EDITOR'S NOTES

By Tim Redmond

> tredmond@sfbg.com

We were all kind of cranky at the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council forum last Thursday night. The topic was the future of San Francisco's public schools, but mostly what everyone wanted to talk about was the recent round of school closures. I think it would be safe to say that nobody on the panel or in the audience rose to defend the school district administration.

The problem is, of course, complex; most major urban issues are. There's not enough money to keep all the existing schools open, because there aren't enough students to fill all those schools and the state pays for education on the basis of student attendance. And (as a few people noted) the more we all complain about how screwed up the school district is, the more parents who can afford private schools decide they don't want to send their kids to a screwed-up public school district, and the more that happens, the fewer students the state pays for in San Francisco, the tighter the money gets, and the harder it is to run good schools.

So a couple of parents suggested, with good reason, that the public schools could do a much better job of marketing themselves; truth is, some of us (myself included) absolutely love the public schools our kids attend. And then Mark Sanchez, a school board member who voted against all the closures, made an excellent point:

We have a $400,000-a-year public relations office in the school district, he said – and we're just not doing that kind of public relations.

In fact, what the district's PR office has been doing for the past few years is hyping outgoing superintendent Arlene Ackerman and desperately trying to shut up her critics. The PR staff has been defensive, sometimes hostile, to the press and almost never forthcoming with information. And that didn't do much of anything to improve public perception of the schools.

It's funny: When Ray Cortines was school superintendent, I don't think he even had a PR office. He took calls from the press and the public himself. In fact, if you called district headquarters at 7 a.m., he was often the only one there – and instead of letting the phone go to an answering machine, he'd pick it up himself and deal with whoever the caller might be.

For $400K, you could hire a lot of teachers. Or you could really try to market the public schools. Talk about a waste of money.

In other news, the California attorney general, Bill Lockyer, signed off on the New Times-Village Voice Media merger Feb. 6. In a terse statement, he announced he will "not be taking any enforcement action against the merger at this time." So the biggest merger in alternative press history, a deal that will severely damage competition industry-wide, particularly in California, where there are 23 alt-weeklies, has rolled on through with no interference from any government regulator. The Bush Justice Department – to nobody's surprise – says an anticompetitive merger is just fine, the Republican attorney general of Ohio rolls right along, and then California's Democratic AG joins the chains-are-us party.

And what do you know: On Feb. 7th, Just one week after Mike Lacey, the New Times executive editor, stormed into the offices of the Village Voice and announced that some changes were coming, Ward Harkavy, who wrote the Bush Beat blog, announced that management had cancelled it.

So no more Bush Beat at Mike Lacey's Village Voice. Here we go.