First, the news…

San Francisco’s Board of Education Thursday night voted to close, merge and relocate more than a dozen public schools to save some of the millions that the district says it lost this year due to declining enrollment.

The board did its work during a five-hour meeting before hundreds of angry parents, students and teachers who filled the Everett Middle School auditorium and occasionally shouted — or wept aloud — as the panel voted on a case-by-case basis.

The first vote hardly caused a stir in the crowd: the Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program will be merged into Rosa Parks Elementary School, the board decided after some debate.

But when the board voted to close John Swett Elementary and merge it into John Muir Elementary, Dawayne Baker, a volunteer basketball coach at John Swett, burst out of the auditorium.

“What are we supposed to do now?” he yelled as he cried in the hallway. “Go to John Muir and start all over again? They don’t care. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to the black community. They know most of us don’t have a choice. We have to send our kids to public schools.”

Thursday’s meeting was the second by the board in a week to draw hundreds of residents. The first meeting, on Jan. 12, ended with the board postponing action for seven days in hopes that the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Gavin Newsom would grant $5 million to the district to keep the schools open for another year.

But Newsom flatly rejected the idea, saying the city over the past year already has provided the schools with $35 million in money and in-kind services. (emphasis mine)

The 26 schools were chosen by district staff because they have fewer than 250 students and use less than 75 percent of their building capacity. The seven-member elected board was charged with deciding which schools from that list should actually close or merge in June.

A big concern of the board, parents and school staff members has been the fact that the proposed changes would affect African American students far out of proportion to their representation in the district. Last year, the board closed three schools in the heavily African American Western Addition neighborhood.

“To target the same community we did last year is not right,” said board member Mark Sanchez, who tried unsuccessfully Thursday night to, once again, delay the school closures. (more…)

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This is prompting me to do some more research on the S.F. public school system (similar to what I did for Detroit–stay tuned)

Another city known for its politics of speaking out for the poor and unfortunate in this country allow yet another crop of predominately black schools to disintegrate under heavy taxpayer funding. If you notice in the whole article, NOWHERE will you see the following issues being addressed:

#1. Why are folks leaving the S.F. school district in droves (”San Francisco Unified School District officials say they have lost 800 to 1,000 students every year for the past five years”)?

#2. The school district asked $5 million, Mayor Newsom rejected the request citing that he had already provided the district with $35 million. WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL OF THOSE RESOURCES?

#3. Teacher unions. Were there any forms of protest staged by this group in defense of these mostly black schools who are going through their second wave of school closures in two years?

As a Californian, I can tell you one big reason why blacks are leaving that city in droves: The cost of living (taxes, housing, gas). This can also be said of the entire state of California for that matter. You will find a lot of the black transfer going to places like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Texas, Atlanta. They are not alone. Whites have been leaving the state in record numbers as well for some of the same reasons. While many prominent (and not so prominent) Californians want to lecture the rest of the country on how to take care of the poor/unfortunate, they fail to mention that their own state has been failing this test for years.

Until the S.F. Unified School District stops to confront the reason why the millions of allocated resources for these schools do not translate into better education, black students will continue to get the short hand in the deal.