Rachel Norton is a former journalist who has served on the San Francisco Board of Education since 2009. She served on the SFUSD Community Advisory Committee for Special Education and is also an active member of Parents for Public Schools. I attended San Francisco public schools through 8th grade and was eager to hear her perspective.
What made you decide to first run for school board?
I have two daughters who attended SFUSD schools (both graduated from George Washington HS). I always knew I wanted to send my daughters to public schools and from the time they were in preschool I got involved with Parents for Public Schools and started paying attention to school board politics.
My older daughter has autism, so from the time she entered Kindergarten I started volunteering with a group of other parents of students with disabilities, to help support parents through the IEP process and to help kids get the services they need. I became aware that so many kids were not getting what they needed, and that parents who were good advocates for their kids tended to get more help than those who were not educated, or didn’t speak English. I also noted that students with disabilities in SFUSD are not doing well academically – significant because the vast majority of our students with disabilities are not cognitively impaired. With the right support and instruction, most of our kids with disabilities could be doing much better in school than they are currently.
I was particularly upset when I saw how hard the district made it for students to be fully mainstreamed (also known as “full inclusion”) in many schools. In many schools, the only option for a student like my daughter was a segregated Special Day classroom. I thought this was wrong, and illegal.
Through my advocacy activities, I also saw that many members of the school board, and district administrators, did not understand what students with disabilities and their families were going through. In some cases, families were treated with contempt or given misinformation about their child’s rights. One example: the term “encroachment” was widely used as a way to describe how special education affected the budget. I wrote about my objections to that term here: https://rachelnorton.com/2009/09/09/what-does-encroachment-mean/
So, I decided to run for school board, because I believed (and still do believe) that our students with disabilities needed an advocate on the Board of Education. Running for office for the first time was the most difficult thing I have ever done but it was worth it.
Have we made progress in serving kids who need special education services? How well do we serve kids who are on the autism spectrum?
Since I was elected to the Board in 2008, I’ve worked hard to change the Special Education conversation from “encroachment” and “adversarial” to “investment” and “collaboration.” Decades of under-funding have left our system under tremendous stress, and it has been challenging to build trust between administrators and parents, who are supposed to be acting together as equal partners in what is best for a particular child.
The district has made progress: the special education department has been entirely restructured and has implemented a strategic plan based on the findings of an independent review of our special education strengths and practices. Every school in SFUSD is now an inclusive school — something that seemed impossible to accomplish when I first ran. I feel far more hopeful about the future for students with disabilities in SFUSD than I did when I first ran for the Board in 2008.
Where do we go from here? Continue supporting our educators to build their skills to differentiate for a broader range of learning styles. Continue to invest in Behavioral Response to Intervention — a way to quickly identify and support students with behavioral problems so that they do not disrupt their own learning and that of other students. When implemented correctly, RTI can reduce the number of children referred to special education. Finally, build more robust recruiting pathways to increase the number of credentialed special education teachers in the district, because this is an area of perennial need.
What advice would you give your 14-year old self?
Care a lot less what other people think! Don’t be nervous to try new things that interest you, even if you feel silly or fail at first.
Thank you, Rachel!
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