Friends of Jefferson members An Bui and Andy Hinds recently appeared on KUSI News’s “San Diego People,” to talk about their experiences as parents of Jefferson students, and how and why they got involved in supporting their local school when many parents in the neighborhood were enrolling their kids elsewhere.

The topic of the show was San Diego Unified School District’s “Vision 2020” plan, the goal of which is to ensure that there is an excellent neighborhood school in every zone in the district by the year 2020. Other guests included School Board Vice President John Lee Evans, Executive Director of Facilities, Planning, and Design Julie Martel, and IB Resource Teacher Jennifer Sims.

The District’s “Vision 2020” plan is meant as a correction to some of the unintended consequences of the “school choice” system in place now, which makes it very easy for parents to choose a school that they perceive as better or more desirable than their neighborhood school. “Choicing out” of the neighborhood school has become so common that almost half of families in the district send their kids to someplace other than the school down the block. When the neighborhood families abandon their neighborhood school, typically the school struggles, loses enrollment, and, in a vicious cycle, becomes even less desirable to the locals, and then is filled with kids from other neighborhoods where the locals don’t like their school. It has gotten to the somewhat absurd point where families are criss-crossing the city, often driving right past their neighborhood school as they commute to a school they think is slightly “better.” Click here to read some more thoughts about school choice and how it affects neighborhood schools…

Watch the full episode for a pretty good primer on Vision 2020, and how Jefferson has become an example of a neighborhood school that the locals are rediscovering! (An and Andy are in the last segment.)

KUSI News – San Diego, CA