A Study in Size

There's also some question as to what it would mean to expand the small schools initiative and where additional money might be deployed. In San Francisco and elsewhere, autonomous schools like June Jordan have generally performed better than small learning communities like those at Mission High, but schools-within-a-school are less costly and involve fewer facilities headaches than starting a school from scratch. More important, though, is the shortage of people with the skills and desire to create a new school that could replicate June Jordan's success. The original proposals for June Jordan and Aim High Academy went beyond simply cutting the number of students — they were detailed plans, approved by a district committee that included Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading school redesign researcher. Several other school applications did not make the cut, though it's possible that if policies changed, administrators and teachers behind successful charter schools might propose new district schools or bring their charter schools inside the district.

SFUSD is a long way from small school expansion. In fact, it's been a challenge just to maintain those small schools that already exist. This fall, Aim High Academy may become the first casualty of the district's lack of support for the initiative.

The board of Aim High — the nonprofit that operates the academy — quietly decided in February to end its partnership with its namesake school at the close of this school year. Alec Lee, the organization's executive director, says the nonprofit's longstanding summer enrichment program will continue, and the nonprofit may open a new small-by-design charter school (it has already received a state grant) — that is, a small school not controlled by SFUSD. Aim High would have stayed involved with the academy if not for its continual clashes with the district over budgets and administration, according to several people who have spoken to Aim High board members and executives.

Without its founding organization, Aim High Academy's future is in question. The district has told the staff that, due to other schools closing, Aim High's enrollment might increase from less than 80 pupils per grade to as many as 100 next year, with no guarantee of additional teachers, robbing the school of its intimacy. Dozens of Aim High parents plan to move their children to other schools, in part because of concern over this increase, but also because the school will move across town this fall, from the Haight-Ashbury District into the Luther Burbank building (next to June Jordan). District administrators haven't even decided what the school will be called when classes begin in August. Almost every teacher, including three who co-founded the school, is considering leaving, although none would talk on the record because their employment futures are still in flux. "Everything is going to be a fight," says one Aim High Academy teacher. "I don't want to fight. I want to teach."

The nonprofit and some teachers, though, might be giving up before the fight is over because of an unwillingness to compromise with SFUSD. "I think if they were committed to this, they should remain committed to it," says Wynns. "The job's not done. This school is not fully developed yet. They had a vision, and they need to finish it."

When Soraya Mabrey's mother told her she'd been assigned to June Jordan, she almost refused to attend. Her friends from junior high were all going to big public schools, places like Lowell and Thurgood Marshall. "I want to go to a real high school," she griped. "They don't even have sports!"

After a week at June Jordan, Mabrey's mother, Ayanna Banks, asked if she wanted to transfer.

"No," Mabrey replied. "I like it."

Now in the 10th grade, the Bayview District resident is no bookworm — she used to write poetry, she says, but stopped because it got "boring." Like many girls her age, Mabrey spends her afternoons chatting on the phone and her weekends shopping for clothes. No one in her immediate family has gone to college, and if she hadn't come to June Jordan, she probably wouldn't have gone, either.

"In junior high, she was glad to be average," says Banks. "A 'C' was OK."

June Jordan raised Mabrey's grades and changed her attitude, and the girl's success has inspired Banks — a single mother who'd never been politically active — to become a forceful advocate for small-by-design schools. Voices like hers, and the stories of students like Mabrey and Travis Fenech, are spreading throughout the city.

Whether or not they buy into the concept of small schools, local families are applying to them in record numbers. This year, June Jordan received 397 applications for 100 places in its ninth grade. Enrollment at small-by-design charter high schools has increased by 50 percent in the past three years, to well over 1,000 kids, or more than one of every 20 high schoolers in the district. New schools such as Metropolitan Arts & Tech High School in Bernal Heights, which opened last fall, and XCEL Academy in the Inner Sunset, which opened in 2003, are on pace to add about 700 students in total during the next four years.

While SFUSD's central office wasted years fighting over autonomy with a few small-by-design schools, several small charter schools opened. With in-district small schools, the central office has a good deal of power over budgets, curriculum, and application processes; with charter schools, which are funded by the state, it has almost none.