On a Friday evening my team and I prepared to leave the office to attend an annual Parents for Public Schools of SF (PPS-SF) fundraiser.
I got a call on my personal phone from the personal mobile of an administrator at the San Francisco Public School District. There had been a delay in letters that notified families of their public school placement, which were due to be mailed that day.
This is a big deal.
San Francisco public school enrollment is a notoriously complex system, sending the calmest parents into tailspins of anxiety as they sit in limbo to learn where their child might attend kindergarten, middle school, or high school.
Although the schools are excellent, the enrollment process is flawed and confusing, causing unnecessary family stress and favoring families with time and resources over under-resourced or non-English-speaking families. Part of our job at PPS-SF was to share information about the complex student assignment system, so that all families could make the best choices for their children.
And now the letters that told families their assigned schools were indefinitely late. It was my job to drop everything and help disseminate that information with thousands of families across the City.
My team sprung into action. We had just launched a new website and coordinating communications platforms (thank goodness). I started drafting copy as soon as I got off the phone.
Thirty minutes later I was back on the phone with SFUSD as they updated their own website and social media. They asked if we could wait one minute to post until after they went live.
I had the blog post drafted and links were ready to push out. My colleagues sat next to me, creating parallel communications in Chinese and Spanish.
“Ok go",” the district administrator said.
I hit send and emailed 10,000 English-speaking parents on our newsletter list. I texted an additional 2,000 in English and manually posted on all our social media sites in hopes of reaching as many families as possible. My colleagues notified several thousand more via WeChat in Chinese and released Spanish copy via a targeted text-messaging app.
Then my team packed up and left for the fundraiser.
I spent the next 48 hours, over the weekend, in constant contact with SFUSD.
I had only just added apps for our new website and text platform on my phone the week before. Instead of running to the office on Saturday for constant updates I went to my kid’s soccer game. I updated the changes to student assignment letters live from the soccer fields, knowing that anxious families were surely checking their own inboxes from their own weekend activities.
Grateful for professional collaboration with SFUSD and our team at PPS-SF. We had an emergency plan in place and we used it. Although many families experienced stress and anxiety at not knowing where their children would go to school, they were able to turn to our organization as a source of information and comfort.
