Happy Birthday, askye!

Happy birthday, askye!

David, what an absolute clusterfork. Poor Matilda.

I found a brown spider the size of Rhode Island in my bedroom a couple months ago. After a few minutes of freaking out, I caught him in an empty yogurt cup with a scrap of cardboard and flung him outside. I still wonder how he got inside and all the way upstairs without being noticed by me or killed by the cats.

Cat talk: Speaking of whom, my darling Percy Shelley the Emo Cat had surgery yesterday to remove a tumorous lobe of his thyroid gland. He's fine now but I was a ball of stress worrying about him all day. They shaved his throat and part of one leg. He's got a long gnarly row of sutures that will be a fine scar, but new fur growth will cover it. The shaved part of his leg almost looks like bone, his skin is so pale even though his fur is black. He's a skinny little goblin under all that poofy fur. His skin is so very soft, and he's annoyed that I keep petting the shaved part of him. The other cat is freaked out, he's acting like Percy's returned from the dead as some kind of zombie. This always happens when a cat comes back from surgery. He must smell funny. Percy's enjoying being left alone, I think.

One of Mr.S's loose teeth came out.

Sheryl, that's a big moment! Is he excited about the Tooth Fairy?

Poor Zen! At least Percey gets some joy out of this.

I will try to briefly explain the situation on school placement.

For two of the high schools in San Francisco you have to apply like you're applying to college. Lowell (which is a high level academic school), and SoTA (where Matilda applied but was not accepted).

For the rest, you go into a lottery system. You pick as many high schools as you like and in the order you prefer.

However, the lottery is weighted with a number of "tiebreakers." The first being siblings. If you've got a sib going to one school you get bumped up to go to that school.

The second tiebreaker is significant as it heavily weights students who come from low-scoring districts and neighborhoods. By State law, SFUSD is not allowed to use race to determine placement but by weighting the districts they can give a leg up to poorer neighborhoods which would include majority black neighborhoods like Bayview/Hunter's Point, and new immigrant families in the Outer Mission.

Which is fine. There needs to be some remedy and opportunity to those communities.

But beyond that the assignment process has SFUSD putting the thumbs on the scale in a lot of ways which are not transparent. We know this because one parent did a Freedom of Information inquiry and found out the district had an active policy of moving kids from the Westside (more Asian) to the East and South parts of the City (poorer, black, latino).

So the fact that JZ and I both went to 4 year colleges is probably a factor and weight. They can't base assignment on income but they can make a presumptions about our income based on our college education and the neighborhood we live in. So it's frustrating knowing they're operating like this and it's not simply that Matilda's number didn't come up.

Because of COVID they have eliminated the multiple rounds of assignment that they usually do. So after Matilda found out she hadn't been accepted to SotA (on the same day JZ tested positive for COVID and we went into quarantine) we found out a week later that she hadn't gotten any of her to six choices for HS.

She was assigned to O'Connell, which is a vocational high school deep in Mission which primarily serves recent immigrant families. It's not a college prep HS and it's not in a safe neighborhood, and it's also not easily accessible by public transit.

We declined that assignment and waited for the Second Round. Then the district kept changing the process as we get deeper into the lockdown. Previously there would have been multiple rounds of assignment as kids who applied in the public system and also applied to private schools (or left the district) would accept or decline assignments and seats opened up.

Instead of having multiple rounds of assignment, now the district just did a second one. Again, Matilda did not get any of the 5 high schools we listed. Instead of assigning her to another school they simply left it blank. So she has no assignment now.

Going forward there are two options, which involve Open Enrollment and a Wait List. In July they will set up Open Enrollment and list any school that has open seats. That's first come first serve. However, since we know Matilda didn't get assigned to any of her schools we also know there won't be any open slots at the schools we'd be willing to take.

And SF's worst schools are in the lowest 5% of the State. (Whereas their best HS - like Lowell and SotA - in the top 5%. There's a massive range in the quality of the schools. And some are fairly dangerous.)

I can Wait List for one school and hope to get in as slots open up. HOWEVER, those assignments will probably also be weighted in some way that's another uphill climb for us.

Finally, there just isn't that much movement until the school year actually begins. Because if a kid has a good school assignment in a public school and also a slot at a private school, they tend to hold onto that public school slot as an asset until they have to make a choice.

I know several parents who are planning to send their kids to private school but want to wait (continued...)

( continues...) to see if the economy is going to tank or if they'll lose their jobs between now and mid-August (when school starts).

So that's where we are. My remedies for moving forward are extremely limited until school starts. There's no guarantee I'll get anything after schools starts (I know one parent who held their child out for six weeks to get a decent assignment.) And because of various invisible weighting schemes the odds are literally stacked against Matilda.

Wow. Rough.

I still don't understand how her school assignment is just blank. That's bizarre.

That is inexplicable.

I still don't understand how her school assignment is just blank. That's bizarre.

They just eliminated the pretense that they had met their responsibility to assignment, and also it was probably punitive. They are actively trying to raise the numbers of middle class white kids at O'Connell, so they're saying, "Well, we GAVE you a school and you didn't like you picky little bitch, so now you get nothing."

But the reality is that O'Connell will have seats available during Open Enrollment so I could claim a seat there anyway if I wanted. But I do not.

Here are the rankings:

[link]

This includes charter schools and some other places that are specialized that wouldn't be applicable to Matilda.

As you can see Lowell is rated 10/10, and SotA (Ruth Asawa) is 9/10.

O'Connell is 2/10. "This school is rated below average in school quality compared to other schools in California. Students here perform below average on state tests, have below average college readiness measures, and this school has below average results in how well it's serving disadvantaged students."