San Francisco absorb the state and federal funding losses.

“There’s a certain set of patients who previously were not paid for, who now will have MediCal,” explained Ken Jacobs, an expert in health care policy and professor at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

But there’s a catch. Since MediCal and insured patients will be able to choose between San Francisco’s public system (called the San Francisco Health Plan) and a private medical provider, SF General also runs the risk of losing patients. If too many decide to go with Anthem Blue Cross instead, the system could veer into the red.

“There’s some question of what share of those we’ll keep,” Jacobs noted.

Asked about this, hospital CEO Sue Currin sounded a note of confidence. “Because our outcomes and our quality of care has been so high…75 percent of everyone who’s enrolled in MediCal managed care default to the Department of Public Health,” she told us.

But the journey toward ACA has only just begun, and things are still falling into place. Costs are projected to rise if nothing is done to improve efficiency, while at the same time, the pending state and federal funding shortfalls could take a toll.

Retaining and attracting insured patients is the only way to avoid a resource crunch — but patients could always walk away if they’re dissatisfied. This uncertainty “makes financial planning and management of risk even more challenging,” according to a report issued by the City Controller.

“We don’t know yet today how the Affordable Care Act will impact the safety net,” acknowledged Erica Murray, CEO of the California Association of Public Hospitals, which represents 21 public safety-net institutions throughout the state. “How are these health care systems evolving to be competitive? How do we continue to fulfill our core mission of being the safety net? That is the fundamental challenge. And we don’t know today, and we can’t be certain, that these public health systems will have sufficient funding.”

It’s all “very dynamic,” Murray said. “We don’t have sufficient data to be able to draw any definitive conclusions. It’s just too short of a time to be able to make any predictions. It will take several years.”

For all the newly insured patients under ACA, a certain segment will continue to rely on the safety net. Undocumented immigrants who don’t qualify will be left outside the system. Some individuals can be expected to outright refuse ACA enrollment, or be too incapacitated to do so. Others will opt out of Covered California, the ACA plan for people who make more than about $29,000 a year, because their budgets won’t stretch far enough to afford monthly payments even though they technically qualify. They’ll need safety-net care, too.

Yet under the new regime, “We can’t, as a safety net, go forward only with uninsured patients — because there won’t be funding to sustain the whole organization,” explained hospital spokesperson Rachael Kagan. “We will still have uninsured patients, always. But it won’t be sufficient to serve only them.”

Mike Wylie, a project manager in the Controller’s Office, worked on the city’s Health Reform Readiness project, an in-depth assessment performed in tandem with DPH and consultants. “The million dollar question is: Are we going to be on target with the projections?” Wylie asked.

Instead of standing still, San Francisco’s health system must transform itself, the Health Reform Readiness study determined. Ask anyone who works in health care management in the city, and they’ll tell you that DPH has been working on just that. The idea is to focus on network-wide, integrated care that runs more efficiently.

“We need to switch from being the provider of last resort, to the provider of choice,” Wylie noted, voicing an oft-repeated mantra.

This could mean fielding more patient calls with nursing hotlines, or using integrated databases to improve communication. There’s also emphasis on increasing the number of patients seen by a care provider in a given day. The report urged the department to ramp up its productivity level from 1.5 patient visits per hour, where it currently stands, to 2.25 patient visits per hour. Currin noted that the hospital has also been looking into group patient visits.

“Part of getting ready for health care reform was creating more medical home capacity,” Currin said, referring to a system where multiple forms of care are integrated into a single visit, “so we knew we needed to have better access to primary care.”

If no changes are made, the Health Reform Readiness study found, the city’s General Fund contribution to DPH is projected to rise substantially — to $831 million by 2019, up from $554 million in 2014-15.

“We’re a little concerned about this rising General Fund support,” Wylie noted. And even though staffing represents a major expenditure, “They didn’t assume cuts in staff,” while performing the assessment, he said. “What they’re trying to get is more outputs, more efficiency. The managers went over this and said: in order for us to survive, we’ve got to get more out of our system. We may have to cut money — we may have to cut later, if city leaders don’t commit to this rising General Fund. We’ve got to do all these best practices.”

Throughout crafting this road map, he added, “There were some uncomfortable meetings and uncomfortable moments. But I think [DPH Director] Barbara Garcia got everyone to agree to these strategies.”

Talk to rank-and-file hospital staff, however, and some will tell you that getting more out of the system is a tall order — especially when the system already feels like it’s busting at the seams.

 

SPACE CRUNCH, STRESSED STAFF

“We hit capacity every single day,” said Negron, the RN in the Emergency Department. Patients are regularly placed on beds in the hallways, he said. Wait times for the Emergency Department can last four to six hours, or even longer. The hospital is working on limiting those waits, not just because it’s better in practice, but because timely patient care is mandated under ACA.

“Now, we have 26 or 27 licensed beds in our Emergency Department,” Negron said. But in reality, on a regular basis, “We function with 45 to 50 patients.”

A nurse who works in the Psychiatric Emergency Services unit described her work environment as “a traffic jam with all lanes blocked. This is totally business as usual.”

The workload is on the rise, she added. “The psych emergency room used to see 500 patients a month,” she said. “Now we see 600 patients a month, sometimes more. People are moving faster and faster through the system.”

Her unit is the receiving facility for anyone who is placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, known as a 5150, for individuals who are a danger to themselves or others or gravely disabled.

“It doesn’t matter who they are,” she said. “We get homeless and destitute. We get CEOs. And we have had CEOs — it’s an experience for everyone involved.” Some patients have been involved in criminal activity. “I’ve had high profile people in my unit; people who have done things that, if I tell you what they did, you would easily be able to Google them.”

Patients who come to her wing need to be evaluated, because someone has determined that they are dangerous. It could be that they are “eating rotten food, or running naked in the street, or suicidal, or want to jump off Golden Gate Bridge, or their family thinks they’re out of control.” Sometimes, patients have to be let go once they’re no longer deemed to be a threat, but they still aren’t altogether recovered, she said.

In the psychiatric inpatient unit, meanwhile, the total number of beds has declined from 87 to 44 in the past five years — leading some staff members to voice concerns.

“There is more to do, and there’s less time to do it,” said another staff member who did not want to be named. This person said one psych unit was essentially shut down and another left open — “but then … a patient climbed up into the ceiling, broke some pipes, and flooded the room” in the open unit, so everything was shifted back to the closed unit.

In part, the daily patient crunch is due to a vacancy rate in the hospital nursing staff that hovers around 18 percent — but steps are being taken to address this problem, caused in part by the city’s Byzantine hiring process.

“The nurses are concerned about how, on a day-to-day basis, they don’t feel they have the support and resources they need,” said Nato Green, who represented the nurses’ union, SEIU Local 1021, in recent contract negotiations. “Staff was expected to do more with less. SF General chronically operates at a higher capacity than what it is budgeted for.”

Currin, the hospital CEO — who started out as a nurse herself — rejected this assertion, saying it is not the norm for the hospital to operate over budget. She added that she would like to reduce the nursing staff vacancy rate down to just 5 percent.

“We have had a fairly significant vacancy rate,” she acknowledged. “But just like any other hospital in the city and the country, you have countermeasures that you put in place to address staffing shortages. And so we use nurse travelers. We use as-needed staff, who work here part-time. We’ve been able to fill those gaps with these other staffing measures. We do want to have a more permanent workforce. We’re working with the city and [DPH] to bring in new hires.”

Roland Pickens, director of the San Francisco Health Network (the patient-care division of the Department of Public Health), said he was working with the city’s Human Resources Department to further streamline operations and get a jump on filling vacancies.

“[Chief Financial Officer] Greg Wagner is working with City Controller’s office and the Mayor’s Office, so everyone is addressing the issue of having a more expedited hiring process,” he said.

Negron, the RN, seemed to think it couldn’t happen soon enough. “For us, at the end of the day, who do we actually have that’s on the schedule, that’s on the floor?” he said. Being fully staffed is important, he added, “so we don’t have any more shortages. So we don’t close beds, or go on divert unnecessarily.”

Staff members, who deal hands-on with a vulnerable patient population, lament that there doesn’t seem to be enough resources flowing into the system to care for people who are at the mercy of the public safety net. After all, San Francisco is a city of incredible wealth — shouldn’t there be adequate funding to care for the people who are the most in need?

“Poor people are not profitable,” Green said. “Without regulatory intervention, poor people would not have adequate health care.”

 

EVOLVING INTO THE FUTURE

For all the concerns about staffing and the financial uncertainty caused by ACA, SF General still has plenty to brag about. For one, it’s moving into a brand new, nine-story facility in December 2015, which will be equipped with a seventh-floor disaster preparedness center and nearly twice as much space in the Emergency Department.

It will have 283 acute care beds, 31 more than there are now. Most of the patient rooms will be private, and the new hospital will be seismically sound — a critical upgrade in a city prone to earthquakes. The hospital construction was funded with an $887.4 million bond approved by voters in 2008.

“In a new care environment, it will be more comfortable for the patients and the staff,” Currin said. “It’s just a much better environment. We’re hoping with the expansion … the wait times [in the Emergency Department], instead of taking four to six hours, we’re hoping to decrease that by 50 percent,” she said. “There will be more nurses, physicians, housekeepers.”

Pickens, the Health Network director, said he felt that “the stars had aligned” to have the hospital rebuild nearing completion just as ACA gets into full swing, since the new facility can help attract the patients needed to make sure the health system is fully funded.

The hospital has also launched an initiative to reduce patient mortality linked to a deadly infection. “Sepsis is a reaction the body has to a severe infection,” explained Joe Clement, a medical surgical unit clinical nurse specialist. “It causes organ dysfunction, and in some cases death. It’s very common, it’s growing, there’s more and more of it every year, and about a third of hospital deaths have been associated with sepsis in some way.”

In 2011, SF General began implementing new practices — and successfully reduced the hospital mortality rate from 20 percent in 2010 to 8.8 percent in 2014.

SF General was also recently lauded in The New York Times for being a top performer in quality and safety scores for childbirth. In San Francisco, low-income women who may be uninsured and dealing with harsh life circumstances can nevertheless get full access to multilingual doctors, midwives, lactation consultants, and doulas. The World Health Organization has even designated it as “Baby Friendly,” because of practices that support breastfeeding.

As things move ahead, management is projecting a sense of confidence that SF General’s high-quality care will allow the hospital to attract patients and maintain a healthy system that can continue to support the insured and uninsured alike.

“Value, we usually define as improving health outcomes, and optimizing the resources we have, for as many people as we can,” said William Huen, associate chief medical officer.

Speaking about the sepsis initiative, he said, “This is kind of our model program of, how do you focus on one area where you know you can improve health outcomes, with integration throughout the system, education at every level … and then having the data and perfecting the care. That can be applied to anything. So as a system, I think we’ve developed infrastructure to support that type of work.”

But for the staff members who are actively involved in the union, it continues to be a waiting game to see if the promises of new staffing levels are realized. Until then, many have said that the low staffing levels are a threat to patient safety. “They are waiting to see if DPH lives up to its commitment to hire the people they said they were going to hire, and staff it at the level they were going to staff at,” Green said.

It all comes down to providing care for people who really have nowhere else to turn, Negron told us in the Emergency Department. “I’m sure we see the highest portion of uninsured patients in the city,” he said. “We’re doing that in many different languages, with people from all over the world. I feel like it’s a real honor to be able to work there in that context. I feel honored to meet a need — that’s not always able to be met.”

Refugee crisis hits home

Michael Redmond
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8

joe@sfbg.com

In the small, colorful Precita Valley Community Center, a woman clutches a black ceramic goblet, circling a teenage girl with wisps of incense, and repeats the act with the 60 or so attendees. The spiritual cleansing ritual is much needed. Afterward, the San Franciscans will set their minds to saving the lives of children.

Nearly 50,000 Central American children crossed the Mexican border since October, according to federal data, fleeing targeted violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This recent surge has hit home, as hundreds of those young refugees, often unaccompanied, seek asylum through immigration courts in San Francisco.

The courts often decide between life and death: Do the children stay in the safety of our sanctuary city, or return to countries from which they fled violence and chaos?

Jose Artiga, executive director of the Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research and Education Foundation, told the crowd a story of life in El Salvador.

