Solutions From Min

Min For SFUSD Board of Education

We should listen and understand the needs of all our schools (all 120+ of them) and work backwards to develop the school system that meets those needs, not the other way around. Knowing the needs and the gaps will help us develop the kind of school system that incorporates the communities’ needs. The SFUSD Board of Education needs diverse voices and diverse thoughts to grow our schools, not close them, and bring students and families back to San Francisco’s public schools. The SFUSD Board needs to push for a stronger curriculum that arms our children so they can compete in the global economy, by bringing back core subjects of math, science, languages, the arts as early as possible in elementary and middle schools. A good education should not be a privilege, it should be a right. I hope you will join me to make ‘good education a right’ for all our children.

Issues & Solutions

Here is what I commit to doing as your representative on the school board:
Bring solutions that address the near-term fiscal crisis and longer-term growth.
  • Closing schools is not the only answer; it may make things worse and drive more families away from public schools. It may also make the existing schools more crowded and class sizes even larger. If we must consolidate schools, let us do it responsibly with input from educators/families so we have the benefit of their perspectives and needs.

  • We need to address the fiscal crisis this fiscal year and will need to make hard decisions in the near-term so that SFUSD survives; costs will need to be addressed both in terms of indirect costs like supplier spend as well as position-control and organizational optimization.

  • In parallel, we will need to invest in the longer-term growth of enrollment, investing in schools, upgrading of our curriculum, and raising performance of educators.
Increase enrollment and bring families back to SF public schools.
  • Assess the 125 schools in our district and really understand their needs. In business we always start with the customer in mind and work backwards to develop the right solutions. The SFUSD “customers” are the families, students, teachers, and schools. 
  • Develop the improvement areas for each school with the “customers” and then overlay it with the SFUSD administration needs. This needs to be both a bottoms up and top-down assessment so that the best solutions can be developed. We need to do the hard work of understanding our “customers” first.
  • When we invest in our schools, they will be more competitive in the marketplace and families will come back to public schools.
Invest in our schools and move resources from the administration to where it is needed – the schools.
  • There seems to be plenty of money in the budget and yet the money does not trickle down to the schools.
  • While enrollment has declined sharply, administration costs and budgets have increased.
  • Look for revenue sources and funding at the federal, state, and local levels; exhaust all options on revenue sources inclusive of grants and bonds. Our per pupil allocation by the State is not the highest; we can work on increasing this through advocacy.
Develop robust curriculum that focuses on the bringing back the basics of education and offering accelerated courses; we need to arm our children to be competitive in the global economy.
  • Bring back many of the things we used to have like gifted programs, accelerated classes, merit-based admissions.
  • Start early with core subjects and foreign languages in elementary and middle schools; offer accelerated courses as they progress.
  • Keep the language immersion programs; they are one of the reasons parents stay with SFUSD.
  • Raise the bar on performance for all schools and ensure that we challenge our students and not hold them back; they can and should accelerate.
Raise the bar of our educators.
  • Work with the administration and the union to retain and attract good teachers back to the school system.
  • Give educators a career path and leverage them as assets; they have ideas that we should listen to and incorporate.
Really engage with parents and community in school improvements; they know the solutions and can help with implementation.
  • Visit and meet with schools, parents, teachers to truly understand their needs and ideas for improvement.
  • Involve them in the assessment of schools, idea generation and implementation; they are our most valued assets, and they can help.