Sunday, April 27, 2008
San Francisco Chronicle

Sandy Kao (top) and Danielle Vogt paint a mural at Daniel Webster Elementary School in Potrero Hill. Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn

Volunteers Give S.F. School a Fresh Look
Anastasia Ustinova, Chronicle Staff Writer

Enrollment is on the decline and budgets are tight, but a Potrero Hill elementary school received a major face-lift Saturday, as more than 100 volunteers painted its walls and planted flowers in hopes of wooing new students and their parents.
“A fresh coat of paint can do wonders for the community,” said Stacey Bartlett with the Potrero Residents Education Fund, a group that supports Daniel Webster Elementary School. “The school district does not have money for the improvement, and it takes the community to help them out.”

After the Board of Education put Webster on the closure list two years ago, local residents wrote letters to public officials, rallied parents to help boost enrollment and raised more than $500,000 for a preschool program. One resident who works at Yahoo created a Web site about the potential closure and designed “Save Daniel Webster” T-shirts.

Thanks to their efforts, Webster was also selected out of more than 100 applicants for the annual rehabilitation housing program called Rebuilding Together San Francisco. The nonprofit organization uses volunteers on the last weekend of April to repair, remodel and clean up community facilities and homes for low-income and disabled people.

Next year, the volunteers will return to paint old classrooms and fix appliances.

“It’s an extreme makeover for Daniel Webster,” said Bartlett, whose daughter, Annabel, will attend Webster’s new preschool in the fall. “It’s so uplifting, and it does a lot for the kids who live (in Potrero Hill).”

On Saturday, Principal Moraima Machado watched as volunteers from the consulting firm Ernst & Young and the San Francisco financial services company Charles Schwab put a fresh coat of paint on the old orange panels.

“These walls have not been painted since the 1980s,” Machado said. “With all the state budget cuts, those people are sending a message to the community and they are making history.”

Outside, a dozen of employees from the entertainment company DreamWorks got busy painting flowers, hills and goats - the old symbol of the neighborhood - for a new mural that faces the playground.

“You see the state school struggle for basic things. They shouldn’t have to struggle,” said Beth Hofer, head of the character development department at DreamWorks. “Giving them a fun environment and putting a smile on their face” is the least the volunteers can do, she said.

On Saturday, more than 2,000 volunteers from different organizations participated in Rebuilding Together San Francisco, which was founded after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Since then, the nonprofit has helped more than 1,000 homes and 250 facilities in the area.

This year’s projects included a residential recovery center for families in the Mission District, several child care centers and Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School.

Some volunteers, who have been involved with the project for several years, say they can’t help keeping coming back.
“It just feels good,” said Helen Hayes, a manager at Ernst & Young. “And it’s also an opportunity to meet people who work in different departments.”

Susie Albrecht, director of the employee communications at Charles Schwab, agreed.
“It’s fun to get to work side-by-side with colleagues and see them outside of the office,” Albrecht said. “It’s a team-building effort.”

E-mail Anastasia Ustinova at austinova@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/27/BA5010CK6O.DTL
This article appeared on page B - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.

Thursday, January 19, 2006
San Francisco Chronicle

Jennifer Betti and friend Dena Fischer play with Betti’s 20-month-old son, Roman, not far from Daniel Webster Elementary, which his mother wants Roman to attend in a few years.
Chronicle photo by Frederic Larson

SCHOOLS IN THE BALANCE
Middle-class moms and dads and Potrero Hill merchants fight to save Daniel Webster
Heather Knight, Chronicle Staff Writer

In an age when parents-to-be scout preschools before their babies are even conceived, it’s not strange that Jennifer Betti, a public relations executive and homeowner, has already picked out the elementary school of her dreams for her bubbly, green-eyed son, Roman, who is just 20 months old.

What is unusual is her school of choice: Daniel Webster Elementary in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.

Betti, 36, and her neighborhood friends are white, well-off and well-connected, the opposite of most of those families already at Webster. But if Betti and her friends have their way — and keep Webster open, despite threats of closure — the two groups’ children will learn together.

The school’s student body is very poor. Eighty-eight percent of Webster students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and many live in the nearby housing projects. Thirty-nine percent are learning English, and just 3 percent have parents who graduated from college. The few white students who attend the school are new immigrants from Eastern Europe. The rest are a mix of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans.

Webster is one of 26 public schools that could be closed or merged based on a vote tonight by the Board of Education. But Betti and dozens of other white, middle-class and upper-middle-class new moms and dads will be on hand to fight for the future of the school they hope to join one day.

Betti and her comrades — the 200-member Potrero Hill Parents Association — are part of a gentrification of Potrero Hill. White families are seeking out the neighborhood as one of the few spots left in San Francisco with semi-affordable housing, an easy drive to their offices downtown, an urban feel and lots of sunshine.

With hefty mortgages, they want a free public school nearby — and several say they’ll leave the school district and the city if they don’t get it.

“I went to public school, and I really believe in the concept of public schools,” Betti said. “Our message is that we’re prospective parents who want to get involved. Give us a year, and let us show you how we can support the school.”
And they’re not talking bake sales.

Group members, many of whom have part-time work schedules or nannies, have pledged to volunteer in the school, run major fundraisers to support Webster and recruit other families to boost enrollment.