“A boy of only 11 years old waited for his grandfather one day,” he said, in Spanish. “A gang captured him, and the community organized to search for the boy. They found the child, but in six parts. The grandfather said, ‘How can I bring my grandchild back to his mother in six parts?’ This was a child. The gang showed up at the funeral, and would not let the community bury him.”

Some say the rising power of gangs sparked this surge in immigration. As President Barack Obama struggles with a bitterly partisan and gridlocked Congress to find a solution, US cities are dealing with the impacts of the overburdened immigration court system.

Now politicians of all partisan stripes, activists, and families are coming together to help the child refugees. Just last week, Sup. David Campos’ resolution to find additional aid for overburdened immigration services unanimously passed the Board of Supervisors. The next step, he told the Guardian, is to determine how best to use funds to help these children.

At the Precita Valley Community Center and beyond, activists call for that funding to reach attorneys, without which these kids will almost certainly be sent home into harm’s way.

 

OVERBURDENED

The refugees travel far. Children fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala trek through Mexico to cross the US border, and some die in the attempt. Those who live and are discovered by Border Patrol officers along the Southwest border are held temporarily in crowded, cold detention centers in McAllen, Texas, or Nogales, Ariz.

Images of these detention centers show groups of children lying on hard floors in thin blankets, and some advocates for the refugees reported feces and urine soaking the floors. The young refugees tell officials where they have family connections, and are flown to immigration courts across the country.

One such court is in San Francisco.

In 2005, San Francisco had 227 new active deportation proceedings for unaccompanied children, according to federal data obtained by Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration project. That number was stable until 2012 when it jumped to 450 new cases. In 2013, the number jumped again, to 820.

San Francisco now has over 1,900 pending juvenile immigration cases, according to TRAC. Most of those children are Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan. The surge is pushing organizations that help these children to the breaking point.

Lariza Dugan-Cuadra, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, knows one thing for sure: “Things have been crazy.”

CARECEN is one of many organizations providing legal representation to Central American child refugees in San Francisco. Two attorneys and two paralegals handle the bulk of cases, which jumped from 20 children a month to 60.

“All a child is given is a court date,” Dugan-Cuadra told the Guardian. “While the US guarantees the right to court, it does not guarantee the right to representation.”

While US citizens have a constitutional right to representation by an attorney, noncitizens in Immigration Court do not. And when organizations like CARECEN can’t provide an attorney, the child loses.

“We’ve heard cases where a 6-year-old will go before a judge having to represent themselves,” she said. “The judges are throwing their hands up saying ‘Are you serious!?'”

Data obtained by TRAC Immigration backs up her claim.

Nationwide, only 52 percent of unaccompanied children are represented by an attorney in deportation court proceedings.

With an attorney, judges rule in a juvenile’s favor to stay about half the time, TRAC’s research found. Without an attorney? Only one in 10 children are granted asylum.

No legal representation means no hope. The ACLU filed a class-action suit against the United States earlier this month on behalf of unrepresented child immigrants, alleging just that.

“The onus has been hard on nonprofit providers and pro-bono attorneys,” Dugan-Cuadra said, because they know the stakes. Legal Services for Children, Catholic Charities, and the Asian Law Caucus are among the organizations calling for more aid.

Many of the attorneys are experiencing burnout. One we talked to was on a vacation for her mental health. Studies by the American Bar Association show judges are burning out too, and things are only getting worse: California has 77,000 pending immigration cases backlogged in its courts.

But locally, the children bear the worst of this: TRAC Immigration’s data shows only 71 of the new 830 unaccompanied children in San Francisco were represented by an attorney as of June 2014.

And without representation, many will be sent home to violence.

 

REFUGEES OR IMMIGRANTS?

The United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, said the children fleeing Central American countries should officially be considered refugees in need of asylum, a claim with legal ramifications President Obama so far has hesitated to make.

“We’re witnessing a complex situation in which children are leaving home for a variety of reasons, including poverty, the desire to join family, and the growing influence of trafficking networks,” Shelly Pitterman, UNHCR’s regional representative in the United States, said in a press statement. “Within this movement there are also children who are fleeing situations of violence at the hands of transnational organized criminal groups and powerful local gangs.”

Those fleeing violence and persecution, said Pitterman, will require access to asylum determination procedures and will need long-term protection. Others should be sent home, she said, and assisted with reintegration.

But some can’t find refuge anywhere at home, no matter where they go.

“My brother’s son was kidnapped eight years ago by extortionists,” one Salvadoran woman at the Precita center told the Guardian, declining to give her name out of fear for her family’s safety. Her brother moved to other cities, but the gangs continued to harass him and his family in provinces throughout El Salvador.

“He got letters threatening to kidnap his child. ‘We know where you live, we know where your child goes to school,'” she said. Her nephew is now 14. The last time she visited him she saw something that chilled her.

“He was approached by gangs to be recruited. I witnessed that. One day after when we were in the car, my nephew saw the gangs in another car. He hid on the floor and started to shake.”

The woman turned her head away and held back tears.

“My brother said ‘I have to take you out of here.'”

Now her nephew is somewhere safe in the United States, she said, though she would not say where. But the reason he left is clear.

“These kids don’t want to be the next dead body on the street,” Clarisa Sanchez, a Board of Immigration’s representative from Catholic Charities CYO told the Guardian.

Nationally, Republicans are calling for the mass deportation of these children. “I won’t stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said this week, as he announced deployment of 1,000 National Guard troops along the Texas border.

But many pin the origins of the crisis squarely on the United States.

 

DRUG LEGACY

Salvadorans are familiar with violence and cruelty. In 1932, more than 30,000 Salvadorans were slaughtered in a peasant revolt called la matanza: the slaughter. Nearly 75,000 civilians died in El Salvador’s bloody civil war, from 1980-1992.

The US government intervened in that war, sending government aid to the Salvadoran government. Now the US has a hand in today’s violence in Central America, some say, as our country’s drug habits fuel cartels throughout the region. Those cartels are arming Central American gangs, whichObama admitted in a press conference last year.

“The United States recognizes that we’ve got responsibilities; that much of the violence in the region is fueled by demand for illegal drugs, including in the United States,” the president said.

Obama requested $3.7 billion emergency funding that would bring at least $64 million to immigration courts, but also at least $1.5 billion to border security and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a troubling addition to needed funding.

Back at the Precita Valley Community Center, Jose Cartagena pled for legal aid at the border. Cartagena is intimately familiar with the need: He fled El Salvador’s civil war over 30 years ago. As he crossed the Tucson desert, 13 of his fellow border-crossers died in the blazing southwestern heat. Only Cartagena survived. Now he’s a representative for the National Network of Salvadorans in the Exterior in San Francisco.

He called for justice.

“We have to help these kids find their families or sponsors,” he said. “If we don’t provide legal support now, the Obama administration may deport all of them. We can’t wait until it’s too late.”

If you’d like to help the efforts around the Central American child refugees, you can contact CARECEN, Catholic Charities, or Superivsor David Campos’ office.

Events: July 2 – 8, 2014

Michael Redmond
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Listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Selector.

WEDNESDAY 2

Jean Kwok Book Passage, 1 Ferry Bldg, SF; www.bookpassage.com. 6pm, free. The author discusses her new novel, Mambo in Chinatown.

Craven Rock Long Haul Info Shop, 3124 Shattuck, Berk; www.thelonghaul.org. 7pm, free. The author reads from cultural-studies tome Days and Nights in a Dark Carnival. Yes, it’s about Juggalos.

Judy Wells and Dale Jensen Books Inc, 1344 Park, Alameda; (510) 522-2226. 7pm, free. The poets read as part of the Last Word Reading Series, followed by an open mic.

THURSDAY 3

“Target Independence Day Celebration” Craneway Pavilion, 1414 Harbour Way South, Richmond; www.oebs.org. 6:30pm, free. Oakland East Bay Symphony performs patriotic works to celebrate Independence Day, followed by a fireworks display.

FRIDAY 4

Fourth of July at the Berkeley Marina Berkeley Marina, 201 University, Berk; www.anotherbullwinkelshow.com. Noon-10pm, $15. Family-friendly fun with live entertainment, pony rides, arts and crafts, and fireworks (9:30pm).

July 4th Festival of Family Fun Jack London Square, Broadway and Embarcadero, Oakl; www.jacklondonsquare.com. 11am-4pm, free. Fun activities for families including a petting zoo, balloon artists, face paint, bubble wrangling, and more.

Pier 39 Fourth of July Pier 39, SF; www.pier39.com. Noon, free. The family-friendly fun begins at noon with live music from the USAF Band of the Golden West, followed by Tainted Love. At 9:30pm, enjoy the traditional fireworks display over the bay.

SATURDAY 5

Fillmore Jazz Festival Fillmore between Jackson and Eddy, SF. www.fillmorejazzfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. Also Sun/6. The largest free jazz fest on the West Coast fills 12 blocks with music, arts and crafts, gourmet food, and more.

LaborFest 2014 Redstone Building, 2940 16th St, SF; www.laborfest.net. 11am-5pm, free. Street fair in honor of the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Labor Temple. Also today: Noon, meet at 518 Valencia, SF. Free. Labor bike tour with Chris Carlsson (ends at Spear and Market). 2pm, meet at Harry Bridges Plaza Tower, Embarcadero at Market, SF. Free. SF General Strike walk led by retired ILWU longshoreman Jack Heyman and others. 7pm, ILWU Local 34 Hall, 801 Second St, SF. Donations accepted. “FilmWorks United” screening of Miners Shot Down (Desai, 2014).

SUNDAY 6

LaborFest 2014 First Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin, SF; www.laborfest.net. 9:30am, free. “Working Class Housing, Ethnic Housing: Hunters Point and Bayview” panel discussion. Also today: 9:45am, meet at Coit Tower entrance, One Telegraph Hill, SF. Free. Coit Tower mural walk with Peter O’Driscoll, Gray Brechin, and Harvey Smith. 11am, meet at 18th St and Tennessee, SF. Free. Dogpatch and Potrero Point walk with Nataly Wisniewski of SF City Guides. Noon, meet at One Market St, SF. Free. Labor history and Market St. walk with Chuck Schwartz of SF City Guides. 2pm, Bird and Beckett Bookstore, 653 Chenery, SF. Free. Author Zeese Papanikolas discusses the Ludlow Massacre. 7pm, 518 Valencia, SF. Free. “Labor, Privatization, and How to Defend Public Education” discussion.

Temescal Street Fair Telegraph between 40th and 51st Sts, Oakl; www.temescaldistrict.org. Noon-6pm, free. Three food courts and multiple stages showcasing local performers (including an entire stage just for kids with magicians, jugglers, and more), plus 150 booths with local crafts, artworks, and more.

MONDAY 7

LaborFest 2014 Meet at Portsmouth Square, Washington St, SF; www.laborfest.net. 10am, free. Chinatown walk with Mae Schoeing of SF City Guides. Also today: 7pm, Bird and Beckett Bookstore, 653 Chenery, SF. Free. Poetry reading by Nellie Wong and Alice Rogoff.

TUESDAY 8

LaborFest 2014 Meet at the corner of Stockton and Maiden Lane, SF; www.laborfest.net. 10am, free. “Rising Steel: Two Centuries of San Francisco Architecture” walking tour. Also today: 6-9pm, Pacific Media Workers Guild, 433 Natoma, SF. Free. “Méndez Rising: Spotlight on the Revolutionary Works of an Artist for Social Justice,” tribute to the art of Leopoldo Méndez. *

 

It’s a trap

Michael Redmond
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10
It’s a trap

joe@sfbg.com

As City College of San Francisco struggles to loosen the noose around its neck, this week its accreditors are slated to offer the college a new way out. But some skeptics are sounding the alarm: it’s a trap.

The Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges is scheduled to vote on and announce a newly revised version of its “restoration policy,” which some journalists have called City College’s salvation.

“Huge CCSF Win: College Won’t Close,” one San Francisco Chronicle headline read. Bay Area TV stations and others echoed the jubilant headline, saying City College was saved. Chancellor Art Tyler told the Chronicle he would “absolutely” apply for restoration status. But many are calling the restoration policy a poor choice for the college’s future.

