As Sheriff, I had been working for years to get certified education programs established for San Francisco County Jail prisoners. The vast majority of prisoners did not graduate from high school, and without a high school diploma on their resume, prospects for lawful employment were slim. We made many attempts to set up jail educational programs: partnering with the local community college, partnering with a community college on the Peninsula, and we even tried getting classes scheduled through the Unified School District.
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“For about nine years we partnered with Milpitas Adult Education providing around 10 classes to the prisoners in three of our jails, but then they gave us notice they had to move on.
“Post 9/11 education budgets took it on the chin, local government budgets were getting slashed left and that’s when Milpitas came to me and said look we need to go back to our county because the State is cutting our budget. We will give you another year and the good news is we will transfer the ADA funding (which was worth around $700K) to the next LEA (local education agency) that you get to provide education for your population.
“I went to around to seven LEAs-- SF State; the San Francisco Unified School District (where Superintendent Arlene Akerman’s right hand woman literally said ‘You want us to do what?! Go to the jail and teach the adults? We failed them already, we aren’t going to do that again.’); San Mateo adult education; Alameda County; Contra Costa County; and Skyline College. They all said ‘no,’ even though we had almost $750,000 dollars committed to funding.”
There were minor successes here and there, but nothing that was very comprehensive or that we could count on returning from year to year. Then, in 2000, my daughter Samantha and her friends were all applying to high schools in San Francisco. I asked her where her best friend, Emmy, was going and she said, “Well, Emmy’s sister goes to Leadership High, but I think Emmy wants to go to Lick.”
I had never even heard of Leadership High School and having campaigned throughout the City for 20 years I was pretty familiar with all of the high schools. As it turned out, Leadership High School was a “charter school,” one of the first San Francisco Charter High Schools approved by the School District. I had no idea what a Charter school was.
I met with Sunny and Michael Marcum to discuss our options and, based on my conversation with my daughter, I mentioned that there was a new type of school being approved in San Francisco-- charter schools. I asked Sunny to make some calls to find out whether this was a potential path. Sunny found out there was a California Charter School Association in Sacramento and that began the journey.
Sunny Schwartz is a member of the Five Keys Board of Directors and a long time advocate of restorative justice in jails.
"Gary came to my office and we gave him a tour of County Jail 7, then showed him our RSVP program, and also our successful Roads to Recovery Program and Gary was moved and determined to help. He put me in touch with charter school consultants, and we pulled together a rag tag group of deputies, educators, a few Sheriff’s civilians and began meeting weekly, daily, hourly. And a year later we got a unanimous vote of approval from the SFUSD school board to set up a county jail charter school.”
Among the many considerations in establishing the jail charter school, giving it a name was one of the biggest obvious needs. We thought of naming it after a famous educator or civil rights leader, but decided all the “good names” were taken, and we didn’t want to be confused with some other school with the same name. Or maybe we were also concerned about their reaction if they were somehow confused with us.
After kicking around many possibilities, I came up with the concept of “The Five Keys Charter School.” I thought one essential goal of the school should be to help prisoners avoid coming back to jail. The root of the idea for the school’s name was based on my prior experience as a lawyer who represented prisoners.
Before I was elected Sheriff I was an attorney who helped county jail prisoners with their civil legal matters. I wasn’t a public defender or a defense lawyer; I was more a professional jailhouse lawyer. I started out as the staff lawyer for the Sheriff’s Department’s rehabilitation programs, which morphed into a Legal Services practice with work study students as my assistants.
Prisoners have a lot of legal problems and usually the most important one is how to get out of jail, legally. As I interviewed prisoners in the county jail I would come across people who had jobs waiting or who had been accepted to City College but couldn’t take advantage of the opportunity. Prisoners who were serving a sentence (as opposed to those in jail awaiting resolution of their charges) generally remain under the jurisdiction of the sentencing judge. I was often asked by prisoners to “go see the judge” to see if their sentence could be “modified” to allow early release.
The first few times I approached judges with this request, I would either be turned away immediately, or be peppered with questions about what was going to happen if the man or woman was released from jail: Where will they live? How will they support themselves? What are they doing to change their lives? It wasn’t enough that the person got accepted into school or had a job offer. There were other basic considerations the judge wanted to be assured of before cutting a prisoner’s sentence short.
After a few failed starts, I developed a “modification formula” that became successful with judges more times than not.
I would work with the prisoner to put together a “package” that addressed the five most common concerns: Where would they live? How would they support themselves? What would they do about their substance abuse issues? What would they be doing to better their lives? This package became the key to open the jail door.
This jail sentence modification package also became the basis for the Five Keys Charter School’s name: Education. Employment. Recovery. Family. Community.
Education and employment are pretty self-explanatory. You need the education to gain employment and you need employment to support yourself.
Recovery was also an important component. Close to 50% of the people in jail at the time were there on drug charges and many others were there for property crimes which were theft crimes committed to get the money to buy drugs.
The person also needed to have a place to live. Very often that would be with a family member or an extended family member. Most prisoners cannot afford to rent a place themselves upon release from jail. Reunification with family not only provided resources, but is also important for moral support and encouragement. It’s hard to make it on your own after being in jail.
The last “key” was a bit more general. I had seen so many men and women look for support upon release and find it primarily from their neighborhood church. This was particularly true in the African American community. But, in naming the school, I did not want “church” or “religion” to be part of its identity. Religious connections to a school attract many students, but also are a turn off for many. I was in the office late one evening kicking these ideas around and went into Michael Marcum’s office to ask his help. He immediately suggested “community” as the right word for a wider description of the kind of post release support that helped so many people.
And there it was: The Five Keys.
Of course, besides the individual principles that the name embodied I didn’t miss the jailhouse key reference in literally being able to get people out of custody.
I also liked the fact that the school’s name referenced the famous doo-wop group of the same name from the early 1950s. And how could any school be cooler than that?