Area merchants are on board — 4 Star Video promises to donate a percentage of each movie rental to Webster, and Klein’s Deli, Goat Hill Pizza and Thick Description, a live theater, plan to participate in fundraisers.

The parents also plan to persuade various corporations to donate substantially to the school. Private funding is increasingly relied upon in California’s public schools because the state’s funding is near rock-bottom in comparison to that of other states.
The Potrero Hill parents’ determination and connections would seem like any school district’s dream. But the San Francisco Unified School District faces declining enrollment, having lost 800 to 1,000 students each year for the past five years, a trend expected to continue for another five years. The district lost $5 million last year alone in per-pupil funding from the state.

The school board hopes to make up that money by closing or merging schools, choosing among those with low enrollment and that don’t use all of their building space.

Under the proposal before the board, Webster’s students and teachers would move to Starr King, less than a mile away. Several county programs for older students, including Phoenix High for pregnant teens, would move into Webster’s building.
But Betti’s group says Potrero Hill is booming with young families and will need two elementary schools in a few years; once closed, schools are almost never reopened.

Upon learning of the potential closure last month, Betti’s group immediately went into fighting mode. One member who works at Yahoo created a Web site and blog about the potential closure and designed T-shirts for sale that read “Save Daniel Webster.” (The shirts come in 12 designs, including “Jr. Baby Doll T-Shirt” and “Kids Hoodie.”)

The group has flooded school board meetings, where, as one of the few groups of white parents, it is often mistaken for a teachers group. Members have met with school board members, written letters to city officials and hit up a Potrero Hill neighbor, former Mayor Art Agnos, for help. Agnos has attended board meetings and press conferences to advocate for Webster.
In an interview with The Chronicle, he said keeping middle-class families in the school district is crucial to the success of the city’s public schools. The district can’t do much about high housing costs driving families out of San Francisco, but it can woo those students — who comprise 30 percent of San Francisco’s children — who attend private schools.

“People are not buying their products,” Agnos said. “They’re spending $20,000 to send their children to private school for kindergarten to learn their colors and learn to share. Our customers are here — we just need to bring them back.”
That’s part of the quest of Parents for Public Schools, which works to improve schools and draw more families to them. Sandra Halladey, associate director of the group, said she vividly recalls meeting with other middle-class Potrero Hill parents a few years ago and being unable to convince them of Webster’s benefits.

“I was almost laughed out of the room,” she said. “They were all interested in either private schools or alternative schools across town.”

Halladey said turning around unpopular public schools is easier than it might seem. Having a core group of parents with the time, money and energy to devote to a school is important, she said. It has worked at city schools like Alvarado Elementary, McKinley Elementary, Balboa High and Galileo High — and she thinks it can work at Webster, too.
Linda Anderson, the principal of Webster, would welcome the help.

“I’m just really happy to see that there is this interest and that it’s constructive in terms of what they’d like to do for the school,” she said, adding that the benefits of new families joining Webster is two-fold. “What this group would be adding to the school would be the Caucasian children, and then we would have a more balanced, multicultural population. That gives the children an opportunity to live with, learn with and grow with more of a variety of students.”

Bianca Ortiz, a secretary for Webster’s after-school program, said she appreciates the group’s advocacy on behalf of the school because most parents already at Webster aren’t able to muster that kind of political will.

“Our parents don’t have the resources or the time to get together and figure out that we’re going to draft these letters or call these people or make this Web site,” she said. “They don’t have the time to do it, or they don’t have the funds or vehicles to do it. They don’t have e-mail, they don’t have computers.”

She added, though, that some Webster parents are leery of the new group. They’re parents too, so they’re not sure why they’re not a part of the Potrero Hill Parents Association, she said. The association started as a Yahoo e-mail group to trade information about babysitters, strollers and the like, and members say they welcome an expansion of their group.

“They are welcoming it, but they’re also wary,” Ortiz said of current Webster families. “They don’t know who these people are.”
Dena Fischer, 40, a literary agent and the mother of 2-year-old twins, said she thinks the initial division between families affected by the potential closures and mergers citywide has started to melt away.

“It’s really been one for all and all for one — that’s been a big change in the whole story,” she said. “It started as families pleading for their own schools but is now coalescing into one group taking arms against the school board.”

DECISION DAY: The San Francisco Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the closure or merger of 26 public schools at 6 p.m. today at Everett Middle School, 450 Church St. The moves would affect 6,087 students and hundreds of teachers and aides, representing one of the most drastic changes in the district in decades.

E-mail Heather Knight at hknight@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/19/MNGK3GPM6N1.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2006 Hearst Communications Inc.

ABC Channel 7
January 13th, 2006

ABC 7 airs piece about our campaign

ABC 7 news aired a piece about the school closures on Thursday evening in which they mentioned our efforts and interviewed Dena and Jennifer:

“San Francisco’s Potrero hill neighborhood is thriving with new families. In 2-4 years these toddlers will start kindergarten at their neighborhood school. That’s if the school district keeps Daniel Webster elementary open.”

Dena Fischer - Potrero Hill Parent

I think we’ve gotten the attention of the school board because we’re unique. Across the city we’re the only group of prospective parents that have come out in force like this to support a local public school.
Jennifer Betti - Potrero Hill Parent

If we don’t have access to those schools every single one of us is going to be wondering if we should move to the east bay, up to marin or over on the west side. We have to have access to good public schools.