“Rumors of City College being saved are premature,” Alisa Messer, political director for the American Federation of Teachers Local 2121, told us.

The college’s faculty union isn’t the only one worried. A report released this month by the California State Auditor shows ACCJC has operated against its own bylaws and without full transparency in threatening CCSF’s accreditation.

“To allow community colleges flexibility in choosing an accreditor,” the state auditor’s report wrote, “the chancellor’s office should remove language from its regulations naming the commission as the sole accreditor of California community colleges while maintaining the requirement that community colleges be accredited.”

In the staid and stuffy bureaucratic language, the auditor essentially wrote the accreditor group was so dysfunctional it should be closed. The 75-plus page report scathingly tears down ACCJC staff, board selection, decisions, and policies. There are few areas in which they did not find fault.

“The report draws conclusions about accreditation without the necessary context and facts related to institutional evaluations,” ACCJC President Barbara Beno told the Guardian via email. “ACCJC is reviewed and approved by the United States Department of Education and its recognition was renewed in January 2014. That is the appropriate body to review the ACCJC’s practices.”

The DOE found many faults with the accreditors as well, but the scope of its review was limited to complaints made by the unions. The auditor viewed the accreditors in a fuller context, alleging the ACCJC decided to terminate CCSF’s accreditation “after allowing only one year to come into compliance,” while simultaneously allowing 15 other colleges two years and another six institutions to up to five years to reach compliance.

Such accusations of bias are also alleged in City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s lawsuit against ACCJC, charging CCSF was targeted with harsher penalties due to its political views.

Meanwhile, a closer look at restoration status shows it’s less like a lifeline and more like a tightrope suspended over flames.

The policy would give CCSF two years to come into compliance with all of the so-called “defects” ACCJC identified. If the college addresses these issues in two years, the commission would rescind the notice to terminate the college’s accreditation.

But buried in the legalese is a frightening clause noting that if CCSF isn’t found to comply with everything, “the termination implementation will be reactivated and the effective date will be immediate,” with “no further right to request a review or appeal in this matter.”

Beno said she heard the college community’s concerns around these clauses, during a two-week public comment period regarding the proposed policy that ended June 25.

“The Commission received a good deal of feedback,” she wrote, saying a revised “final version” of the restoration policy has been sent to the commissioners, who will vote remotely over the next week. “If it is approved, the ACCJC will post the final policy on its web page, the policy will be effective immediately.”

But the auditor found Beno hasn’t followed existing bylaws. This has long been an open secret in the community college world that’s referenced to in a 2010 public letter from the former California Community College Chancellor Jack Scott to the Department of Education. His immediate successor, Brice Harris (who also served on the ACCJC as a commissioner for seven years), did not heed this knowledge. He trusted Beno.

He met her for coffee, he talked to her on the phone. These interactions led him to believe replacing the college’s leadership would appease Beno, he said in his declaration (under penalty of perjury) in Herrera’s lawsuit against the ACCJC.

So on July 3, 2013, Harris released a video announcing he stripped the college’s elected Board of Trustees of all of its powers and promoted Special Trustee Bob Agrella to take its place. The college community was in an uproar, but Harris maintained publicly it was the right thing to do.

Privately, he received an email from Beno. “Dear Brice, Beautiful job,” she wrote to him, about his decision to whack the board. “The college may survive, with the right leadership.”

Harris wrote in his declaration: “Based on this email, which was consistent with all my prior interactions with Dr. Beno, I believed that City College could maintain its accreditation… if City College took extraordinary steps to comply with the ACCJC’s recommendations.”

But the accreditors did just the opposite. Just this month, it denied CCSF’s accreditation appeal, telling the college they it not review any evidence of progress it made after they voted to terminate its accreditation. This took Harris by surprise.

“If I had known on July 8, 2013, that the rules of the commission were later going to be interpreted to preclude any progress made by City College after June 2013,” he wrote in his declaration, “I would not have asked the Board of Governors to take the extraordinary step of setting aside the locally elected Board of Trustees.”

Harris was burned by the ACCJC. Now City College faces the choice to trust Beno and the accreditors again.

 

Above, California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice Harris explains why he pushed state entities to remove the City College’s Board of Trustees and replace them with Special Trustee Bob Agrella. Should City College of San Francisco trust the ACCJC?

Film Listings: June 25 – July 1, 2014

Michael Redmond
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For complete film listings, see www.sfbg.com.

FRAMELINE

Frameline 38, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, runs through June 29 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St, SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St, SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. For tickets (most shows $10-15) and schedule, visit www.frameline.org.

OPENING

Breathing Earth: Susumu Shingu’s Dream Japanese artist Susumu Shingu has built his career through his concerted engagement with the natural world. The wise and eternally smiling 75-year-old creates angular and often gargantuan mobiles that harness the power of wind and water to gyrate in ever-changing directions. In Breathing Earth, German director Thomas Riedelsheimer crafts a deliberately paced rumination on Shingu’s life philosophy that, while devoid of the frenetic facts, figures, and trite biographical rehashes that punctuate hyper-informative pop-docs, uses a beautifully simplistic narrative arc to illuminates Shingu’s attempt to create a hilly, open-air collection of windmills. The sculptor’s impassioned narration and charming conversations with potential landlords and investors (who usually entirely miss the point of his mission to raise environmental consciousness through aesthetic beauty) make Shingu impossible not to fall in love with — he is laid-back, funny, and astonishingly youthful. Riedelsheimer’s camera is similarly relaxed, gliding sumptuously over the green and wild landscapes on which Shingu installs his works. Despite his meditative tempo, Riedelsheimer manages to explore a remarkably wide scope; Shingu’s late-life marriage to a fellow sculptor, his appeals to both Japanese and German schoolchildren to care for the earth and help to avoid environmental disasters, and his intricate technical processes all receive intimate and inspiring sections. (1:37) Roxie, Smith Rafael. (David Kurlander)

Citizen Koch After quietly influencing conservative ideology, legislation, and elections for decades, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers have found themselves becoming high-profile figures — much to their dismay, no doubt. The relative invisibility they hitherto enjoyed greatly abetted their impact in myriad arenas of public policy and “popular” conservative movements. Look behind any number of recent red-vs.-blue flashpoint issues and you can find their fingerprints: Notably state-level union busting; “smaller government” (i.e. incredible shrinking social services); seeding allegedly grassroots organizations like the Tea Party; furthering the Corporations = People thing (see: Citizens United); and generally helping the rich like themselves get richer while fostering working-class outrage at everybody else. This documentary by Trouble the Water (2008) co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessen touches on all those matters, while also focusing on Wisconsin as a test laboratory for the brothers’ Machiavellian think-tank maneuvers, following a Louisiana GOP candidate on the campaign trail (one he’s marginalized on for opposing corporate influence peddling), and more. Any one of these topics could support a feature of their own (and most already have). Citizen Koch‘s problem is that it tries to encompass too much of its subjects’ long reach, while (despite the title) leaving those subjects themselves underexplored. (It also suffers from being a movie completed at least 18 months ago, a lifetime in current US political terms.) For the reasonably well-informed this documentary will cover a lot of familiar ground—which is not to say that ground isn’t still interesting, or that the added human interest elements don’t compel. But the film covers so much ground it ends up feeling overstuffed and unfocused. (1:26) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Coherence See “Vortex Room.” (1:29) Presidio.

Korengal This companion piece to 2010’s Oscar-nominated Restrepo — one of the best docs about modern-day warfare to date, offering unfiltered access to an Army platoon stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley — uses previously unseen footage shot during the year filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent shadowing their subjects. Korengal is structured as a more introspective work, with musings on what it feels like to be a soldier in the Korengal, surrounded by rough (yet strikingly beautiful) terrain populated by farmers who may or may not be Taliban sympathizers, not to mention unpredictable, heavily armed opponents referred to simply as “the enemy.” Interviews reveal sadness, boredom, a deep sense of brotherhood, and the frustrating feeling of going from “100 miles an hour to a dead halt” after the surreal exhilaration of a firefight. Korengal also functions as a tribute to Hetherington, who was killed in 2011 while on assignment in Libya. Not only does his death add a layer of poignant subtext, it also suggests why Junger felt moved to revisit this story. That said, though Korengal‘s footage is several years old, its themes remain distressingly timely. (1:24) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Snowpiercer Eighteen years after an attempt to reverse global warming has gone wildly awry — freezing all life into extinction — the only known survivors are on a one-of-a-kind perpetual-motion train that circles the Earth annually, has its own self-contained ecosystem, and can smash through whatever ice buildup has blocked its tracks since the last go-round. It’s also a microcosm of civilization’s worst class-economic-racial patterns over history, with the much-abused “tail” passengers living in squalor under the thumb of brutal military police. Unseen at the train’s front is its mysterious inventor, Wilford, whose minions enforce “Eternal Order Prescribed by the Sacred Engine.” Curtis (Chris Evans) is default leader of the proletariat’s latest revolt, in which they attempt to force their way forward though the prison section (where they free Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung as the train’s original lock designer and his psychic daughter) on to the wonders of the first class compartments, and beyond. This first (mostly) English-language feature by South Korean Bong Joon-ho (2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother), based on a 1982 French graphic novel, starts out as a sort of locomotive, claustrophobic Mad Max (1979) variation. But it gets wilder and more satirical as it goes along, goosed by Tilda Swinton’s grotesquely comic Minister Mason, and Alison Pill as a teacher propagandist in a particularly hilarious set piece. In case the metaphor hasn’t already hit you on the head, one character explains “The train is the world, we the humanity.” But Snowpiercer‘s sociopolitical critique is as effective as it is blunt, because Bong handles everything here — visceral action, absurdist humor, narrative left-turns, neatly etched character archetypes, et al. — with style, confidence, and wit. Some of the FX may not be quite as seamless as it would have been in a $200 million Hollywood studio production, and fanboys will no doubt nitpick like nitwits at various “credibility gaps.” (As if this movie ever asks to be taken literally.) But by current, or any, sci-fi action blockbuster standards, this is a giddily unpredictable, risk-taking joy. (2:07) (Harvey)

Third Person A screenwriter, Paul Haggis, pens a script in which a novelist (Liam Neeson) sits alone in a smoke-filled hotel room in Paris struggling over a manuscript about a novelist who can only feel emotions through his characters. What that psychic state would actually look like remains unclear — when the woman (Olivia Wilde) he’s left his wife (Kim Basinger) for shows up, their playful, painful, fraught interactions reveal a man with above-average emotional reserves. Meanwhile, in another hotel in another city, Rome, a sleazy fashion industry spy (Adrien Brody) finds his life turned sideways by a seemingly chance encounter in a bar with a beautiful Romanian woman (Moran Atias) in dire need of money. And in a third hotel, in Manhattan, a young woman (Mila Kunis) cleans up the suites she used to stay in when she was married to a renowned painter (James Franco), with whom she has a son she may or may not have harmed in some terrible way. The film broadly hints at connections between these three sets of lives — in each, the loss or endangerment of a child produces an unrelenting ripple effect; speaking of which, objects unnaturally submerged in water present an ominous visual motif. If the movie poster doesn’t give the game away as you’re walking into the theater, the signposts erected by Haggis ensure that you won’t be in the dark for long. Learning how these characters relate to one another, however, puts considerable drag on the fabric of the plot, exposing the threadbare places, and where Haggis offers his tortured characters redemption, it comes at the cost of good storytelling. (2:17) Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Transformers: Age of Extinction Mark Wahlberg and the Dinobots star in the latest installment of Michael Bay’s action sci-fi series. (2:30) Presidio.

Under the Electric Sky Hey, raver! This 3D concert film enables you to experience the Electric Daisy Carnival without punching any holes in your brain. (1:25)

Violette Taking on another “difficult” woman artist after the excellent 2008 Séraphine (about the folk-art painter), Martin Provost here portrays the unhappy life of Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos), whose fiction and autobiographical writings eventually made her a significant figure in postwar French literature. We first meet her waiting out the war with gay author Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py), one of many unrequited loves, then surviving via the black market trade before she’s “discovered” by such groundbreaking, already-established talents as Jean Genet (Jacques Bonnaffé) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain). It is the latter, a loyal supporter who nonetheless retains a chilly emotional distance, who becomes bisexual Violette’s principal obsession over the coming 20 years or so. Devos does her best to portray “a neurotic crazy washed-up old bag” with an “ugly mug” — hardly! — who is perpetually broke, depressed, and awkward, thanks no doubt in part to her mean witch of a mother (Catherine Hiegel). “Screaming and sobbing won’t get you anywhere,” Simone at one point tells her, and indeed Leduc is a bit of a pill. For the most part lacking the visual splendors of Séraphine (this character’s environs weren’t so pastoral), Violette is finely acted and crafted but, like its heroine, hard to love. (2:18) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

ONGOING

Belle The child of a British naval officer and a Caribbean slave, Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is deposited on the doorstep — well, the estate grounds — of her father’s relatives in 1769 England after her mother dies. Soon she’s entirely orphaned, which makes her a wealthy heiress and aristocratic title holder at the same time that she is something less than human in the eyes of her adopted society. For Belle is black (or more properly, mixed-race), and thus a useless curiosity at best as a well-bred noblewoman of the “wrong” racial makeup. Based on a murky actual historical chapter, Amma Asante’s film is that rare sumptuous costume drama which actually has something on its mind beyond romance and royalty. Not least among its pleasures are a fine supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, and Emily Watson. (1:45) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Harvey)

A Coffee in Berlin How do you say “mumblecore” in German? Jan Ole Gerster’s debut feature has certain arty pretensions — it’s shot in black-and-white, and scored with peppy jazz — but it’s more or less a rambling day in the life of law school dropout Niko (Tom Schilling). It happens to be the very day Niko’s golf-loving father decides to stop funding his shiftless son’s slacker lifestyle, though that crisis (which, you know, Lena Dunham built an entire HBO comedy around) receives nearly equal heft as a cutesy ongoing gimmick that sees Niko incapable of getting a cup of coffee anywhere in Berlin. Hipster ennui can be compelling if it has some underlying energy and purpose (see: 2013’s Frances Ha, to which this film has been compared), but A Coffee in Berlin comes up short on both. That said, it does offer an intriguing portrayal of Berlin — a city whose modern-chic façade barely contains the history that haunts it — and some of its supporting characters, particularly Friederike Kempter as a former schoolmate of Niko’s who has outgrown him emotionally by about one thousand percent, provide pleasant enough distractions. (1:28) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

The Fault in Our Stars I confess: I’m no card-carrying, vlog-flogging Nerdfighter in author John Green’s teen-geek army. But one can admire the passion — and teary romanticism — of the writer, readers, and the breakthrough novel that started it all. Much has been made over the cinematic tweaks to the best-selling YA book, but those seem like small beefs: OK, male romantic lead Gus’s (Ansel Elgort) perhaps-understandable brattiness seems to have been toned down a touch, but we’ll all get the somewhat-subversive push and pull of Green’s love story centered on two cancer-stricken innocents. Sixteen-year-old Hazel (a radiant Shailene Woodley) has been battling cancer almost all her life, fighting back from the brink, and now making her way every day with an oxygen tank and her devoted parents (Laura Dern, Sam Trammel) by her side. Her mordant wit, skeptical attitude, and smarts attract Gus, a handsome teen with a prosthetic leg, at a cancer support group, and the two embark on what seems like the most normal thing in the world — sweet, sweet love — albeit cut with the poignancy of almost-certain doom. Would the girl who calls herself a grenade dare to care for someone she will likely hurt? That’s the real question on her mind when the two reach out to the solitary author (Willem Dafoe) of their favorite book, An Imperial Affliction. The journey the two make leaves them both open to more hurt than either ever imagined, and though a good part of Fault‘s denouement boils down to a major puddle cuddle — with solid performances by all, but particularly Dern and Woodley — even a cynic is likely to get a bit misty as the kids endure all the stages of loss. And learning. (2:05) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia Nicholas Wrathall’s highly entertaining documentary pays tribute to one of the 20th century’s most brilliant, original, and cranky thinkers, with extensive input from the man himself before his death in 2012 at age 86. The emphasis here is less on Vidal’s life as a literary lion and often glittering celebrity social life than on his parallel career as a harsh scold of US social injustices and political corruption. (Needless to say, recent history only sharpened his tongue in that department, with George W. Bush dismissed as “a goddamn fool,” and earlier statements such as “This is a country of the rich, for the rich and by the rich” seeming more apt than ever.) He’s a wellspring of wisdoms both blunt and witty, sometimes surprising, as in his hindsight doubts about the virtues of JFK (a personal friend) as a president. We get plenty of colorful archival clips in which he’s seen verbally jousting with such famous foes as William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, invariably reducing them to stammering fury while remaining exasperatingly unruffled. His “out” homosexuality and outré views on sexuality in general (at odds with an increasingly assimilationist gay community) kept him controversial even among many liberals, while conservatives were further irked by his rock-solid family connections to the ruling elite. In our era of scripted political rhetoric and pandering anti-intellectualism, it’s a joy merely to spend an hour and half in the company of someone so brilliantly articulate on seemingly any topic — but particularly on the perpetually self-mythologizing, money-worshipping state of our Union. (1:29) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

The Grand Seduction Canadian actor-director Don McKellar (1998’s Last Night) remakes 2003 Quebecois comedy Seducing Doctor Lewis, about a depressed community searching for the town doctor they’ll need before a factory will agree to set up shop and bring much-needed jobs to the area. Canada is still the setting here, with the harbor’s name — Tickle Head — telegraphing with zero subtlety that whimsy lies ahead. A series of events involving a Tickle Head-based TSA agent, a bag of cocaine, and a harried young doctor (Taylor Kitsch) trying to avoid jail time signals hope for the hamlet, and de facto town leader Murray (Brendan Gleeson) snaps into action. The seduction of “Dr. Paul,” who agrees to one month of service not knowing the town is desperate to keep him, is part Northern Exposure culture clash, part Jenga-like stack of lies, as the townspeople pretend to love cricket (Paul’s a fanatic) and act like his favorite lamb dish is the specialty at the local café. The wonderfully wry Gleeson is the best thing about this deeply predictable tale, which errs too often on the side of cute (little old ladies at the switchboard listening in on Paul’s phone-sex with his girlfriend!) rather than clever, as when an unsightly structure in the center of town is explained away with a fake “World Heritage House” plaque. Still, the scenery is lovely, and “cute” doesn’t necessarily mean “not entertaining.” (1:52) Albany, Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Ida The bomb drops within the first ten minutes: after being gently forced to reconnect with her only living relative before taking her vows, novice nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) learns that her name is actually Ida, and that she’s Jewish. Her mother’s sister, Wanda (Agneta Kulesza) — a Communist Party judge haunted by a turbulent past she copes with via heavy drinking, among other vices — also crisply relays that Ida’s parents were killed during the Nazi occupation, and after some hesitation agrees to accompany the sheltered young woman to find out how they died, and where their bodies were buried. Drawing great depth from understated storytelling and gorgeous, black-and-white cinematography, Pawel Pawilowski’s well-crafted drama offers a bleak if realistic (and never melodramatic) look at 1960s Poland, with two polar-opposite characters coming to form a bond as their layers of painful loss rise to the surface. (1:20) Albany, Clay, Piedmont. (Eddy)

Ivory Tower The latest “issue doc” to come down the pipeline is this very timely and incisive look at the cost of higher education from director Andrew Rossi (2011’s Page One: Inside the New York Times). Rossi is a Yale and Harvard Law grad, and he begins his film in the hallowed halls of the latter to frame the question: In the era of skyrocketing tuition, and with the student loan debt hovering at a trillion bucks, is college still worth it? The answer is left open-ended, though with the very strong suggestion that nontraditional education (including community colleges, online learning, and the Silicon Valley-spawned “uncollege” movement) is certainly something worth exploring, particularly for the non-wealthy. Along the way, we do see some positive tales (a kid from the mean streets of Cleveland gets a full-ride scholarship to Harvard; students at rural Deep Springs College follow philosophy discussions with farm work; African American women at Spelman College thrive in an empowering environment), but there’s a fair amount of cynicism here, too, with a hard look at how certain state schools are wooing deep-pocketed out-of-staters with fancy athletic stadiums, luxurious amenities, and a willingness to embrace, however unofficially, their hard-partying reputations. Segments following a student protest at New York’s Cooper Union, a formerly free school forced to consider collecting tuition after a string of financial troubles, echo Frederick Wiseman’s epic At Berkeley (2013), a thematically similar if stylistically very different work. (1:37) California. (Eddy)

Jersey Boys The musical that turned the back story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons — the 1960s hit making machines behind upbeat doo-wop ditties like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” and a zillion more; you will recognize all of them — into Broadway gold ascends to the big screen thanks to director Clint Eastwood, a seemingly odd choice until you consider Eastwood’s own well-documented love of music. Jersey Boys weaves a predictable tale of show biz dreams realized and then nearly dashed, with a gangster element that allows for some Goodfellas-lite action (a pre-fame Joe Pesci is a character here; he was actually from the same ‘hood, and was instrumental in the group’s formation). With songs recorded live on-set, à la 2012’s Les Misérables, there’s some spark to the musical numbers, but Eastwood’s direction is more solid than spontaneous, with zero surprises (even the big finale, clearly an attempt at a fizzy, feel-good farewell, seems familiar). Still, the cast — including Tony winner John Lloyd Young as Valli, and Christopher Walken as a sympathetic mobster — is likable, with Young in particular turning in a textured performance that speaks to his years of experience with the role. For an interview with cast members Young, Michael Lomenda (who plays original Four Season Nick Massi), and Erich Bergen (as Bob Gaudio, the member who wrote most of the group’s hits), visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (2:14) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Eddy)

Obvious Child We first encounter the protagonist of writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s funny, original film — a Brooklyn-dwelling twentysomething named Donna (Jenny Slate), who works at a lefty secondhand bookstore and makes regular (if unpaid) appearances at a local comedy night — onstage mining such underdiscussed topics as the effects of vaginal discharge on your garden-variety pair of underwear. This proves a natural segue to other hefty nuggets of embarrassment gold concerning her love life, to the dismay of boyfriend Ryan (Paul Briganti), auditing from the back of the club. He pretty much deserves it, however, for what he’s about to do, which is break up with her in a nasty, well-populated unisex bathroom, taking time to repeatedly glance at the texts coming through on his phone from Donna’s good friend, with whom he’s sleeping. So when Donna, mid-drowning of sorrows, meets a nice-looking fellow named Max (Jake Lacy) at the bar, his post-fraternity-presidency aesthetic seems unlikely to deter her from a one-night stand. The ensuing trashed make-out dance-off in Max’s apartment to the Paul Simon song of the title is both comic and adorable. The fractured recap of the evening’s condom-free horizontal events that occurs inside Donna’s brain three weeks later, as she hunkers down with her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann), in the bookstore’s bathroom after peeing on a stick, is equally hilarious — and unwanted-pregnancy jokes aren’t that easy to pull off. Robespierre’s treatment of this extended windup and of Donna’s decision to have an abortion is a witty, warmhearted retort to 2007’s Knocked Up, a couple generations’ worth of Hollywood rom-com writers, and an entertainment industry that continues to perform its sweaty contortions of storytelling in the gutless cause of avoiding the A-word. (1:15) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Ping Pong Summer Eighties teen flicks of the My Bodyguard (1980), smart-dweebs-beat-the-bullies ilk are paid homage in Michael Tully’s deadpan satire, which is closer in spirit to the Comedy of Lameness school whose patron saint is Napoleon Dynamite. Radley (Marcello Conte) is an average teen so excited to be spending the summer of 1985 in Ocean City, Md. with his family that he renames himself “Rad Miracle.” He acquires a new best friend in Teddy (Myles Massey), who as the whitest black kid imaginable might make even Rad look cool by comparison. However, they are both dismayed to discover the local center for video gaming and everything else they like is ruled by bigger, older, cuter, and snottier douchebag Lyle Ace (Joseph McCaughtry) and his sidekick. Only kicking Lyle’s ass at ping pong — with some help from a local weirdo (a miscast Susan Sarandon, apparently here because she’s an off screen ping pong enthusiast) — can save Rad’s wounded dignity, and the summer in general. A big step up from Tully’s odd but pointless prior Septien (2011), this has all the right stuff (including a soundtrack packed with the likes of the Fat Boys, Mary Jane Girls, New Edition, Whodini, and Night Ranger) to hilariously parody the era’s inanities. But it’s just mildly amusing — a droll attitude with lots of period detail but not much bite. (1:32) Roxie. (Harvey)

