Related Data:

• The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3000. (New York Times, Friday, October 3, 2014)
• Fifty-nine per cent of students in SFUSD qualify for free or reduced lunch. (www.sfusd.edu)
• To qualify for free/reduced lunch in San Francisco, a family of four lives on less than $36,000 per year. (SF Gate, September 30, 2013)
• Starting salary for a teacher in SFUSD is $47,000; starting pay rate for a paraprofessional is $17.05 per hour. (www.sfusd.edu)

Sample Frame:

As we begin our work this week, I want to talk for a minute about the housing situation that we’re facing in San Francisco right now because it affects our students, our families, and most likely, many people who work here with us.

Here are some staggering numbers. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco right now is $3000. Fifty-nine percent of students in SFUSD qualify for free or reduced lunch. At our school ____ % of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. To qualify for free lunch in San Francisco, a family of four subsists on less than $36,000 per year—that is $3000 per month. Let’s think about that amount of money for a moment in a city where an average cup of coffee is over $2. The starting salary for a paraprofessional in San Francisco Unified is $17.05 per hour and the starting salary for a teacher is $47,000, respectively yielding $2387 and $3916 per month before taxes.

We already have first-hand experience with what this means for our students and for our colleagues. Many of you have been graciously and empathically trying to manage the increasingly uncomfortable living conditions yourselves and for our students, from working with parents who’s children have long BART or car rides because they’re traveling from distant suburbs to finding services to help with laundry for families who are co-habitating with several other families in a small space. (customize this paragraph with examples from your own school.)

It’s worth noting that the children of middle and upper middle class homes often have their own sleeping spaces—they have quiet places to do homework—they often get sufficient sleep because their journeys to school in the morning are short. Our children who travel from afar, or share a couch at night with three other people, or attempt to do homework on BART, come to us less nourished by food and sleep, and often with the shame (apparent or not) of not being prepared for school, in the ways that we traditionally describe readiness—well-rested, well-fed, clean, homework completed, and with a backpack of appropriate school supplies. This is too important for me not to state the obvious—children who experience the stress of uncomfortable housing and economic scarcity must overcome that stress to be fully-available learners. This is a layer of effort that our students living in more economically stable situations do not face.

It’s important to acknowledge that gentrification doesn’t affect our students proportionally. In San Francisco, where socio-economic status and race often align, our African American, Latino, and Southeast Asian communities are disproportionately affected by the rising housing costs. For many of our students, this creates a feeling of being ostracized in their own neighborhoods where their families may have lived for generations.

Here’s just a reminder to us all, myself included, that being an educator committed to equity means, in this case, that we hold in our consciousness the realities of our colleagues’ and students’ housing situations that might affect their performance and experience of school. This does not mean that we lower our expectations of the greatness, in any given moment, that we expect of these humans. But it does mean that we hold awareness in the front of our minds so that we are open to creative and supportive ways of helping them reach their greatness. “You don’t have your homework today? I bet you were doing something really important. Let’s find you a partner who can help you get caught up for what we’re doing in class today and you’ll need to stay after school today to make sure it’s done.” (Might be a spot to ask for other examples of what it means to hold awareness and creative ideas rather than judgment and anger.)

There are several ballot initiatives this fall that will seek to address the housing crisis in San Francisco. Without endorsing anything specific, here’s to hoping that enough of our fellow voters in San Francisco share our concerns about fair access to affordable housing to ease, however slightly, this aspect of inequity.

This is a great opportunity for me to acknowledge this dedicated staff. As stated above, a teacher’s average salary isn’t going to cover the median rent in this city. I know many of you commute from other cities and that for others, surviving the rising rent costs in SF is a constant struggle and something that you worry about. This means that some of you often come to work tired from a long commute or preoccupied about your own housing situation. In the same vain that I ask you to be thoughtful about our students’ experiences outside of school, I am thoughtful about yours. I appreciate you for the effort and energy you bring to our young people everyday. Please take care of yourselves and let me know if there are ways that I can best support you. [Possibly insert an offer of appreciation like there’s coffee and donuts for you tomorrow as a small token of appreciation for all that you do.] We’re all in this together.