By Ari Burack

June 26, 2008

San Francisco’s public school admissions system, intended to foster diversity in schools, is actually “an expensive failure,” according to a civil grand jury report released today.

The report focused on the city’s kindergarten students and concluded that the San Francisco Unified School District’s School Choice policy, is “unnecessarily complex and confusing, time consuming, alienating to families” and fails on its promised to deliver a diverse student body to schools.

The School District’s Education Placement Center employs a staff of 29 people at a cost of $2 million per year, the report stated.

According to David Hartley, who chaired the San Francisco civil grand jury committee that produced the report, many earnest parents have to navigate a lengthy and complicated application process without the assurance their child will be admitted to one of the seven schools to which they apply.

Hartley called the process “harrowing” and “a crapshoot” for parents.

The report contends that the selection process is widely seen by parents as unfair, and may factor in San Francisco’s lower public-to-private school rate of attendance.

The report recommended the District eliminate the computerized Diversity Index it uses in assigning students to schools, and instead locate them in neighborhood elementary schools, with the option of applying to another school if they desire.

“A child should be able to know that they can go to a neighborhood school,” Hartley said. He said school officials could redraw the District’s attendance zones for neighborhood schools to make them more ethnically diverse.

With the current practice, “Schools have not improved or become more diverse, even with the use of busing,” the report concluded. Each year, school buses transport 5,000 elementary students to school, costing the District $5 million, according to the report.

Hartley added that diversity should not come at the expense of a quality education.

“The School Board has been very involved in diversity… and in some cases it’s possible to say the (push for) diversity takes precedence over really good schools,” he said.

District officials were not immediately available for comment today on the report.