The Rover Future days have never seemed quite so bleak as they are depicted in the wild, wild Aussie west of The Rover — rendered by Animal Kingdom (2010) director David Michod, who co-wrote The Rover with Joel Edgerton. Let’s just say we’re probably not going to see any primo Burner ensembles inspired by this post-apocalyptic yarn: Michod ventures to a plausible future only a decade out, after a global economic collapse, and breaks down the brooding road trip to its hard-boiled bones, setting it in a beauteous, lawless, and unceasingly violent outback. A heist gone wrong leads a small gang of robbers to steal the car belonging to monosyllabic, ruthless mystery man Eric (Guy Pearce). The latter wants his boxy little sedan back, badly, and, in the cat and mouse game that ensues, seems willing to die for the trouble. Meanwhile, one of the gang of thieves — the slow, dreamy Rey (Robert Pattinson), who has been left to die of a gunshot wound in the dirt — turns out to be more of a survivor than anyone imagined when he tracks down the tracker hunting for his brother and cohorts. Michod seems most interested in examining and turning over the ties that bind, in a mean time, an eminently absurdist moment, when everything else has fallen away in the face of sheer survival. Cineastes, however, will appreciate the elemental, existential pleasures of this dog-eat-dog Down Under out-Western, not the least of which include the performances. Pearce’s rework of the Man With No Name exudes intention in the very forward thrust of his stance, and Pattinson breaks his cool — and the confines of typecasting — as a blubbering, babbling, thin-skinned man-child. Clad in the mystic expanses of the South Australia desert, which tip a hat to John Ford Westerns as well as scorched-earth-of-the-mind movies such as El Topo (1970) and Paris, Texas (1984), The Rover is taken to the level of tone poem by the shuddering, moaning cellos of Antony Partos’s impressive, atonal electroacoustic score. (1:42) Metreon, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Signal Sharing its title with a 2007 film — also a thriller about a mysterious transmission that wreaks havoc in the lives of its protagonists — this offbeat feature from co-writer and director William Eubank belies its creator’s deep affection for, and knowledge of, the sci-fi genre. Number one thing The Signal is not is predictable, but its twists feel organic even as the story takes one hairpin turn after another. MIT buddies Nic (Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah (Beau Knapp) are driving Nic’s girlfriend, Haley (Olivia Cooke), cross-country to California. Complicating the drama of the young couple’s imminent separation is Nic’s deteriorating physical condition (it’s never explained, but the former runner apparently has MS or some other neurological disease). The road trip turns dark when the trio (who also happen to be hackers) realize an Internet troll they’ve tangled with in the past is stalking them. After a brief detour into found-footage horror — fooled ya, Eubank seems to be saying; this ain’t that kind of movie at all! — the kids find themselves embroiled in ever-more-terrifying realities. To give away more would ruin the fun of being shocked for yourself, but think Twilight Zone meets Area 51 meets a certain futuristic trilogy starring Laurence Fishburne, who turns up here to play a very important role in Nic and company’s waking nightmare. (1:37) Metreon. (Eddy) *

 

Spotlight on transgender issues

Michael Redmond
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Spotlight on transgender issues

Trans March, SF’s largest transgender pride event, is happening Fri/27, starting in Dolores Park. This year’s march will kick off with a Youth and Elder Brunch starting at noon and a stage show 3-6pm before beginning the march. It will conclude at the 100 block of Turk Street, where a San Francisco street will finally be named after a trans: pioneering drag performer and trans woman Vicki Marlane. The afterparty will benefit the Transgender Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project.

To celebrate Trans March’s success in its 11th year, we spoke with SF Trans March Co-Chair Jamie Rafaela Wolfe to find out how Trans March, trans issues, and trans rights have changed since the march began in 2004.

Although the Trans March website states that it originated from an anonymous email regarding the murder and trial of Gwen Araujo, Wolfe informed us that the march mostly started when a group of activists decided they needed to be heard. That first march was only a few hundred people. This year, they’re expecting around 7,000.

Just as the march has grown, awareness of trans issues has also grown. Wolfe told us that “11 years ago, you never heard the word ‘transgender,'” and when one did, it was often used in discriminatory ways. But now, trans people have more opportunities and discrimination has subsided. As proof of the changing views toward trans issues and people, Miss Major — the SF Pride Grand Marshal — is a well-known author and Orange is the New Black’s trans actress Laverne Cox was featured on the cover of the June 9 issue of Time magazine next to the headline: “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier.”

Although a lot has changed for the better in the last 11 years, there’s always more that can be done. Wolfe suggests that the most important thing to work on now is workforce development. “We need people to get jobs. We need people to get education.” As a part of education, Wolfe stresses working with trans youth to get them in safe environments where they can be their “authentic selves.”

Pride and prejudice

Michael Redmond
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7
Pride and prejudice

joe@sfbg.com

As Pride celebrations across the country unfurl their rainbow flags this month, teacher tenure in California suffered a stunning blow from a Los Angeles Superior Court, undermining protections that have shielded the LGBT community from discrimination.

Although the decision will likely be appealed, Judge Rolf M. Treu’s ruling galvanized teachers unions and evoked memories of conservative attacks on gay teachers in the 1970s, including the unsuccessful Briggs Initiative that was a rallying point for then-Sup. Harvey Milk and a new generation of LGBT political leaders.

“To jeopardize any of the protections we have now, it’s a thinly veiled attempt to demoralize teachers, and it’s an attack on public education,” Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, the San Francisco Democrat who began his political career as an openly gay teacher campaigning against the Briggs Initiative, told the Guardian.

LGBT rights and teacher tenure may seem to have little in common, but a peek at the movers and shakers in the LGBT and teachers’ rights movements show an interconnected relationship of protections and the players who fight for them. Loss of tenure can threaten the protection of minority groups, academic freedom, and unpopular political speech, despite employment rights gained in recent years.

“We’ve beaten back that thinking,” Ammiano said, “but it’s still lurking.”

In California, K-12 teachers are shielded by legal protections often referred to commonly as tenure. Permanent status is the backbone of these protections, offering an arbitration process for teachers who administrators intend to fire. Also struck down by the judge was the First In, First Out law, which protects veteran teachers from layoffs by letting go of recent hires first.

In his ruling, Treu said these policies created an environment where students were burdened by ineffective teachers who were difficult to fire, disproportionately detracting from minority students’ education quality in the most troubled schools.

“The evidence is compelling,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

Many education advocates vehemently disagreed with that ruling, and the veracity of the evidence will be further weighed in upcoming appeals. But along the way to pursuing equality for students, the equality of teachers may find itself eroded by an unlikely new hero of the LGBT movement: A conservative attorney who fought against marriage discrimination, but also litigated against the legacy of an LGBT legend.

 

HERO OF MARRIAGE EQUALITY

The morning last year when the US Supreme Court ruled to overturn California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, San Franciscans gathered inside City Hall by the grand staircase. Men held men, women held women, and families held the their children tight.

When the court’s decision finally hit the news, the outcry of happiness and surprise at City Hall was deafening. The expressions on the faces of those there was that of joy with many understandably streaked by tears. Attorney Theodore Olson helped litigate against Prop. 8 and won, and as he fought for gay rights, his face was often streaked with tears as well, LGBT rights activist Cleve Jones told us.

“There was a part of that trial when the plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier described their love for each other,” Jones said. “I was sitting with their family in [US District Court Judge] Vaughn Walker’s court. When we broke, Ted Olson went to embrace them and there were tears on his face.”

But Olson is not a poster child for most politics considered the realm of liberals and Democrats. Olson and fellow Prop. 8 litigator Attorney David Boies were on opposing sides of the Bush v. Gore case that Olson won, handing George W. Bush the presidency in 2000. Olson was then appointed solicitor general of the United States, often leading conservative causes.

 

Olson and Boies will talk about their new book Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality at the LGBT center on June 25 (joined by Supervisor Scott Wiener), but Olson gave us a glimmer of those motivations.

Olson, a Los Altos native who attended UC Berkeley School of Law, told the Guardian in a phone interview that his stand on gay rights was based on conservative principles: “I think of conservatives as including people who are libertarians and respect individual liberty.”

 

A trailer for “The Case Against 8,” which features Ted Olson heavily.

He said the right to marry the person of one’s choosing should be an individual right that government has no business banning. That belief in individual liberty is at the core of his political principles. “It affects me in absolutely the deepest personal way,” he told us.

Whatever his ideological motivations, Olson became a hero in the LGBT community. But this year, he was one of the attorneys who convinced Judge Treu of the evils of teacher tenure. In the trial, Olson claimed one Oakland teacher was harming elementary students’ educational outcomes: “The principal couldn’t remove that teacher. These stories are so awful, sometimes you feel people are exaggerating.”

Yet the problems afflicting Oakland schools and its children, the unions argued, are not due to teacher tenure. In a city with high violence rates, students’ broken homes, low teacher pay, and difficult working conditions, critics say Olson oversimplified and misrepresented a complex problem.

“We all know there are problems in our schools,” Jones, who works with unions, told us. “But there’s never of course discussion about poverty, or students growing up in single families, or class sizes.”

These were all arguments the union made against Olson, unsuccessfully. The decision to remove protections for teachers may send ripples into other states and spur increased attacks on teacher protections.

And unlike California, which has strong anti-discrimination protections, that campaign may allow teachers of other states to be fired or dismissed for coming out of the closet, an issue that helped elevate Harvey Milk into such an iconic leader.

 

ECHOES OF BRIGGS

Jones and Ammiano fought alongside Milk against Proposition 6 in 1978, known as the Briggs Initiative, which would have made it illegal for openly gay people to teach. Then-Sen. John Briggs and his allies associated gay teachers with child molesters and frequently said they may influence children to become gay.

“I was born of heterosexual parents, taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society,” Milk said in a speech at the time. “Then why am I homosexual if I’m affected by role models? I should’ve been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there’d be a lot of nuns running around the streets today.”

This fight may be history, but Ammiano said such biases are still with us today, such as with how some see the transgender community. “We’re holding people at bay around LGB issues, but the T part now is the crossroads for the right wing [activists] who are rolling back protections,” he said.

Only 30 US states offer employment protections for sexual orientation, and some of those only cover government employees, according to a study by Center for American Progress. Only 23 states protect against firing for gender identity.

Vulnerable teachers lacking protections granted by tenure or equal employment laws are still being fired in California and across the country. In April, a transgender Texas substitute teacher was fired for making children “uncomfortable,” according to news reports. In Glendora, California, a teacher was fired from a religious private school after a photo of he and his husband kissing on their wedding day made the local newspaper.

This month, President Barack Obama announced an Executive Order mandating federal contractors enact policies protecting workers from dismissal due to sexual orientation or gender identity. Many speculate this was announced to press Congress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect private employees from discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation.

briggs

“This is only round one,” stated Senator John Briggs to the press about the defeat of Proposition 6, Nov. 7, 1978, at a Costa Mesa hotel. Proposition 6, called the Briggs Initiative, prohibits gay teachers from working in California public schools. AP file photo by Doug Pizac

But ENDA has stalled for years, despite the best efforts of advocacy groups nationwide. And as the country awaits equality, many teachers’ last hope against unlawful dismissal is tenure. In fact, tenure laws were first drafted after the Red Scare and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt for communists, California Federation of Teachers spokesperson Fred Glass told us.

Yet Olson recoils at linking LGBT rights to teacher protections. “I support wholly protections for people for who they are, for heaven’s sakes,” he told us, mentioning that Milk “was very much an inspiration and very important to us.”

And Jones still thinks of Olson as a hero, saying that life and politics are complex.

“Irony abounds,” Jones said. “I don’t square it. You can’t square it. It’s there. But my respect for Ted Olson is based on his very genuine support for our community on the issue of marriage. For LGBT people to win equalit,y it’s important there’s a national consensus, it can’t just be from the left. Ted Olson was incredibly important with that effort and will be remembered generations for now. You don’t have to like everything about Ted Olson or President Obama to acknowledge they had a profound effect.”

