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VY: Yeah, what did you do after that?

MM: Oh. I came back to the school district and you know when you have a certain amount of administrative skills, I worked with the budget department because they were doing a review and taking the city, that the school district and the city were mixed in as one general accounting. But you couldn't know how much money you had in your department, or any department, under their system. So that was removed, and I helped make a book that described each department, what they did, how many people they were in, how money they got, so you could get a profile of the school district that never existed before. It was fascinating. And I could see, by interviewing some of the administrators, they had no budget capability. They did not know how to fill in the form. So I said in an interview, "What is the purpose of your department?" They've never thought of putting it in a small form so you could end up with this binder about all the departments and all the money. They just worked, they got the job but nobody was overlooking what they should do or would do or whatever. It was quite an education, and I loved it.

VY: It's a good thing, you must be very detail oriented and very organized. It's interesting to hear you talking about these things, this is all pre-internet.

MM: Well, you know, these schools were given a gift. The government was trying to integrate throughout the United States. So we had a court order, (...) we had to integrate San Francisco. And because there was so much money there, and I could read what these government rules were, I could write a proposal for four million dollars and get it. So it was... can you imagine the fun of saying, all right, we have four million dollars we can ask for. Now, what is it that you think you could do to integrate your school better if you had all the money you wanted? Some schools had good ideas. Like there was a school, James Denman, had a wonderful theater that had gone to ruin. They had shops that didn't work anymore. They stopped having shops and sewing and everything, they got rid of that. So I went in and I wrote a grant so that they can have the curtains fixed, the sound system fixed. They could get their instruments up and running, we could hire a music teacher, and we could take those shops and make them dance floors, because they were all wooden floors, and put mirrors along the sides. And you know, now that's going to be a lot of money. But that would bring students who were interested in arts, would come to that school. Because you have invested in that, and then students of all different races would come together.

So after integration started, I was able to go out, so as (an administrator to) see (if) the first day of school was running smoothly. So I'd go in this junior high and I'll look at it, and I'd see all these groups. Before, there'd be a Black group, Asian group, and a white group. And all of a sudden I went, and I noticed an integrated group (and another) integrated group. I said, "How was it that you know each other?" "Oh, we went to the same elementary school." So it was what we were doing in the past, obviously, having segregated schools before they got to junior high. And that shows what you can do. Unfortunately, San Francisco Unified is resegregated. We used to have 92,000 students in their school, we now have 52,000. And we used to have fewer newcomers to this country. Now fifty-two percent of our students now have a home language other than English. So our complexion of the school district has changed. And we have newcomer schools for high school students that my Servas visitors who were teachers came and looked at, she said, "We couldn't do that in our country." Like in Germany, they had a lot of Turkish workers and they don't have one Turkish book in their library, that would not go here. And then we have, you know, bilingual classes that are for newcomers but of all different languages. So you're working with people who don't, can't even talk to each other. So we're much more ahead and the (visiting) teachers love to see that, to see what's possible. They've read about it but they didn't know how it would look in the school, and they just were fascinated.

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