School Beat: Community Voices Unveiled—the CACSERR Final Report

Many may recall that the CACSERR was created in response to the need for a long-range plan imbued with a rich understanding of community priorities and desires. The BOE and district recognized at the end of last year that not only were community voices an essential part of the formal planning process, but that the multiplicity of those voices in San Francisco required a significant amount of time and attention in order to meaningfully and accurately uncover what people are thinking. Thus was the CACSERR created and now we have the results of its fantastic work. The CACSERR had several primary goals:

• Gaining “a better understanding of diverse community members’ aspirations for SFUSD schools;”

• Creating “shared knowledge about key issues facing the District”; and
• Involving “many members of the community in addressing these issues.”
Instead of taking the familiar approach of having members of the committee serve as proxies for the community, the committee set about achieving its mandate by convening more than 80 intimate, facilitated parent and community discussions in every part of San Francisco (only one zip code, in the Embarcadero area, was left untouched). This approach was instrumental in ensuring that community voices, which are rarely singular in any given defined community, were not represented by one or two people, but were expressed by many members.

The CACSERR process resulted in the participation of more than 900 individuals, including over 180 youth. Great efforts were made to reflect the diversity of both San Francisco and the district, as the socio-economic profiles of each group are not the same. Meetings were in multiple languages, at varying times, in all parts of the City and in a many different types of settings, from schools to the offices of community organizations to private homes.

More
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4352#more