With a microphone in one hand and a large poster in the other, third-grader Isabella led a series of chants during a protest outside Mission Educator Center (MEC), a school in San Francisco that supports newly arrived Spanish-speaking immigrants during their transition to the city.
“I want a career to support my family,” Isabella said boldly to the crowd of mostly tiny protesters. “I don’t understand why they’re taking away our education.”
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Around her, dozens of her classmates, some as young as five, cheered her on while holding posters with handwritten slogans like “We want our social workers” and “Nobody asked us about our school.”
More than 50 students and dozens of parents, teachers, alumni and neighbors gathered outside MEC on Tuesday afternoon to protest proposed budget cuts by the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).
MEC, located in Noe Valley, is one of many public schools in the city bearing the brunt of SFUSD’s significant budget deficit, and the district’s plans to address it through staff cuts. SFUSD’s final budget won’t be adopted by the district until late June, but the district has already sent out preliminary layoff notices, concerning families and educators.
Under SFUSD’s proposed cuts, MEC’s newcomer program stands to lose one of its three teachers, its on-site nurse and full-time access to a social worker for next school year. Parents say the school has also told them that the number of classrooms serving the newcomer program will be cut in half, from four to two.
Families fear losing a vital lifeline
As cuts loom, parents are growing increasingly concerned about the school’s future. MEC serves newly arrived students from pre-K to 5th grade, helping them boost their English skills while also providing families with resources to navigate life in the city. After a year, students typically get transferred to a general public school.
“We’re in a sanctuary city, and they’re supposed to help all immigrants. So for us, this feels like getting rid of a source of support,” said Yennifer B., a Colombian mother with three children enrolled at MEC. “We need even more teachers, because we feel like they’re too few for the number of students we have.”
Yennifer said families first learned about the proposed cuts in late February during a meeting with the school principal. Outraged, they organized a picket outside of SFUSD’s Board of Education meeting on March 11, where MEC students joined dozens of children from across the city in public comments opposing the proposed layoffs.
This school year, MEC is currently at full capacity, serving 98 children.
During the meeting, a group of MEC teachers delivered a letter to Superintendent Maria Su, highlighting concerns about how the cuts could impact the school’s ability to support San Francisco’s large newcomer population. They invited Su to visit the school and speak to staff.
SFUSD Executive Director Laura Dudnick told El Tecolote that the district remains “deeply committed to serving its newcomer students.”
She noted that Spanish-speaking newly arrived families are given the option of enrolling in MEC or in other elementary schools with general education and biliteracy programs, some of which currently serve more newcomer students than MEC.
According to SFUSD projections, only 18 students are expected to enroll in the MEC’s elementary grades next year. Meanwhile, the district is expanding MEC’s Transitional Kindergarten (TK) program by adding two classrooms and two teachers, as part of its efforts to meet state law requirements. TK is a general education program, and isn’t uniquely designed for newly arrived immigrants.
MEC’s immigrant families say they are worried that the cuts to the newcomer program might devastate a space that has supported generations of immigrant students, especially given the country’s current political climate.
“Everything is going to get harder for teachers, and more than anything for the students,” said Clelia Rodríguez, who came to the protest to support her daughter’s former teachers. “This was my daughter’s first school… and she learnt so much, she made so many friends. It was so hard for her to leave.”
Many parents said MEC also helps families navigate life beyond the classroom. Maribel O., a Mexican immigrant mother who lives in a temporary city shelter, said the school lets her family use the kitchen to prepare meals. Yennifer said MEC’s social worker taught her how to use public transportation in the city and helped her get her first clipper card.
“We were alone here but [this school] gave us a refuge,” said Melissa, a newly arrived Peruvian immigrant. Her daughter Arlet, 9, has been in MEC for over a year. “They gave us a lot of care that we couldn’t have imagined.”
At the protest, teachers said that they wanted the district to give MEC a larger location, to make sure the school is accessible to more newcomer immigrants, rather than being cut down.
“We want this program to continue and the community deserves and needs it,” one teacher told the crowd on Tuesday. “We have plenty of students that need this program, we have plenty of immigrant students that come here and are ready to learn … We are ready.”