SF school board to consider minimum wage proposal tonight amid union battles UPDATED

Erica Hanna
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25
SF school board to consider minimum wage proposal tonight amid union battles UPDATED

Update [6/25]: The minimum wage proposal won, and is now part of SFUSD’s approved budget. “There will be a larger conversation in August when I introduce the new minimum wage policy,” Matt Haney, of the Board of Education said. Read the article to get some context on SFUSD’s minimum wage struggles.

Hundreds of San Francisco Unified School District employees stand to finally be paid San Francisco’s minimum wage, in a new proposal expected for tonight’s Board of Education meeting.

Matt Haney, a board commissioner, plans to propose requiring SFUSD to pay San Francisco’s minimum wage. He said it’s a practical move that also carries a message.

“It’s a relatively small amount of people, but a dollar fifty or two dollars more an hour is not pocket change for them,” he told the Guardian. “It’s really a step towards aligning the school district towards paying everyone a living wage.”

As a state entity, the SFUSD need only adhere to the state minimum wage of $9 an hour, which will be the state’s new minimum wage starting July 1. For now, San Francisco’s minimum wage is $10.74 an hour, though that may change under a new November ballot measure to as much as $15 an hour by 2018.

Haney is considering introducing a new resolution in August to match the City’s $15 minimum wage hike, as well.

Over 800 SFUSD workers earn below San Francisco’s minimum wage. These employees are mostly unrepresented by unions, Haney told us, and though they serve in a variety of positions, most are yard monitors who oversee recess in the city’s over 100 schools.

Haney’s minimum wage proposal is part of the overall SFUSD proposed 2014-15 budget, which the school board will vote on tonight. As Governor Jerry Brown’s new funding mechanism, the Local Control Funding Formula, drives extra dollars into disadvantaged school districts, the unions and schools are expected to put on the pressure for the district to offer raises for teachers and paraprofessionals.

“There should be some fireworks, I imagine,” Haney said.

Negotiations between the school district and the unions are at a standstill, sources tell us. The district said it is proposing a 8.5 percent increase over three years, which amounts to an approximate $1.83 an hour raise for paraprofessionals. This offer infuriated the United Educators of San Francisco, who allege that is still not a living wage.

“They’re coming to us and saying ‘this is almost the best we can offer,'” Dennis Kelly, president of UESF told the Guardian. “What the hell does that mean?”

Paraprofessionals often work in special education or early childhood education, and some are security aides. There are between 1,350 and 1,500 of those employees at any given time in the district, Kelly told us, noting they’re also a group made up largely of minorities and women.

In a statement to the press, SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza said the district made the best offer it could under the circumstances.

“We are committed to providing salary increases this year and in the future as long as the revenues from the state continue to grow,” Carranza wrote. “Unfortunately the state’s forecast for school budgets just got a lot worse. Governor Brown just said that he is now expecting districts to pay a bill, in the amount of several billion dollars, to cover the State’s unfunded pension liabilities as soon as next school year and every year after for the foreseeable future. This expenditure will spend a significant amount of the very same revenues we are counting on to provide services for our students and salary increases for our employees.”

As the district struggles with its bills, the paraprofessionals are facing the very real rising costs of living in San Francisco. The average pay for a paraprofessional is $25,000, Kelly told us, adding “you’re employing 1,000 of these people at poverty wages.”

The UESF will take a vote to authorize a strike vote in August, and the negotiations between the UESF and the school district is expected to be mediated soon.

In the meantime, for 800 or so employees at least, Haney’s minimum wage increase should bring some much-needed good news to a school district beleaguered with money woes. Though the raise would only bump employees a dollar fifty or two dollars an hour more, Haney said, “it’s a symbolic in some ways, but important.”

And as a school district that mostly serves poor and disadvantaged students, Haney added, “if anyone should know about poverty in schools, it’s us.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccuately cited the district’s wage offer. The Guardian apologizes for the error.

Frameline is underway! Plus: crooners, ping-pong champs, and more, in new movies

Sue Vaughan
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0

Frameline 38, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, kicked off last night and runs through June 29; check out our big list o’ blurbs right here. Elsewhere, Clint Eastwood directs a musical, Guy Pearce prowls the outback, a very good suburban noir emerges from the Netherlands, a documentary takes on the cost of higher education, and more! Read on for the goods (and bads). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-VBgShBKlY

 Borgman Popping out from his underground hidey hole, narrowly escaping organized armed vigilantes — indicating an ongoing, possibly global secret battle this movie is content to leave entirely unexplained — the titular figure (Jan Bijvoet) shambles to a nearby home and demands comfort. Refused, he persists, and housewife Marina (Hadewych Minis) acquiesces — at first on the sly, as husband Richard (Jeroen Perceval) has already beaten their paunchy, disheveled, weird would-be guest. But soon Borgman is insinuating himself with the well-off suburban couple’s three children, gradually warping the family dynamic until he has everyone under his power. You’ve seen this kind of “Enigmatic stranger invades complacent bourgeoisie home, wreaks liberating and/or terrifying havoc” thing before, both in thrillers and in artier parables from Teorema (1968) to The King (2005). There is nothing wildly original about Dutch filmmaker Alex van Warmerdam’s seductive, macabre black comedy in outline, not its satire of oblivious upper-middle-class entitlement or even (perhaps especially) when the too-generous hosts and any unlucky interlopers start getting killed off one by one. You can debate Borgman’s precise point, or whether it has one at all. But there’s a tart, bracing quality to this cruel absurdist joke that is as perversely delightful as the film is utterly misanthropic. (1:53) (Dennis Harvey)

A Coffee in Berlin How do you say “mumblecore” in German? Jan Ole Gerster’s debut feature has certain arty pretensions — it’s shot in black-and-white, and scored with peppy jazz — but it’s more or less a rambling day in the life of law school dropout Niko (Tom Schilling). It happens to be the very day Niko’s golf-loving father decides to stop funding his shiftless son’s slacker lifestyle, though that crisis (which, you know, Lena Dunham built an entire HBO comedy around) receives nearly equal heft as a cutesy ongoing gimmick that sees Niko incapable of getting a cup of coffee anywhere in Berlin. Hipster ennui can be compelling if it has some underlying energy and purpose (see: 2013’s Frances Ha, to which this film has been compared), but A Coffee in Berlin comes up short on both. That said, it does offer an intriguing portrayal of Berlin — a city whose modern-chic façade barely contains the history that haunts it — and some of its supporting characters, particularly Friederike Kempter as a former schoolmate of Niko’s who has outgrown him emotionally by about one thousand percent, provide pleasant enough distractions. (1:28) (Cheryl Eddy)

Fateful Findings Oh my. With the technical sophistication of Birdemic (2008), Doris Wishman-worthy attention to superfluous detail, and the obliviousness of The Room (2008) toward any semblance of narrative or character continuity, this supernatural drama — or, uh, something like that — is making a bid to be the latest so-bad-it’s-surreal midnight movie hit. Writer-director-producer-editor-star Neil Breen, a man of many hats if no apparent talents, plays Dylan, a writer. As a child, he and friend Leah had found a mushroom that turned into a jewelry box (““Look what I found! A treasure! It’s a magical day!”), and which will come to effect their lives in ways that never make any sense whatsoever. They reunite as re-infatuated adults (Jennifer Autry now playing Leah), which is bad news for the pill-popping wife (Klara Landrat) Dylan is kinda over anyway. Meanwhile, their friends Jim (David Silva) and Amy (Victoria Valene) fight a lot, because he drinks to compensate for their nonexistent sex life, and she’s just incredibly bitchy. Eventually we realize that Dylan is working on a new book that will shockingly expose the rampant global corporate and political corruption that apparently no one has ever noticed before. The climax, which must be seen to be believed, has him triumphantly announcing these (extremely vague) revelations to the cheers of invisible thousands, while disgraced officials are seen committing suicide en masse rather than, you know, retiring to the Canary Islands. There’s a fine line between the hilarious and tortuous that is exactly where Fateful Findings lives. With its flatlined pacing, not-from-this-planet dialogue (Dylan straight facedly tells a dead body “I can’t help you outta this one”), gratuitous nudity, and curious insistence that its characters express emotions by throwing things (laptops, pieces of meat, etc.), this inscrutable vanity project is indeed unique. What it lacks to get you through the (many) boring parts is the compelling personality of a Tommy Wiseau — Breen is (like everyone here) awful, but he’s just a zero onscreen, not a fascinating weirdo. You will want to be drunk for this movie. (1:40) Clay. (Dennis Harvey)

Ivory Tower The latest “issue doc” to come down the pipeline is this very timely and incisive look at the cost of higher education from director Andrew Rossi (2011’s Page One: Inside the New York Times). Rossi is a Yale and Harvard Law grad, and he begins his film in the hallowed halls of the latter to frame the question: In the era of skyrocketing tuition, and with the student loan debt hovering at a trillion bucks, is college still worth it? The answer is left open-ended, though with the very strong suggestion that nontraditional education (including community colleges, online learning, and the Silicon Valley-spawned “uncollege” movement) is certainly something worth exploring, particularly for the non-wealthy. Along the way, we do see some positive tales (a kid from the mean streets of Cleveland gets a full-ride scholarship to Harvard; students at rural Deep Springs College follow philosophy discussions with farm work; African American women at Spelman College thrive in an empowering environment), but there’s a fair amount of cynicism here, too, with a hard look at how certain state schools are wooing deep-pocketed out-of-staters with fancy athletic stadiums, luxurious amenities, and a willingness to embrace, however unofficially, their hard-partying reputations. Segments following a student protest at New York’s Cooper Union, a formerly free school forced to consider collecting tuition after a string of financial troubles, echo Frederick Wiseman’s epic At Berkeley (2013), a thematically similar if stylistically very different work. (1:37) (Cheryl Eddy)

Jersey Boys The musical that turned the back story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons — the 1960s hit making machines behind upbeat doo-wop ditties like “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” and a zillion more; you will recognize all of them — into Broadway gold ascends to the big screen thanks to director Clint Eastwood, a seemingly odd choice until you consider Eastwood’s own well-documented love of music. Jersey Boys weaves a predictable tale of show biz dreams realized and then nearly dashed, with a gangster element that allows for some Goodfellas-lite action (a pre-fame Joe Pesci is a character here; he was actually from the same ‘hood, and was instrumental in the group’s formation). With songs recorded live on-set, à la 2012’s Les Misérables, there’s some spark to the musical numbers, but Eastwood’s direction is more solid than spontaneous, with zero surprises (even the big finale, clearly an attempt at a fizzy, feel-good farewell, seems familiar). Still, the cast — including Tony winner John Lloyd Young as Valli, and Christopher Walken as a sympathetic mobster — is likable, with Young in particular turning in a textured performance that speaks to his years of experience with the role. Interview with cast members Young, Michael Lomenda (who plays original Four Season Nick Massi), and Erich Bergen (as Bob Gaudio, the member who wrote most of the group’s hits), right here. (2:14) (Cheryl Eddy)

Ping Pong Summer Eighties teen flicks of the My Bodyguard (1980), smart-dweebs-beat-the-bullies ilk are paid homage in Michael Tully’s deadpan satire, which is closer in spirit to the Comedy of Lameness school whose patron saint is Napoleon Dynamite. Radley (Marcello Conte) is an average teen so excited to be spending the summer of 1985 in Ocean City, Md. with his family that he renames himself “Rad Miracle.” He acquires a new best friend in Teddy (Myles Massey), who as the whitest black kid imaginable might make even Rad look cool by comparison. However, they are both dismayed to discover the local center for video gaming and everything else they like is ruled by bigger, older, cuter, and snottier douchebag Lyle Ace (Joseph McCaughtry) and his sidekick. Only kicking Lyle’s ass at ping pong — with some help from a local weirdo (a miscast Susan Sarandon, apparently here because she’s an off screen ping pong enthusiast) — can save Rad’s wounded dignity, and the summer in general. A big step up from Tully’s odd but pointless prior Septien (2011), this has all the right stuff (including a soundtrack packed with the likes of the Fat Boys, Mary Jane Girls, New Edition, Whodini, and Night Ranger) to hilariously parody the era’s inanities. But it’s just mildly amusing — a droll attitude with lots of period detail but not much bite. (1:32) Roxie. (Dennis Harvey)

