As SF Expands Transitional Kindergarten, Some Classes Still Lack Permanent Teachers

On the calendar in Room 202 at Mission Education Center, there’s a sad face scribbled across Oct. 31.

For the 4-year-olds in the Upper Noe school’s transitional kindergarten classroom, Halloween won’t just be a flurry of costumes and candy. It’ll also be their last day with Ms. Katrina, who’s been a familiar face amid a rotation of substitute teachers since August, when the school year began without a permanent teacher in place.

Maya Karwande’s daughter told her over the weekend that she’ll miss Ms. Katrina, who works out of the San Francisco Unified School District’s central office as an instructional coach supporting classroom teachers but has been stationed at MEC for about two months.

Though Karwande said the coaches have provided much-needed stability for the young students, parents were initially assured they would remain until their children’s classroom had a permanent teacher. But last week, the district told parents it “isn’t optimistic” it’ll be able to fill the role at all, according to Karwande. The instructional coaches’ last day is Friday, Karwande said.

“We are facing a situation where the kids have a new substitute teacher … every month for the rest of the year. Or even a series of substitutes that are less than 30 days at a time,” she said via email.

“As a parent, I’m so stressed out,” she told KQED last week.

SFUSD expanded its transitional kindergarten program this fall, adding more than a dozen new classrooms as part of California public schools’ gradual rollout of the early education grade level akin to preschool. Any child in the state who turns 4 by Sept. 1 is guaranteed a seat in a TK classroom.

The district has touted a boost in enrollment thanks to growing TK interest, and it announced plans to open even more classrooms in the coming years to meet demand. But parents in at least five classrooms at four of the city’s early learning centers and elementary schools told KQED that their students still don’t have permanent teachers — and don’t seem likely to get one.

“If I had known in advance that my daughter’s classroom was not going to have a permanent lead teacher, or that they’re in limbo about a permanent teacher, I may have made other arrangements,” said Susan Zhang, whose daughter attends Frank McCoppin Elementary School in the Richmond District. She said her class has cycled through about 10 teachers since August.

“This is really not what we were expecting, and it’s not what our children need or deserve,” she continued.

‘We have asked repeatedly, who’s accountable?’

Substitute teachers with certain emergency permits can work in TK classrooms without meeting the same early education credential and experience requirements as permanent teachers — which are more extensive than those for other elementary school grades — but they can only teach the same group of students for 30 calendar days in an academic year, according to California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

Zhang’s daughter’s classroom has had a long-term substitute since the beginning of October, but he is also leaving at the end of the month. While a new 30-day sub is interested in taking over the class in November, according to Zhang, parents haven’t gotten any confirmation.

“At the very least, we were just hoping for some communication and transparency from the district … and they just have not been giving us that,” Zhang said. “It’s been very frustrating for families.”

Yaely Knebel, another TK parent at McCoppin, has been trying to gather information from district staff since the first week of school about when their children might get a permanent teacher, and why they started the year without one.

She’s been repeatedly bounced back and forth between administrators and school staff on a lengthy email chain, viewed by KQED.

District officials and McCoppin’s principal have sent some intermittent updates, but Knebel said parents have mostly been left to piece together what’s happening in their children’s classroom on their own.

According to Knebel, McCoppin’s original TK teacher resigned the position over the summer, leaving the school scrambling weeks before the first day. Parents were told that the principal interviewed and selected a replacement teacher, who was going to transfer to McCoppin from a different SFUSD school, but a “paperwork problem” held things up.

In early September, the district told families that it instructed McCoppin’s principal to recruit a new candidate instead, since the teacher he selected couldn’t be released from their current school without a replacement being hired there, per the district and teachers union’s collective bargaining agreement. But parents say their principal told them there were no eligible TK teachers in the district’s hiring pool.

The district said via email that it is actively recruiting teachers for a small number of remaining TK vacancies.

“We have asked them repeatedly: Who’s accountable and what the plan is and how the pool will get bigger, and we just keep being redirected to, ‘The principal will recruit, the principal will recruit,’” Knebel told KQED.

“It’s very flippant and has gotten to a place of being super dismissed and frustrated with what’s happening,” she continued.

In September, McCoppin parents requested a meeting with district and school site staff, and the district’s executive director of schools supporting McCoppin said she, and potentially a human resources representative, would meet with them. But a date was never set, and once October’s long-term sub was in place, Knebel and Zhang said they were told that meeting was no longer necessary.

“We replied, ‘Actually, absolutely we would still like the meeting, that does not negate the need,’” Knebel said. “And then no response. It’s been completely pulled off the table now.”

Throughout October, Knebel has sent district and school staff multiple emails seeking a meeting and more answers, but she has gotten little information and no offer to talk face-to-face.

“I don’t want to send angry emails. I have a full-time job. This is exhausting,” Knebel said. “The goal is really to have a safe, happy learning environment for my kid.”

A district-wide problem

Junipero Serra Elementary and Junipero Serra Annex in Bernal Heights both have TK classes in similar situations, according to parents. Two classes at MEC don’t have permanent teachers.

Parents at MEC, which has also been operating without a principal since the start of the year, met with SFUSD human resources staff for the first time last week. According to Karwande, the district declined earlier meeting requests because they didn’t have any updates.

Parents wrote a letter to the district during the first week of school, calling the conditions in their students’ classrooms “unsafe and unacceptable.” They said there was just one paraeducator bouncing between the school’s three TK classrooms, which required at least four based on student staffing ratios, and the interim principal had to step in to teach one class, while a parent said they led circle time in another.

By the end of week one, SFUSD said that it had offered a candidate the principal job and was “fully committed to providing the very best care and quality education to each of the 76 students enrolled at MEC.”

Karwande said most of the paraeducator vacancies have been filled, and the district sent Ms. Katrina and other instructional coaches to support the classrooms, but a permanent principal still hasn’t started. Now, it’s unlikely the remaining two TK vacancies will be filled, she said.

“What has been the most disappointing is feeling like the district is not meeting us where we’re at in the urgency of this situation,” Karwande told KQED.

District spokesperson Laura Dudnick said in a statement that the “positions have been challenging to fill due to statewide shortages of credentialed TK teachers.”

“In the meantime, we are ensuring that all classrooms have consistent coverage by qualified substitutes or long-term staff, with instructional coaches … provided to maintain continuity of instruction for students,” she said.

Specific early education qualifications that took effect this fall might be making it more difficult to permanently staff TK classrooms.

In addition to a multi-subject teaching credential, teachers have to meet a new early education instruction requirement this fall, either by completing 24 units of early childhood education or child development courses, obtaining a Child Development Teacher Permit or having an equivalent amount of work determined by their school district.

The state Legislature introduced the requirement about 10 years ago, but enforcement has been pushed back multiple times, according to Hanna Melnick, director of early learning policy at the Learning Policy Institute.

She said a survey of TK teachers conducted by the Learning Policy Institute last year found that more than 50% of respondents had the necessary course units or experience equivalent to meet the new requirement, while about a third reported having a Child Development Teacher Permit. It’s unclear how many met multiple requirements, though, or what the total portion of the workforce with the appropriate qualifications was.

In SFUSD, the requirement’s effective date aligned with the exodus of hundreds of educators through early retirement buy-outs as part of the district’s stabilization plan to close a major budget deficit last year, while also adding 16 new TK classrooms.

Still, Melnick said, “it has been known to districts for quite a while that that would eventually be the requirement.”

“It’s highly concerning to have any kind of instability, let alone someone who doesn’t know child development, in a [TK] classroom,” she continued. “Thirty-day subs are problematic for any grade level, but especially for 4-year-olds and especially for kids who are new to a school setting. That’s a really unfortunate way to start the school year.”

Parents are worried that as the district plans to continue increasing TK capacity, including at the new Mission Bay Elementary School set to open next fall, more students could be left behind.

Knebel and Zhang told KQED their kids have had little continuity of instruction. They said one of the substitutes in their children’s classroom put on movies.

At Junipero Serra, parents said some of the substitutes have not known how to properly discipline such young students or understand their developmental needs. And at MEC, which is a Spanish immersion campus, many of the instructors haven’t been Spanish-speaking.

“They can’t even get enough eligible teachers for the current class count,” Knebel said. “So they’re publicly stating ‘We’re going to have a spot for every eligible 4-year-old,’ but what does that spot mean? [If] it’s just like show up and watch TV with a sub, that’s not really a spot.”