By Thomas K. Pendergast

The impact of California State education budget cuts may soon be felt by after-school programs throughout the City, including the Richmond Neighborhood Center at George Washington High School, five District 1 elementary and two middle schools. 

The Center’s usual budget of $153,000 from the state will be slashed by almost half, with $75,123 getting cut while leaving $77,877 in place.

Richmond Neighborhood Center’s Executive Director Michelle Cusano said current high school students are still dealing with the aftermath of SFUSD schools being closed for more than a year during the pandemic, so now they need after-school programs more than ever. 

“High schoolers are social beings. They want to be with their peers,” Cusano said. “So now, this generation of young folks is facing that and having to relearn these social things at such a key time in their lives, during their adolescent development, where that’s so important. And that’s what we provide in after-school programs. We provide a space where they can experiment with social things like learning how to advocate for themselves in a safe space after school.

“And we also provide the academic support they need,” she said. “We believe the district needs to prioritize this regardless of the funding that came down from the state. We believe this is a priority issue. If they prioritize this, I believe that they can find the money.”

Laura Dudnick, the school district’s interim communications director, said they are looking at ways to replace this money throughout the 11 affected high schools in the district. 

“SFUSD is working closely with school sites to lessen the fiscal impact of declining enrollment, including having eligible schools apply for restricted funding in order to preserve continuity in service provision for students who are furthest from access,” Dudnick said in an email. 

“What we would like to see is that they fill this with funding so those don’t get affected,” Cusano said. “The cuts for the district overall for high schools’ after-school (programs) is about $730,000, and we believe they can find that money in other ways.”

Bishoy Abdelshaid oversees programs for the Richmond Neighborhood Center, which serves about 900 of the approximately 2,000 students at George Washington High School. 

“We give pretty much about half the school some service, whether that be food and hygiene supplies, whether that be our programs like identity-based programs,” Abdelshaid said. “That could be case management. It could be employment services. Almost 50% of the student body gets served by us.” 

He noted that they have about five staff members serving the high school, not including himself, although they work at multiple school sites. 

“It’s going to take a lot to figure out what programs are we going to cut. I think that the immediate need is scaling back immensely on clubs that are after school,” he said. “Unfortunately, we have to figure out and really sacrifice, in terms of looking at some of the numbers, what are some of our clubs that really don’t serve a large number of students and really maybe have to make some tough decisions on those clubs.”

Abdelshaid said cutting after-school programs can have a domino effect; the fewer students they serve after school, the more it affects school-day relationships with the young people.

“We have 10th graders who spent most of middle school, if not all of it, at home,” he said. “Now they’re expected to be at a school with 2,000 kids and be able to be in a community with a diverse group of people with folks that they’re not necessarily typically engaged with at home. 

“Not to mention the intense burden that schools across the country have put on people in terms of this notion of during COVID youth fell behind in their educational journey and they’re having to catch up,” Abdelshaid said. “And so I think there’s so much pressure on young people coming out of lockdown to adhere to, so many things around catching up on literacy, in math fields, and reading-based skills that I think there is a mental and social exhaustion that’s coming with it.”

The school district, however, is not the only source of money. 

The San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families (DCYF) is a city department that contributes to the program as well. 

Last fiscal year, the DCYF contributed $193,000, although this money is spread out over all the Richmond District school sites with after-school programs, according to their online records data base. Exact figures for each site are not given. 

Maria Su, executive director of the DCYF, said they provide the “core funding for these programs and the school district supplements this funding.

“So, to the Richmond Neighborhood Center we allocate quite a large grant,” Su said. “We give a very large grant to the neighborhood center because they provide a lot of different things. They do everything from services to elementary school kids, to middle school kids, to high school kids.”

She said the program provides workforce development to help students get their first jobs, as well as tutoring or homework help. 

Su also sees recovery from the pandemic shutdowns as crucial for students. 

“When you isolate social beings, and children are very, very social, when you isolate social beings from interacting with their peers in social settings it does have a significant impact on their mental and emotional development,” she said. 

Aside from the social impacts, there is also learning loss.

“We have a formula on how to get back on track with learning loss. You can do intensive tutoring. You can do supports after school hours, supports during the summer months; it can get kids back on track,” Su said.

“What is really hard, and we don’t have a full formula for, is how to get kids emotionally and psychologically back on track. So, it’s a difficult and it’s a very individualistic strategy.

“If the child experiences isolation as very traumatic, they become stunted in their development because they’re struggling to figure out how to deal with that moment in time. So we need to help them work through what happened during isolation,” she said.