The Rover Future days have never seemed quite so bleak as they are depicted in the wild, wild Aussie west of The Rover — rendered by Animal Kingdom (2010) director David Michod, who co-wrote The Rover with Joel Edgerton. Let’s just say we’re probably not going to see any primo Burner ensembles inspired by this post-apocalyptic yarn: Michod ventures to a plausible future only a decade out, after a global economic collapse, and breaks down the brooding road trip to its hard-boiled bones, setting it in a beauteous, lawless, and unceasingly violent outback. A heist gone wrong leads a small gang of robbers to steal the car belonging to monosyllabic, ruthless mystery man Eric (Guy Pearce). The latter wants his boxy little sedan back, badly, and, in the cat and mouse game that ensues, seems willing to die for the trouble. Meanwhile, one of the gang of thieves — the slow, dreamy Rey (Robert Pattinson), who has been left to die of a gunshot wound in the dirt — turns out to be more of a survivor than anyone imagined when he tracks down the tracker hunting for his brother and cohorts. Michod seems most interested in examining and turning over the ties that bind, in a mean time, an eminently absurdist moment, when everything else has fallen away in the face of sheer survival. Cineastes, however, will appreciate the elemental, existential pleasures of this dog-eat-dog Down Under out-Western, not the least of which include the performances. Pearce’s rework of the Man With No Name exudes intention in the very forward thrust of his stance, and Pattinson breaks his cool — and the confines of typecasting — as a blubbering, babbling, thin-skinned man-child. Clad in the mystic expanses of the South Australia desert, which tip a hat to John Ford Westerns as well as scorched-earth-of-the-mind movies such as El Topo (1970) and Paris, Texas (1984), The Rover is taken to the level of tone poem by the shuddering, moaning cellos of Antony Partos’s impressive, atonal electroacoustic score. (1:42) (Kimberly Chun)

Think Like a Man Too Kevin Hart and company head to Vegas in this sequel to the 2012 hit comedy based on Steve Harvey’s best-selling relationship tome. (2:02)

A heart in San Francisco

Michael Redmond
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5
A heart in San Francisco

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER This week, at New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco’s Evan Johnson remounts his popular 2013 solo play, Pansy. It’s the story of a disaffected twentysomething gay man who discovers a cache of videocassettes in the basement of his SF apartment building — made by someone who could be considered his doppelganger, a club kid long since felled by AIDS. The play functions in part as a communion between a younger generation of queer San Franciscans and the early era of the AIDS crisis.

Of course, there are those who, in their lives as well as work, continue to bridge the two eras, maintaining a vital link to this fraught but fecund period in SF’s queer/queered history. One of them is the inimitable Justin Vivian Bond. Mx. Bond has long since been based in New York, and yet v (to apply the preferred prefix and pronoun to someone who has gracefully sidestepped the dominant gender binary) grew into an artist here, and has returned to SF many times over the years, including for packed performances produced by Marc Huestis at the Castro Theatre.

Although maybe still most often identified with the cabaret sensation Kiki and Herb — a Tony-nominated, long-running duet with Kenny Mellman, in which Bond excelled as the perennially sloshed Kiki Durane — Bond’s career has hardly slowed since K&H were put to rest more than five years ago. In fact, the output for this internationally acclaimed artist, actor, performer, and singer-songwriter has been impressive: In addition to innumerable musical performances, there are two fine albums, a spunky and poignant memoir about growing up as a trans kid in suburban 1970s Maryland, and a recent turn as the Widow Begbick (singing original songs by Duncan Sheik) in a New York production of Bertolt Brecht’s A Man’s a Man.

A powerfully soulful and charismatic performer, Bond brings Love Is Crazy!, an evening of songs about love in all its aspects, to Feinstein’s at the Nikko this weekend.

SF Bay Guardian In the late 1980s and early ’90s, AIDS made SF a dark place, but it was also a time of exceptional artistic, intellectual, and political ferment. How did that affect the development of your career?

Justin Vivian Bond I majored in theater in college, but I couldn’t really see a place for myself in mainstream theater. At my freshman evaluation they told me I had to butch up; I had to be able to pass as a straight man in order to make a living in the theater. Fortunately, I’ve been able to prove them wrong! But that was sort of a frustrating and unappealing way to live my life.

So I moved to San Francisco. I was going to probably go back to college and get a degree in art history and teach. But instead, I found Theatre Rhinoceros and queer performance and Queer Nation. It was a time when there was a tremendous amount of activism around HIV and AIDS. I worked at A Different Light bookstore, so I was exposed to the greatest queer minds of the day, brilliant writers and artists that would come in there. It was also, looking back now, the golden age of queer publishing. It was when Mike Warner published Fear of a Queer Planet. It was an intellectual and creative surge for queer people. Rick Jacobsen was still alive, and he did the Kiki Gallery [1993–1995]. I worked with him on a show that was written by Christian Huygen called Waiting for Godet, which appropriated Waiting for Godot and made it about two drag queens. It was so much fun, and really exciting. And I was in Hidden: A Gender with Kate Bornstein at Theater Rhinoceros. We toured that around the country — that was my New York stage debut.

I was at the Alice B. Theatre in Seattle when the NEA Four were defunded. Three of the four were at that festival. That was when I decided that I was going to devote my life to queer performance and to having the voices of queer people heard in as many places as possible. That propelled me to stay in the role of Kiki longer than I might have liked to, because it eventually brought me to Carnegie Hall and a Tony nomination on Broadway. [After that] I thought, OK, now I can really start honoring my own creativity, aside from making political statements. Fortunately for me, once I gave up that character and started performing as myself, I feel like things have been going pretty well. And it all started for me in San Francisco, which is why I love it so much.

SFBG Was there always a political dimension to your work?

JVB Having my art spring from a political place — exposed to the queer politics, really the life-or-death politics, that were happening back then — really justified my impulse to be an artist. I’m not saying that everything I’ve ever done has been politically astute or important, but there is a political perspective behind everything I do. That helps me justify asking a bunch of people to pay attention to me. If I didn’t feel like I was actually saying something, I’d probably be embarrassed to be on the stage, really.

SFBG What are the origins of Love Is Crazy!? You took it first to Paris. Was it a show you made specifically for that city?

JVB It kind of evolved. When I was last in San Francisco, actually, I was getting ready to host a benefit for the Lambda Legal Defense [and Education] Fund. Sometimes I’ll just pick a word and put it on my iPod, then let all the songs with that word in them play. That particular day, I had recently become single, so I hit “love,” and this list of songs played. I thought, “I should just write down this list and that could be my next show.” And that’s what I did for a show here in New York called “Mx. Bond’s Summer Camp.” I liked that show but over time I sort of finessed it. Now, not all the songs have the word love in them. Some are songs from both of my records. I was going to Paris, and I decided I wanted to do this Valentine’s Day show in front of the Eiffel Tower. I had a really wonderful time with it, so I decided to tour that show this year. So that’s what it is, craaazy love. And it’s got some good anecdotes in it.

SFBG I’m curious about the origins of your distinctive singing voice.

JVB For Kiki, I sang with a character voice. I started performing Kiki when I was like 28 or 29. I was just coming into my own voice at that time, and I kind of sang in that voice for 15 years. In San Francisco, during the last run of Kiki and Herb, I met this person who I fell in love with, and went on the road with, from San Francisco up to Canada. I kind of got back in touch with my queer roots, and I started writing my own songs, because I needed to find my own voice. It really helped me to get myself into the mindset of what I wanted to say, as opposed to what I wanted to say as this character.

I wrote several songs that were on my record Dendrophile. And I started singing songs that really resonated with me, including “The Golden Age of Hustlers,” which is a song by Bambi Lake and Jonathan Basil, who lives in the Bay Area. It’s about San Francisco and Polk Street. It’s an elemental song for me. And that’s how I started to rediscover my own voice. I had also just been in London; I went to Central Saint Martins College for my MA in scenography, which is like performance installation. One of my teachers was talking about Nina Simone, and how when you hear her sing you hear the life that she’s lived. I set out to try and make my voice reflective of my experience, so that when people hear my singing voice, they’ll sort of know what my life has been like and the world that I inhabit through it. That was my goal. And it really is a very satisfying thing, I have to say.

SFBG To be concentrating on your voice?

JVB And my life, and what my voice can say. 

JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND

Sat/21-Sun/22, $35-$50

Feinstein’s at the Nikko

222 Mason, SF

www.feinsteinssf.com

 

Alerts: June 18 – 24, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

WEDNESDAY 18

 

Glenn Greenwald: Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State

The Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes, SF. (773) 583-7884 tinyurl.com/glengreenwald. 7-9pm, $6. Greenwald, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service along with his UK Guardian colleagues, will recount his Hong Kong meeting with Edward Snowden, discuss new information on the National Security Agency’s abuse of power and examine the bigger picture implications of the NSA’s surveillance. Greenwald will also be signing his new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, Metropolitan Books, The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and KPFA.

 

Film and Discussion: DamNation

The David Brower Center, 2150 Allston, Berk. (510) 809-0900 tinyurl.com/damfilm. 7pm, $10 advance, $12 at door. Award-winning film DamNation explores America’s pride in large dams and the ways that we rely on rivers. The film looks at the effects of dams on fish and landscapes, as well as the values that come along with dams. Guests include Matt Stoecker, DamNation Producer/Underwater Photographer, Jason Rainey, Executive Director of International Rivers, and Steve Rothert, California Regional Director of American Rivers.

THURSDAY 19

 

Labor in the Food System

120 Kearny No. 3100, SF. (510) 654-4400 tinyurl.com/foodsys. 6-8:45, free. This panel will explore all levels of food production, from farm to government, and will have speakers from the various levels. They will discuss wages, food distribution, food processing and more. The panel is put on by Food First, which aims to end hunger-inducing injustices. Speakers include James Cochran, Gail Wadsworth, Margaret Reeves and Paul Ramirez.

 

Do Good Lab’s International Development Trivia Night

Soda Popinski’s, 1548 California, SF. tinyurl.com/oslg7d5 6-9pm, $15 per individual or $60 per team. Trivia is fun, but doing it for a cause with five other friends is even better. On Thursday, Do Good Lab will hold its International Development Trivia Night in collaboration with FUNDAESPRO, a women’s empowerment organization based in Guatemala City. For $60—$10 per person—teams can compete to raise money for the organization, which provides childcare for working mothers and literacy education to women. Better yet, all tips to the bar (staffed by with special guest bartenders) will go toward FUNDAESPRO’s childcare and education centers.

City College’s accreditors bow to pressure, amend rules to save CCSF

Erica Hanna
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18
City College’s accreditors bow to pressure, amend rules to save CCSF

Keep City College of San Francisco open, or else.

That’s the message local and federal officials have drilled into City College’s accreditors in recent weeks. Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Jackie Speier; Assemblymembers Tom Ammiano and Phil Ting; and the state’s community college government have all publicly pressured the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges to give City College an extension to prove its worth.

Finally bowing to pressure, the ACCJC may soon chang their own rules to save City College.

Today the ACCJC announced changes in its policy exclusively for colleges with terminated accreditation, granting a chance for such colleges to request a new “accreditation restoration status.”

“This is new for the ACCJC, but I don’t know if its new for other institutions,” Dave Hyams, a spokesperson for the ACCJC told us. But this new policy may offer new hope for City College.

In 2012 the ACCJC told City College its accreditation would be terminated, putting the school in the fight of its life. A loss of accreditation would mean its degrees are worthless, and the school would lose government funding. Notably, the school has not lost its accreditation yet.

The ACCJC’s policy change is not yet final, as the agency is allowing two weeks for the public to weigh in. The changes will be finalized on June 25, the commission said.

If the policy is adopted though, it means City College would be able to apply for a lifeline.

“If this policy is adopted as expected,” the ACCJC wrote in their statement to the press, “CCSF would have the opportunity to take steps to be designated as being in restoration status.”

Hyams denied the decision has anything to do with the very recent, and very public, emails from Nancy Pelosi and other politicians to demanding the ACCJC give City College more time.

“The ACCJC was looking for a way to balance the impact of termination on students,” he said, “with the needs for the college to meet basic standards.”

