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SFUSD staff present three student-assignment options aimed at reducing racial isolation
Summary
District staff proposed three approaches to redesign student assignment — attendance-area assignment, a controlled-choice system, and zone-based systems — and showed preliminary simulations that reduced the number of schools with extreme racial concentration from 15 to 11; the board asked for more analysis on transportation, program placement and community outreach.
San Francisco Unified School District staff presented a set of options to redesign the district’s student-assignment system, saying the current approach has not achieved the district’s long-term desegregation goals and that a redesigned system must support the board’s equity-centered strategic plan.
Orla O'Keefe, who is directing the committee’s work, told the ad hoc student-assignment committee that the district’s 2001 citywide choice system — which uses lotteries, weight pools, open enrollment and appeals — has left about a quarter of schools with more than 60 percent students of a single racial or ethnic group and persistent achievement gaps for African American, Latino and Samoan students. O'Keefe said staff synthesized last year’s research, ran preliminary boundary simulations, and developed three options for deeper analysis.
Staff analyst Jean Gobellet described two families of geographic approaches: attendance-area boundaries (school-level catchment areas with feeder patterns) and zones (larger boundaries that enclose multiple schools), noting that program placement, school capacities and geographic barriers such as highways and hills constrain feasible designs. Gobellet said districtwide capacity at elementary and middle levels exceeds enrollment, but seats and student residences are mismatched geographically — the Southeast has higher student residence density while some northern and western neighborhoods have surplus seats.
Using attendance-area draft boundaries in a preliminary simulation that preserved siblings, special-education and English-learner program needs, staff reported a reduction in the number of schools with more than 60 percent of a single racial/ethnic group from 15 to 11, and a halving of schools with an API of 1 meeting that threshold. Staff cautioned these results are preliminary and that historical choice data have limits because family choice patterns would likely shift under a new system.
The three options staff described are: - Attendance-area assignment: redraw attendance-area boundaries so most students are assigned to a nearby school, while language immersion and selective/criteria schools remain citywide choice programs. - Controlled choice: families submit preferences and a centralized assignment system allocates choice seats under controls designed to advance board priorities; staff will test variants that prioritize diversity, proximity, or a hybrid of both. - Zone-based systems: district is divided into larger zones with constrained choices; staff warned large zones can help diversity on paper but create transportation and program-relocation challenges.
Staff also described a proposed achievement-diversity mechanism, where multi-year achievement data aggregated to small geographies (for example, census tracts) would produce an achievement value used as an allocation factor when assigning choice seats. The intent is to distribute achievement levels across schools, but staff emphasized the complexity and potential trade-offs of using achievement as a central factor.
Board members and staff highlighted cross-cutting issues that any system would need to address: program placement (how to locate immersion, newcomer and specialized programs), transportation costs and routes (staff and several commissioners noted existing citywide bus routes and requested transportation overlays), protection of required services (ensuring special education and English-learner supports), grandfathering current students, and transparent, accessible community engagement.
Staff proposed an aggressive timeline: community conversations beginning in October, a board first reading in February and approval in March to allow a new assignment system to be in place for students entering school in August 2011. Members asked staff for more detailed modeling of options 2 and 3, transportation cost estimates, maps showing school enrollment diversity (not just residence), and clearer evaluation parameters tied to the board’s priorities.
The committee will return with more detailed simulations and community-engagement materials; staff emphasized the preliminary nature of the analysis and urged careful testing of mechanisms before a final recommendation.
