San Francisco School Closures Will Hurt Chinese, Immigrant Communities, City Leaders Say

City leaders rallied Thursday morning to urge the San Francisco Unified School District to halt its effort to close as many as 11 campuses, which they say will have a disproportionate impact on the city’s immigrant population and communities of color.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, whose district includes three elementary schools that could close, said Jean Parker Elementary, in particular, is integral to the Chinatown community.

“This is more than just a school site,” Peskin, who is a candidate for mayor, said during the rally outside Spring Valley Science Elementary School, which is also on the list of potential closures. “This is an intimate part of the fabric of this community. This is the densest part of San Francisco, and that’s why we have this many school sites in San Francisco. It is also the heartland of the Chinese-American community.”

After a hectic and agonizing few months of waiting and confusion for parents, Superintendent Matt Wayne on Tuesday released a list of 11 campuses that could close at the end of this school year.

The list includes a few schools with special programs geared toward Cantonese-speaking families, one of which is in Peskin’s District 3 near Chinatown.

Jean Parker, which serves students from Chinatown along with Nob Hill and Russian Hill, has a Cantonese biliteracy program, and about 65% of its students identify as Asian or Pacific Islander. More than 80% of students at both Gordon J. Lau and John Yehall Chin elementary schools, where Jean Parker’s general education students could go next year if it closes, also identify as Asian.

Supervisor Connie Chan, who represents the Richmond and Presidio, said that it “seems like [the closures are] targeting Chinese Americans and Asian American families.”

Sutro Elementary, the only westside elementary school on the district’s initial list, is the only bilingual and immersion school in the Richmond, Chan said, and many of its students have family members who are monolingual Cantonese speakers.

Students who are enrolled in Sutro’s Cantonese biliteracy program would move to the Chinese Immersion School at De Avila Elementary next year, but Chan said an immersion program would be very different from the support they get at Sutro.

“Chinese [Immersion School at] De Avila is really an immersion program where your primary language doesn't have to be Chinese — or in this case, Cantonese — to be part,” she told KQED. “For Sutro Elementary, though, it’s not just about the language itself, but also many of [the students] are actually what we would call newcomer immigrants. They typically would be first generation, newly arrived immigrants, or their family, are typically monolingual.”

She said that while the goal of an immersion program is often for students to become bilingual, the biliteracy program at Sutro is geared toward families whose first language is Cantonese.

Other speakers at the event got emotional discussing the school communities affected by the list of potential closures.

“This is a similar situation for me because … during my senior year of high school, we were told our school was cutting a bunch of teachers because we didn't have money because enrollment was down,” said Queena Chen, an alumna of Spring Valley Elementary. “Does that sound familiar?”

SFUSD last closed schools in 2005 and 2006. Those consolidations drew criticism for disproportionately affecting schools with higher percentages of Black students.

Four schools in the Western Addition neighborhood shuttered in those two years, along with a K-8 school in the Bayview. The Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program was merged with Rosa Parks Elementary School in 2006.

The school district has made a point to center equity in this round of cuts, citing an equity audit and weighing equity heavily in the “composite scores” it is giving schools to guide its decisions. In Wayne’s announcement sharing the initial list of campuses that qualify for closure under the district’s criteria, he said that elementary schools with under 260 students and composite scores in the lower 50% — which weigh equity, academic performance, school culture and use of resources — could be closed.

Data from the San Francisco Chronicle shows that the demographic split of students affected by the closures aligns pretty closely with the demographic makeup of the district. Still, there’s a lot of concern over where the schools getting cut are located and which communities will be the most heavily affected.

“I think that there is a general sense that the list of schools proposed to be merged and closed is unequitable,” said Vanessa Marrero, the executive director of Parents for Public School Students of San Francisco. “The three schools that are proposed for closure are all schools that have a high incidence of Asian populations and or bilingual education programs in the Chinese language, so that seems problematic to me.”

Chan and Peskin are calling on the district to hold off on the consolidation plan and focus instead on remediating the district’s budget crisis, which puts it at risk of state takeover if it can’t cut an additional $113 million to balance the books by December.

Growing up as an immigrant who attended Galileo High School, Chan said that school communities can be a lifeline for families arriving in the city and added that budget solutions should be more thoroughly examined before turning to closures.

“When you really think about a school community — especially for immigrants and new immigrants — those are the very critical community spaces … so that they can actually take root and stay here and thrive as part of the larger San Francisco community,” she told KQED.