The college would need to file its application for restoration status by July 2014, City College’s originally announced accreditation termination date. This may all be moot, however, as City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed for an injunction to stall the college’s closure until the conclusion of the city’s lawsuit against the ACCJC. Legal proceedings are expected to begin in October.

Sara Eisenberg, the deputy city attorney leading the case against the ACCJC, told us this doesn’t affect the case at all.

“Our lawsuit is about the ACCJC’s bad acts, which go to the heart of the fairness and accuracy of the accreditation evaluation process,” she told the Guardian. “These violations of law, policy and fundamental fairness require that the ACCJC’s past decisions concerning City College be vacated and that City College be reevaluated on a clean slate using a fair process.”

Interestingly, the announcement of restoration status by the ACCJC contains a caveat: they will not extend CCSF’s appeal unless the US Department of Education gives them the go-ahead. Hyams said the ACCJC developed this plan while consulting the USDOE, so it may be a slam dunk.

Need some context on the City College fight? Check out the video above for a basic overview.

“The commission and the department had very recent meetings that have been constructive and productive, they’re fully aware of this proposal,” he told us.

One of those meetings was not so peaceful, however, as over 200 City College supporters rallied outside the ACCJC’s semi-annual meeting in Sacramento, demanding the organization rescind its decision to revoke the college’s accreditation. The protest was led by the California Federation of Teachers, the local AFT 2121 and attended by teachers and students alike.

Tim Killikelly, the president of the AFT 2121 had questions about the new policy.

“I’m not sure how this restoration status is different than what appeals already existed,” he said. “The students need to be sure about their academic future, and this doesn’t do that. The students need to breathe a sigh of relief.”

He’s referring to the college’s recent drop in enrollment. At its height City College had over 100,000 students enrolled. But, due in part to its accreditation struggles and (some have said) the economy’s mild upswing, the enrollment has recently dropped to under 80,000 students. 

Killikelly laid much of the blame for that enrollment drop at the feet of the ACCJC. “They should’ve sent a team to verify we’re in compliance,” he said. Instead of this middling compromise, if the ACCJC had instead granted full accreditation Killikelly thinks confidence in the college could be restored.

City College Trustee Rafael Mandelman was also cautious about the decision.

“Its good news,”  he said, but, “the powers that be have rallied and persuaded the ACCJC that they cannot shut City College down now. The ACCJC are not pulling their claws out of the college. We will continue this terrible dance unless the City Attorney wins his lawsuit.”

The college may already have bounced back. California Community College Chancellor Brice Harris and City College Chancellor Arthur Tyler have publicly stated the school is 95 percent done addressing all of the concerns the ACCJC wanted to see fixed.

Mandelman contends the ACCJC’s move to terminate City College’s accreditation did more harm than good. “This whole process has been incredibly and unnecessarily disruptive on City College,” he said. “It’s a horrendous way to reform an institution.”

It should be noted that City College is still open, and remains accredited. For a look at the new policy from the ACCJC, click here.

Peculiar thrills

Michael Redmond
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0
Peculiar thrills

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Documentaries are often the best section of any given film festival. But even die-hard fans admit to occasional Social Issue Fatigue — that feeling you get when you’ve just seen too many all-too-convincing portraits of real life injustices, reasons why the planet is dying, etc. “It was great — I’ll just go kill myself now” is a reaction few want to experience, you know, three times in one day. Yet it’s a typical plaint heard on queue at events like Toronto’s Hot Docs, let alone the touring United Nations Association Film Festival (a virtual global wrist-slitting orgy).

You’d be hard-pressed to have such a hard time at our own SF DocFest, however. For 13 years it’s managed to emphasize the entertaining and eccentric over grim reportage. To be sure, the latest edition, opening Thu/5 (with programs primarily at the Roxie and Oakland School for the Arts) has its share of films on topically important subject themes. Centerpiece presentation The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz poignantly recalls the short history of the brilliant young programmer-activist whose fate is especially chilling given the potential imminent death of net neutrality. Of Kites and Borders examines the harsh lives of children in the Tijuana area; Goodbye Gauley Mountain has Bay Area “eco-sexuals” Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens uniquely protesting the mountaintop removal industry in the Appalachians. But among 2014 SF DocFest’s 40 or so features, only Ivory Tower — about the increasingly high cost of higher U.S. education — offers straight-up journalistic overview of an urgent social issue.

More typical of DocFest’s sensibility are its numerous portraits of peculiar individuals and even more peculiar obsessions. In the jobs-make-the-man department, there’s An Honest Liar, whose magician subject The Amazing Randi has made it his personal mission to expose those who’d use his profession’s tricks to defraud the vulnerable; The Engineer, profiling the sole criminologist working in gang crime-ridden El Salvador; Bronx Obama, in which one man’s uncanny resemblance to the POTUS sets him on a lucrative but discomfiting career of impersonation for (mostly) audiences of hooting conservatives; and Vessel, whose protagonist Dr. Rebecca Gomperts sails the world trying to make abortions available to women whose countries ban the procedure.

There are no less than three features about people trying to succeed among the professionally tough: Fake It So Real (the South’s independent pro wrestling circuit), Bending Steel (a Coney Island performing strongman) and Glena (struggling mother hopes to hit paydirt as a cage fighter).

On the obsessive side, Wicker Kittens examines the world of competitive jigsaw puzzling. Jingle Bell Rocks! examines the netherworld of serious Christmas-music aficionados; Vannin’ observes the 1970s customized-van culture still alive today. Magical Universe is Jeremy Workman’s very first-person account of his friendship with an elderly Maine widower who turns out to have secretly created epic quantities of bizarre Barbie-related art. Hairy Who and the Imagists recalls the somewhat less “outsider”-ish achievements of Chicago’s ’60s avant-garde art scene, while Amos Poe’s 1976 The Blank Generation, DocFest 13’s sole archival feature, flashes back to punk’s birth throes at CBGB’s.

Another legendary moment is remembered in Led Zeppelin Played Here, about an extremely early, ill-received 1969 Zep show at a Maryland youth center that few attended, but many claim to have. Portraits of artists expanding their forms in the present tense include Trash Dance (a choreographer collaborates with truckers and their big rigs) and When My Sorrow Died (theremin!).

Exerting a somewhat wacked fascination is the cast of We Always Lie to Strangers, which is somewhat spotty and unfocused as an overall picture of tourist mecca Branson, Mo. — Vegas for people who don’t sin — but intriguing as a study of showboy/girl types stuck in a milieu where gays remain closeted and Broadway-style divas need to keep that bitching hole shut 24/7. Further insight into your entertainment options is provided by Doc of the Dead (on zombiemania) and self-explanatory Video Games: The Movie.

One pastime nearly everyone pursues — looking for love — gets sobering treatment in Love Me, one of several recent documentaries probing the boom in Internet “mail order brides” from former Soviet nations. Its various middle-aged sad sacks pursuing much younger Eastern bombshells mostly find themselves simply ripped off for their troubles. Those looking for quicker, cheaper gratification may identify with Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story.

Of particular local interest is the premiere of Rick Prelinger’s No More Road Trips, culled from his collection of nearly 10,000 vintage home movies. A preview screening of First Friday offers a first peek at this forthcoming documentary about tragic violence at the monthly arts festival in Oakland last year. True Son follows 22-year-old Michael Tubbs’ attempt to win a City Council seat and reverse the fortunes of his beleaguered native Stockton. The “Don’t Call It Frisco!” program encompasses shorts about the Bay Bridge troll, a Santa Rosa animal “retirement home,” and a salute to South Bay hardcore veterans Sad Boy Sinister.

DocFest ends June 19 with that rare thing, a documentary about downbeat, hard-to-encapsulate material that’s won considerable attention simply because it’s so beautifully crafted and affecting. Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos’ Rich Hill focuses on three kids in worse-than-average circumstances in a generally depressed Missouri town of 1,400 souls. Harley is an alarmingly temperamental teen housed on thin ice with his grandmother while his mother sits in prison for reasons that explain a great deal about him. Potty-mouthed Appachey is a little hellion perpetually setting off his exasperated, multi-job-juggling single mother, living in near-squalor.

Still, both are at least superficially better off than Andrew, an almost painfully resilient and hopeful boy constantly uprooted by an obscurely damaged mother and a father who can’t hold a job to save his life. “We’re not trash, we’re good people,” he tells us early on, later rationalizing his continuing dire straits with “God must be busy with everyone else.” He’s the heartbreaking face of a hardworking, religious, white American underclass that is being betrayed into desperation by the politicians who claim to share its values.

DOCFEST 13

June 5-19

Check website for venues, times, and prices

www.sfindie.com

 

Standing Up for Children Exposed to Trauma

Michael Redmond
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0
Standing Up for Children Exposed to Trauma

By Suzy Loftus

OPINION Sasha’s only 9 years old, but she has already experienced significant trauma and adversity. Whenever her father drank too much, he would hit and verbally abuse Sasha and her mother. After her father went to jail, Sasha’s mother lost her job, the family became homeless and eventually moved into subsidized housing. Sasha had also witnessed high levels of community violence. Exposure to trauma has taken its toll on Sasha; she has a hard time focusing on assignments in class and struggles with reading and math. She gets frustrated and acts out at home and in class. Her teacher thinks Sasha has learning problems, and has recommended her for special education.

We have often looked at childhood trauma such as Sasha’s as a social problem or a mental health problem — but emerging data provides a more complete picture. At the Center for Youth Wellness, in Bayview Hunters Point, we are part of a growing national movement that is looking at childhood exposure to chronic adversity through a different lens: as a public health threat.

Children, like Sasha, are screened for exposure to chronic adversity and toxic stress during their pediatric visits, through a partnership between the Bayview Child Health Center and the Center for Youth Wellness.

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris discusses ACEs and toxic stress as the next massive public health threat.

In the Bayview and across California, chronic adversity and toxic stress stand in the way of the health and success of many children. Now more than ever, we are beginning to understand the impact of early adversity — known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) — on the developing brains and bodies of children like Sasha.

ACEs are traumatic experiences over which a child has no control. Examples include abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, exposure to community violence, homelessness, discrimination, involvement in foster care, and others.

A study conducted by Dr. Burke Harris, founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, found that a majority of the 700 participants, all patients from Bayview with a median age of 8 — 67 percent —were exposed to one or more ACEs.

Beyond the Bayview, exposure to childhood trauma is surprisingly common among Californians. In fact, a San Diego study found that two-thirds of 17,000 participants reported at least one adverse childhood experience, and 20 percent of participants reported three or more ACEs.

ACEs can result in toxic stress, which can affect the fundamental biological functioning of the body and, in many children, the healthy development of their brain architecture. Without support and protection from adults, children who experience toxic stress are at higher risk for health problems, like asthma, diabetes, and obesity. Toxic stress also may make it difficult to sit still in school or to control emotions in challenging situations. If left untreated, toxic stress can lead to increased risk of adult diseases including heart disease and cancer as well as behavior problems such as depression, substance use, and suicide.

That’s why exposure to Adverse Childhood Experiences has been called the greatest unaddressed public health threat of our time. This is a public health crisis with clear implications beyond health — from education to public safety to our economy.

Our approach: screen every child for toxic stress and pilot and evaluate interventions that heal the impact of ACEs. Our goal is to share best practices in ACEs treatment with others around the country. We believe that the pediatric home offers an important entry point into addressing ACEs and toxic stress with families.

Even before a child goes to school or interacts with other systems, he or she usually visits a pediatrician for a routine well-child check. With the ability to touch countless numbers of children exposed to ACEs, pediatricians can be on the frontlines of preventing, screening, and healing toxic stress. Other healthcare professionals who work with children, such as school nurses, also are in a unique position to screen for toxic stress and help families access the services they need.

The science is clear — we must do more to prevent, screen, and heal the impacts of ACEs and toxic stress. A crucial first step in addressing this crisis is raising awareness among parents, pediatricians, educators, and policymakers that ACEs are a public health threat that we cannot afford to ignore. We must do more to identify toxic stress in our kids before it leads to a lifetime of challenges for children, families and our communities.

Suzy Loftus is chief operating officer of the Center for Youth Wellness and a member of the San Francisco Police Commission.

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