5.10.05

5/17 Neighborhood Schools hearing location announced...

B Rock responds

If you’re on the SFSOS mailing list, you’ve already received this message:

Greetings all, 

The announcement we've been waiting for about the location of the May 17 School Board Committee-of-the-Whole hearing to discuss neighborhood schooling has been released. It will be held at:

Everett Middle School Auditorium

450 Church Street (@17th Street)

Tuesday, May 17th @ 7:00 p.m.

Those of you who were at the April 12 School Board meeting know that this hearing is the result of a packed room of concerned parents adamant about neighborhood schools; it is the direct result of your demands to be heard (an accomplishment in itself). We hope you can all attend and capitolize on this opportunity to participate in the decision-making process.

As this hearing is entirely devoted to the topic of neighborhood schooling, you will not waste any of your time waiting though the agenda as you would during a full school board meeting. So please come knowing that the entire meeting is devoted to you.

From now up to the day of the meeting, we will continue to assemble those of you who will commit to attend this meeting and demonstrate the community's demand for neighborhood schools. So please forward this email to other concerned residents, and confirm your RSVPs to me. Please also continue to print the petition, sign/circulate it and fax it back to us at 397-3768. We will continue to collect them through May 17th.

Many thanks,

Ryan Chamberlain

Field Director, SFSOS

From B Rock comes the following response:

will there be schoolcare provided?... i only ask because i have a young school... usually i take it with me wherever i go, because, being a school, it can be taken anywhere... sometimes, when i play basketball out at 28/lawton, i leave the school out back on the large expanse of grass...

it needs a large area, because it is a large school, not one of the bungalow thingees... mine is a REAL school... not some john kerry purple heart (sorry — that was the school channeling — it hates it when it is forced to accept military recruiters by the nclb act)...

anyway, when i take my school out to 28/lawton and leave it out back while i play ball, you'd be amazed at how many people come to see it... they even go home and get their kids... they always ask me if i can leave it there for a few days or years but my school likes to sleep in its own bed at night...

usually i tell them i will get them another school and bring it there and leave it for them...

most of them tell me that someone has already made that promise to them... they have been promised that by the sfsos people, you know, those nice people with the hate symbols on their literature, that they are going to bring them not just one, but many many schools... and they are going to leave them out there forever and forever...

they don't know where those schools are going to come from — i think some of them thought that i was actually bringing the first of those schools when i was out there with my school playing ball... they have been waiting a long time... waiting and waiting and waiting...

the other idea was that they could just kick everybody out of the schools in their neighborhood and then they would have those schools all to themselves... they were thinking that... but then someone explained to them that they don't actually own the schools in their neighborhoods... that was a hard concept for them to grasp, because there were all these other people telling them that they DID own the schools... that they were THEIR schools... their NEIGHBORHOOD schools... the first guy tried to explain that actually, ALL the people of san francisco own ALL the schools... some schools are friskier than others but they are all supposed to share all the other schools... but that guy, someone wished him into the cornfield...

in the cornfield, there was a school that no one was using because all the crops had failed... so he thought he would bring it back to the people who wanted more schools in their neighborhood... so he put it in his pocket and took the slow boat back, but when he got there and he said he had a school that everyone could share, they didn't WANT to share — they wanted to take that school for their own...

so they did... and they gave the guy to john ashcroft and now he works on third and fourth drafts of the patriot act and is very, very unhappy... all because he didn't get with the sfsos program...

my school isn't with the sfsos program either... but it wants to come on may 17th and yell, "WE WANT OUR NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS"...

and my school says that whether you find other schools that are just like my school and ask them to come out and live in big green expanses so all the neighborhood children will have somewhere close to home to go to, or whether you just throw out everyone who doesn't live there (or have a relative who does - hint, hint) and TAKE the schools where you live for your very own, my school says that if you just keep yelling and yelling and yelling, and you find people who will manipulate you with false promises of a utopian ideal where we just put all the schools where people in the neighborhood want them (because schools, like mine are very portable), you too can have everything you want in life and stay real close to home all the time and never have to interact with those "other" kids and never have to go away to college or downtown to work or anything like that... and after you get that, you need to get the giants to split up into 11 teams and play all "neighborhood" games, every one  at "home"...

and then, we need to get all those cemeteries BACK from colma, because we all want to be buried in our NEIGHBORHOOD GRAVES!...

my little school wonders if we can't just bury everyone under the schools...

me, i just hope they are going to have schoolcare on may 17...