When she first attended City College of San Francisco (CCSF) in 2002, Shanell Williams, who had just come out of the foster care and drug court system, says she wasn’t fully prepared to succeed academically. She ended up dropping out of school to work full time and to get her own place.
Eight years later, Williams returned to CCSF. She joined the Guardian Scholars program, which supports students who have been in foster care, majored in urban studies and got involved in student government, becoming president of the student council at Ocean Campus and the student trustee. Next year, she plans to transfer to the University of California at Berkeley or to Stanford University.
“It’s completely changed my life,” Williams said about CCSF. “I wouldn’t have a real pathway without it. As someone who went to a continuation school, I didn’t really get all the normal high school requirements and with City College, I was able to come back after working for many years.”
CCSF has been a welcoming place for her, Williams says, and she wants to make sure the school is there for other working-class students. So on July 9, she joined hundreds of protestors in front of the Department of Education in downtown San Francisco. They were asking the department to reverse the decision of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) to revoke CCSF’s accreditation on July 31, 2014.
The ACCJC put CCSF, the largest community college in the state with 85,000 students, on its most severe sanction, “show cause,” last July, giving the college until March to work on 14 recommendations, many having to do with finances and governance. In a July 3 letter to CCSF Interim Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman, ACCJC President Barbara Beno said the school had not fully addressed them. The college plans to appeal the decision.
Rafael Mandelman, one of the seven trustees on CCSF’s board, said he and others had put in thousands of hours working to meet the standards and had been commended by the visiting team on their efforts.
“It was stunning,” Mandelman said about the decision. “I couldn’t believe [that despite] what the folks at City College had done, [ACCJC] still decided to revoke accreditation. If you look at the visitors’ report, over and over they say what great progress we made. ”
Jennifer Aries, a communication consultant for CCSF, says progress has been made — but there’s still more to do.
