The following letter was posted to the PotreroHillSF.com message boards, notifying the community of the SF School District’s intentions of closing Daniel Webster Elementary:

Dear Friends, Families and Supporters of Daniel Webster Elementary School,

I am writing to inform you that the SF school district intends to close Daniel Webster Elementary School. The plan involves moving our 250 students to Starr King and turning Webster (which is designed for K-5 students) into a hub for city’s at-risk high school students in County-funded schools. The “merger” plan was announced on December 6th and will be approved or disapproved on January 10th.

Originally the plan was to merge the 150 students from Starr King to Daniel Webster since we have enough room to accommodate these numbers. The district informed the parents that Daniel Webster was a site for a potential merger and our school was removed from the primary list of possible closures. However, this plan was scrapped at the last minute and now the district intends on moving the 250 Webster students to Starr King at the end of the school year. The district has not given this information to the media nor the parents so we, the workers of Daniel Webster, have been scrambling since Wednesday morning to inform the families of 250 students as well as the community.

For generations, our families have chosen to attend Daniel Webster, hailing from Potrero Hill, the Bayview, and the Mission for reasons of scholastics, Limited English learning and safety. Closing our school and trying to send students to Starr King will result in a lot of our families opting to ship their children across town instead of attending Starr King Elementary. The Board will essentially be destroying two neighborhood schools with this unprecedented and deceptive move.

There is a Board of Education Meeting on Tuesday, December 13th at 7:00 PM at 555 Franklin Street. This is our ONE and ONLY chance to try to save Webster. The vote will take place after Winter Recess on January 12th.

• Mergers and Closures PDF File from the SFUSD

Any support that you can lend to our families would be very much appreciated.

Gracias y Paz.
Bianca Ortiz
Secretary
Daniel Webster Child Development Center
phone (415) 920-5076
fax (415) 920-5077

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2005 at 11:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.