Christina Feliciana is a social worker who focuses on child welfare. She has worked in school and community-based settings in Alameda and San Francisco for more than a decade. Christina grew up in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood and moved to the Bayview in 2001. When it came time to enter their daughters in SFUSD’s lottery system, Christina’s family made the difficult choice of not sending their daughters to their neighborhood school and ranked schools outside of their neighborhood on the school placement application. Her eldest daughter was selected to attend Rooftop Alternative, a magnet public school located in Twin Peaks. Her daughter was later joined by her younger sister, who was also selected to attend Rooftop through the sibling preference element of the lottery. Her daughters caught a public school bus that took them to Rooftop each morning. However, the Bayview school bus was chronically late in picking up students, disproportionately affecting the Black and brown student community attending Rooftop. After 4 years of chronically late buses, Christina mobilized with fellow parents in 2014 for improved bus routes and pick-up times. Her efforts led to improving the bus routes and pickup times, however the district continues to struggle to fully integrate their magnet schools and provide equitable transportation opportunities to students from low SES backgrounds interested in attending a school in a neighborhood outside of their own.

Here Christina speaks to AEMP member Ariana Allensworth on navigating SFUSD’s school choice system, trauma-informed educational practices, and strategies for addressing disproportionality in school discipline. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

On navigating school choice:

You have to follow the school assignment system, and we were in an underperforming block area. That would mean that we’d get an extra point in the school assignment system because our neighborhood school was broken. So we ranked our top three schools and Rooftop was like fifth on the list. It was kind of a shock when it came back and that was the match after the first round. It was kind of heartbreaking in some ways not to be able to access your neighborhood school.

On the complexities of school diversity:

I think economic diversity in schools is hugely important. What happened in this [school bus intervention] experience is that I had the social capital to kind of know how to hit all of these different levers to make things change. Whereas folks who are just spent from working and trying to manage childcare and their kids’ lives wouldn’t be able to do all of that. When we had that [school bus] intervention, it’s not magically erasing all the other issues that happen around disproportionately in discipline. We have so much work to do at the school. The district likes to hold up Rooftop as our most diverse school in the City, like they get all these kudos for it but they don’t give us support. And then diversity becomes kind of like a loaded term, like a problem or a burden. Black kids are just quicker to get pushed out of classroom and be subjected to suspensions. There are some white kids that a lot of people tolerate because they’re “creative and curious and high energy.” They get the gift of all of those euphemisms where the Black kids are “broken and hurt and it’s a torn up family.” Like all these other things that they’re not speculating about with these other children. So these are the obstacles. We need support at the district level for for interrupting some of the bias.

On trauma-informed practices:

We’re trying to promote trauma-informed practices. The realization that some of these kids experience community violence and violence at home and all these other issues of loss and things that other kids, you know, haven’t. And so they can be triggered in ways that teachers aren’t accustomed to really having to be sensitive to. The school raised four hundred thousand dollars this year. We’re going to use some of that money to bring in the UCSF Hearts Program [Healthy Environments and Response to Trauma in Schools]. We need restorative practices to really get at all of the intersections going on and not just have this model of “fixing” broken kids.

On the challenges chronic school bus tardiness:

I was looking at the impact it’s having on black kids, this chronic tardiness. These kids need some stability, some equal footing and it’s such a disadvantage for them to roll in late. That triggers the teacher and the community circle to be able to integrate them peacefully into the room and routine. They act out because of the shame and embarrassment about the fact that the other kids treat them differently, as do the teachers and parent volunteers. If the bus arrives late they don’t get the free and reduced breakfast or if they say, ‘I’m really hungry’, the teacher is saying, ‘you can’t eat that in the room’, so you’re eating it outside of the classroom, even further losing minutes from instruction.

On busing excluding kids from afterschool programs:

Because kids are bussed they can’t access after school tutoring and support which does hurt the sense of community with school. The bus leaves right at the end of the day and will take you to certain after school programs or drop off sites. There’s no late bus to help kids who could really benefit from hanging around.

On starting a petition to protest the late buses:

So I did the petition and went through the directory at Rooftop, sending it especially to all of the people in the zip code of the area of the school bus [Sunnydale and Bayview]. We got a decent response, including a lot of people that aren’t from Bayview, which I think is what we needed in terms of being persuasive as stakeholders. I had it delivered to the president of the school board and higher level people in the district that had been ignoring us. I contacted the Examiner and the reporter got back to me. We spoke and I think she called the principal and talked to him. He very smartly, and to his credit, decided to take a ride on the bus and that was featured in her article. Thankfully, that morning it was 30-minutes late. So he got to see the whole experience firsthand. I think that was a wonderful move on his part.

On the district’s response to the petition and Examiner article:

The district hired a school bus monitor. They only did this because of the petition and article but made it seem like that was already in place. I think bus monitors are a good idea and having a consistent driver who knows the kids and knows the families. They hired a paraprofessional that works at the school all day so she knows these kids and has a relationship with them. She is wonderful and should get some recognition for the depth of her caring. The district recently told her that they can’t pay her for it anymore. With our [PTA] budget we can do that. But again, symbolically, what message is that sending?

Source: https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2015-02/as-parents -get-more-choice-sf-schools-resegregate