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By Jill Tucker
San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco’s schoolyards have long been off-limits on the weekends and holidays, most with large padlocks and chain-link fences that keep families out.
The city and school district have decided to change that, announcing a pilot program Monday that would allow weekend access at up to 14 school playgrounds.
The idea sounds simple enough: Open the gates, let kids in, and then shut the gates at the end of the day.
But actually putting that into practice is not so easy.
Who will open the gates and who will close them? Who will empty the trash? Who will clean up graffiti? What happens if something gets broken? And what if someone sues after a fall off the monkey bars?
It took the city and district staff months to hammer out the details and agree to the division of labor and costs. The city is taking on nearly all financial and legal responsibility, although the school district will provide the trash cans.
"Nothing is more frustrating for me than a kid with a basketball standing outside a playground that’s locked," Mayor Gavin Newsom said Monday at an event to announce the program. "This kid is going to sit around with nothing to do. That’s wrong."
City staff said the pilot schools likely will start opening on weekends in early November.
While the program doesn’t require approval by school board members or supervisors, both boards are expected to introduce measures to establish their public support, city and district officials said.
School board member Hydra Mendoza, who is also Newsom’s education adviser, said she taught her children to ride a bike at Fairmont Elementary on weekends, although she never had official permission to be there.
Officially opening the schools will create a community center and show residents some positive attributes of the public schools, perhaps luring them to enroll instead of leaving the city, Mendoza said.
The pilot schools haven’t been chosen yet. That process probably won’t go smoothly, either.
At Dianne Feinstein Elementary School, where city and district officials made the announcement, parents eyed Newsom warily, questioning the logic of allowing access to carefully tended school gardens and clean playgrounds.
They noted that a city park about a block away had been recently "torched" and tagged with graffiti.
"Our yard looks like this because of the parents here," said Debbi Masterson, whose fourth-grade child attends the school with patches of greenery and a mural along the back wall.
Trampled plants and graffiti-tagged slides and swings would be at the very least "disheartening," she said.
Part of the agreement includes keeping the school restrooms closed. While that means the bathrooms will stay as clean as they were on Fridays, it could create another distasteful problem on the playgrounds, parents said.
Newsom said the city’s Recreation and Park Department staff will monitor the schools to make sure they are clean and in good repair each week. If the program doesn’t work, it will be ended, the mayor said.
"We’ll be back where we started," Newsom said.
District officials said school staff will also check on the pilot schools to make sure there are no problems.
"You worry about what’s going to be there on Monday," Superintendent Carlos Garcia said.
Garcia fully expects some problems now and again, but the effort will be worth it, he said.
"It may be a little inconvenient on the adults," Garcia said. "But it is something that’s centered on children."
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