Descriptive Title: Percentage of kindergarteners requesting nearby schools on their school application
Geographic Unit of Analysis: Elementary school attendance area
|Percent of families choosing their attendance area elementary school as their first choice and school academic performance index, 2011|
|School||% 1st choice||2010 Base API|
Research on travel mode choice also shows that when schools are located closer to home, more children walk and/or bicycle to school and vehicle pollution emissions fall.a Walking to school can be an important source of physical activity to help prevent chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Nationally, less than 15% of children aged 5 to 15 walk to school. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, long distances to school are a primary barrier to walking to school. Danger from traffic was the second most important barrier.b Decreased vehicle utilization can help reduce rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases as well as decrease rates of pedestrian/traffic injury. Additionally, shorter commuting times provide students with more free time, which can be spent on homework, participation in extracurricular activities, employment, sleep, etc.
While there are many reasons for a student’s family to choose a school outside of their attendance area, including language immersion and other unique school programs, sibling enrollment, or actually living closer to a non-attendance area school, particularly low percentages of attendance area families selecting a school as a first choice may be an indication that families perceive that school to be undesirable or problematic.
San Francisco has a choice based school assignment system, meaning that families can apply to any public school/program with openings in the city. There is no guarantee that a student will receive an assignment to any particular school, but if there are enough spaces at a school to accommodate all students who want to attend, all applicants will receive assignment offers. While the primary application form allows students to rank ten schools, additional paperwork can be filed to provide rankings for all schools.
These maps, created by the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) based on 2011-2012 school assignment offers, demonstrate that in general fewer families on the south eastern side of the city listed their attendance area school as their first choice school or their closest school as a choice at all. The SFUSD Student Assignment Annual Report for 2011-12 School Year reports that when school choice and proximity are examined by ethnicity, fewer African American and Latino families list their closest school as one of their school choices compared to Chinese or White families (67% African American, 61% Latino, 54% Chinese, and 52% White families respectively did not list their closest school at all).
When the percent of families choosing their attendance area elementary school is examined in relation to school academic performance (API) from 2010, it is evident the percent of families choosing their area school generally increases with school API.
Maps were copied from the two SFUSD documents listed in the Data Sources section below. Percentages of families selecting their attendance area elementary school by school in the table were taken from the March 2011 School Assignment Offers report and 2010 school Base API scores were gathered from the California Department of Education.
School choice can be influenced by many factors, including sibling attendance, school proximity to home or work, school academic reputation, recommendations, special programming, afterschool programming or childcare, neighborhood safety, and others. School demand is just one indicator of school quality. Additional measures of quality could include: academic performance; availability of books, supplies and other resources; physical and social structures of the school; actual and perceived safety at the schools; proximity to green space; training and experience of teachers and staff; involvement of parents in children’s education; opportunities for extracurricular activities; whether the school is used as a multi-use facility in the afternoons, evenings and weekends; existence of afterschool programs; etc.
SFUSD. Student Assignment: March 2011 School Assignment Offers. April 13, 2011. http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/enroll/files/Post_March/Update%20April%2013%202011_Revised.pdf
SFUSD. Student Assignment Annual Report: 2011-12 School Year. March 5, 2012. http://www.ppssf.org/HomepageFiles/Annual%20Report_March%205%202012_FINAL.pdf
2010 Base API Scores: California Department of Education: http://data1.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/
Maps prepared by San Francisco Unified School District.
Table prepared by San Francisco Department of Public Health.