Making SFUSD a PreK-12 School District

By Kimberley "Kim" Knox

Kim is a strong advocate for high quality child development programs that all families can afford for their children. Here are some ways that Kim would work with UESF and child development advocates to recreate SFUSD into a pre-kindergarten to 12th grade school district.

A subsequent RAND Labor and Population study found that a high-quality universal preschool in the Bay Area would lead to a drop of 3 to 5% drop in children ever needing special education, a 5% reduction in child years of special education use for those children who will need special education, a 11% reduction in high school dropouts and 11% drop in the number of juvenile petitions.

-Create the San Francisco Unified School District as a pre-K to 12 school district. This will allow more students to be "school ready" when they enter elementary school. It would also help working parents to more easily find a quality chld care development program that works with their limited budget in an expensive city such as San Francisco.

-Work with the Mayor's Office to create District child development centers near the largest offices of the City's largest employer, the City and County of San Francisco. This includes another child development center in the Civic Center and near 2323 Cesar Chavez, 1990 Newcomb, 130 Gough and Hall of Justice.

-Find funds to invest in the District's child development staff, so they can receive at least one professional day to help enhance their skills.

-Create a long range plan so that the District's child development staff will in five years, receive the same number of professional development days as other certificated staff receive at SFUSD. Currently, teachers receive three professional development days, while paraprofessionals receive one professional development day.

-Double the number of social workers within the District's child development program. This year, one position for a social worker was eliminated from the District's child development program, leaving only one social worker to identify and help parents work with early intervention measures to help their child to succeed scholastically.

-Create a pilot program with funders such as the Haas Foundation and others, to create a training program for child care development teachers and parents such as the one that was done with Burnett Child Development Center in the late 1990's. The training program would deal with expanding cognitive skills, identifying fetal alochol syndrome, dealing with post-traumatic stress and teaching pre-reading skills. The pilot program should start with child development programs in eastern half of the City and then eventually encompass the entire City.