A San Francisco sixth-grader was enrolled at a public center college however by no means confirmed up. She acquired A’s anyway

Lila Nelson usually loves getting report cards for her high-achieving daughter, Miriam, but the transcripts from San Francisco’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School giving the 12-year-old girl some A’s didn’t make her proud. They made her confused and angry.

Nelson, a single mom in the Bayview, pulled Miriam out of the public school district after fifth grade and scored a financial aid package at a parochial school where her bright sixth-grader is thriving. How could her daughter get A’s at a middle school she’s never attended?

But what I thought would be yet one more column about governmental ineptitude, San Francisco’s specialty, turned into something deeper: a window into one of the most difficult and stressful academic years in decades.

A teacher shortage, a dearth of substitutes, sinking staff morale, a never-ending pandemic, a budget crisis, incessant politics and kids struggling in the wake of distance learning have contributed to a hugely challenging school climate. And one with so many cracks, it’s possible for a girl who never showed up for sixth grade to fall through them.

“We’ve never had a situation like this. Never,” Michael Essien, Martin Luther King’s principal, said of Miriam’s report cards. “Just to be clear, it’s still not an excuse. That means at some point in the system, we failed at our jobs at the school site with taking basic steps and doing our due diligence.”

Principal Michael Essien is the last one out the door at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in San Francisco. “This is the perfect storm of everything,” he says. “This year has been insane.”

Felix Uribe/Special to The Chronicle

Essien, a popular and respected educator for 30 years including nine as principal at Martin Luther King and the president of the principals union, said the 2021-22 school year has been by far the most difficult of his career, and the demands placed on his staff have been huge.

“This is the perfect storm of everything. This year has been insane,” he said in a wide-ranging interview in which he sounded exhausted.

The report card saga began in the fall. Miriam attended a public school through fifth grade, but her mother saw her spark and love of learning vanish during dull, never-ending Zoom school. She opted to move her to a parochial school for sixth grade and didn’t enter the San Francisco Unified School District middle school lottery.

Miriam received a placement anyway, which a district spokesperson said is normal and intended to help parents who accidentally miss the deadline. When Nelson kept getting daily robocalls announcing her daughter was absent from a middle school she wasn’t attending, she spoke to two people at the school about the mix-up. They said they’d sort it out.

But the calls kept coming, and then the report cards did too. Her first progress report showed Miriam getting A’s in study skills and social studies, a C in physical education and “pass” or “no mark issued” in the rest. She received full credits for every class except science. By the end of the semester, she was still getting an A in social studies and had boosted her grade in physical education to an A. The rest were F’s or “pass.”

Her absences varied by class from 51 to 82 even though she’d been absent every day. Nelson said nobody from the school or central office ever called to ask why Miriam wasn’t there.

Principal Michael Essien talks with staff in 2016.

Connor Radnovich/The Chronicle 2016

Nelson, who is Black, said district officials say they “care so much about the education of Black students and care about the wellness of Black families, but you’re not really connected to the students or the families. You can’t possibly be. You’re not connected to my family.”

She said it made her wonder whether the school district with a longstanding academic achievement gap between Black students and their white and Asian counterparts was paying full attention to other Black students’ academic and social needs if they didn’t even notice her daughter was missing.

As for Miriam, she loves her new parochial school.

“She’s completely back to her old self,” Nelson said.

The year has been much harder at Martin Luther King. Seventy-one percent of its kids at the school, in the Portola neighborhood but serving kids throughout the city’s southeast sector, are from low-income families, and 28% are learning English. Its student population is almost entirely children of color.

Essien said enrollment before the pandemic hovered around 450 students. This year, he said, it dropped to 386 students, and many aren’t showing up. No-shows have been a problem all year, but got worse during the omicron surge.

“We’re not even getting 85% attendance,” he said. “There are times when we’ve had in excess of 100 children absent.”

He said he doesn’t know all the reasons that kids aren’t attending, but that parents’ concerns about exposure to the coronavirus is a big one. Teachers have also been out in big numbers all year because of concerns about their own health, potentially spreading the virus to vulnerable family members or simply feeling overwhelmed, he said. Some positions he posted no received applicants.

There are so few substitutes available, every adult in the building is filling in, as are some administrators from the central office.

Essien said the school has long centered on project-based learning, but there’s no time for teachers to collaborate and prepare for their classes, frustrating him and his staff. Much of his own time is spent contact tracing when teachers or kids get sick.

Essien said one huge help would be the health department taking over contact tracing and other elements of dealing with the coronavirus so teachers and principals can “return to a full-time focus” on educating students.

The kids, too, are struggling. Eighth-graders arrived in the fall not having been inside a school building since they were in sixth grade. There’s learning loss for sure, Essien said, but he’s more concerned about the social and emotional effects of such a long period of isolation.

“Even the best distance learning that was happening was not good for kids,” he said, noting that some students’ social skills have slipped notably and they struggled to work with each other or even ask their teachers questions.

As for Miriam’s report card, Essien said the social studies teacher has been absent all year for personal reasons, and the kids have had a string of fill-in teachers. Because of that, the school gave everyone in the class an A — including Miriam.

“It was just based on kids who’ve not had a teacher all year not receiving failing grades,” he said.

Principal Michael Essien, the last one out the door at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, spends much of his time contact tracing.

Felix Uribe / Special to The Chronicle

Only in the past few days did candidates emerge as long-term substitutes for the social studies teacher. He said he’s not sure why her PE teacher gave her an A. He said he checked with all her supposed teachers, and they all said they’d never seen her.

Essien said that when an enrolled student doesn’t show up, the school reports the absences to the central office, which should drop the kid from its computer system. Apparently that didn’t happen with Miriam. He said that if a child has attended the school and then stops coming, the teachers often go to great lengths to check in — sometimes even driving to the families’ homes.

Laura Dudnick, a school district spokesperson, said of Miriam’s report cards, “This is the first time something like this has come to our attention.” As for Essien’s laments about the school year, Dudnick said the district “offers numerous tools” to help kids struggling with the effects of the pandemic, including expanded mental health services. She said the district is trying to recruit new substitutes and pay them better to help cope with the teacher shortage.

Essien said the school district is consumed with politics and infighting among adults and not focused on children. For example, the school board voted in 2020 to cut ties with the Police Department, a vote he said his families opposed.

Essien said a police officer worked closely with Martin Luther King students, taking them camping and even writing a play about bullying they were about to perform before schools shut down in March 2020. Now that relationship has been severed.

Overall, he said, the focus in the city and the school district has veered off course and become “highly political” at the expense of kids.

“It’s heartbreaking to see what is happening in SFUSD right now,” he said. “It’s adult stuff. It’s one thing to argue for the needs of children, and it’s another thing to meet the needs of children. We’re not holding the conversation around meeting the needs of children.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf