S.F. school enrollment to get overhaul

Controversial lottery process hasn’t enhanced diversity

San Francisco’s widely panned student assignment system needs a complete overhaul, and the process to change it starts now, the school board decided late Tuesday night.

The unanimous vote just before 11 p.m. set in motion the process to create a new procedure that would end the all-lottery system and make the assignment to schools more predictable and based on where students live, board members said.

Parents won’t see the results for at least a few years, but the vote requires district staff to come up with a new plan that includes one of three possibilities:

An automatic assignment to a neighborhood school, with additional lottery-based choice for citywide or specialized options like language immersion programs.

A choice system based primarily on home address.

Zone-based assignment with a guaranteed assignment to one in a set of schools.

The process will include feedback from parents and community members, board members said.

“The board is unified in going through this process and looking carefully at what we’re doing and what other districts are doing,” said board member Matt Haney. “I think we can come up with a better system.”

The process will focus on elementary student assignment, which would keep the middle school feeder system and the all-choice high school assignment process in place for now.

The board launched the process even though three of the current members won’t be there to make a final decision. Board members Matt Haney

and Shamann Walton are leaving to take seats on the Board of Supervisors, and Emily Murase’s term ends when the new board is seated in early January.

Board members Mark Sanchez and Rachel Norton said that at some point, they intend to also address how students are assigned to high school, including whether some schools, including Lowell High School and the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, should be allowed to select students based on their academics or talent.

The current elementary school assignment system allows families to rank their preferred choice of schools, with a lottery system determining whether they get one of their picks.

Siblings get first-priority consideration, followed by those who live in census tracts where students post low standardized test scores, which district officials hoped would help desegregate schools. But it didn’t work, board members said.

The school board adopted the most recent update of the system in 2010. In an earlier version, in the 1990s, most children were automatically assigned to their neighborhood schools, and parents widely criticized that system. Over the past few decades, student assignment in the city has been a perennial issue as well as the subject of lawsuits over racial segregation, which resulted in a federal consent degree and mandated busing of students.

But after eight years of the current system, and thousands of complaints, it’s time to move on, district official said.

“To get different outcomes, we have to try different things,” board member Murase said.

The new assignment system needs to be easy to understand and feel like it serves all families, said board President Stevon Cook.

“This is like that football that gets kicked around in every city,” he said. “People want great schools that they can trust and believe in.”

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker