Source: I know many families with kids in various private schools in SF, and not one of them had uninterrupted in-person learning throughout the pandemic.
That said, SF public schools were slower to reopen to in-person learning than private schools, which seems to me to have mostly been due to pushback by the SFUSD teacher’s union (who, imvho, responded to this crisis poorly).
> During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools.
This is patently false. All of the private schools in SF that I’m aware of switched to remote learning from March 2020 to the end of that school year, and many had “hybrid” models (e.g. alternating one week in-person, one week remote) when they resumed in August / September.
Like you, my source is having been there and experienced it: my cousins, who were in private school, were quickly able to go back to in-person instruction; my sister, who was in public school, was not (until she switched).
Kids without the financial resources to do that just lost out.
Here's an NYT article from Nov 4, 2020, headline "In San Francisco, Closed Public Schools, Open Private Schools":
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/us/san-francisco-closed-p...
Here's an SFUSD memo six months later announcing the partial return of some kids to in-person learning:
https://www.sfusd.edu/covid-19-response-updates-and-resource...
Sure I'm dunking on SF city gov, because it deserves it! Its citizens are uniquely poorly served, especially its poorer citizens, in a city that is one of wealthiest on earth.
Recall that SF isn’t that big a city - only 800,000 people (and with a low %age of children to boot) - so there aren’t that many schools in the city.
[edit] it’s also the case that the only variation in response was on the private school side - SFUSD took a monolithic approach to their schools (which are the greatest in number and have most of the students in the city)
This continued long after it was clear that (a) in person schooling was not a significant risk and (b) remote education was not adequate. (You're basically insane if you think sitting on videochat hours a day, with no in-person contact with other children, is in any way a healthy lifestyle for an elementary-school aged kid.)
This was SF policy, not state policy!
It was just a totally fucked, unafir situation: only those w/ enough cash to afford private education could get even the most minimal level of quality education for their kids.
Besides failing at the basic public service of educating children, SF also struggles with things like providing safe, sanitary streets and public transit. All this while having a huge budget.
Here's a memory that has stuck with me, from just before the pandemic started:
A man lying on the sidwalk at the intersection of Colombus and Broadway, covered in his own shit, calling out, "help me, call an ambulance, help me". A constant stream of people, passing by, doing nothing.
That's SF in a nutshell: people are in a sort of state of denial about the condition of their city. Sure, there are lots of great things, and you can ignore the badness and pretend it's not happening, but it's there.
(Or at least it was when I was there, from 2011-2021.)
I hope they figure it out and improve things! It's truly a geographically blessed area. And I've still got a bunch of family there.