Three San Francisco school board members may be recalled shortly, as the same voter focus on education that helped elect a Republican governor in Virginia earlier this month finds an outlet on the other side of the country.
Recall votes will be held in February for School Board President Gabriela López, as well as commissioners Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga. Supporters of the recall argue that the board focused too much on social justice issues during the Covid-19 outbreak and not enough on terminating one of the nation's longest suspensions of in-person learning.
Opponents have attempted to portray the recall, which has become one of the most heated political battles in this highly liberal city in recent years, as being led by right-wing Republicans. Democrat Mayor London Breed has backed it.
The city of San Francisco last held a recall election in 1983, when then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who is now a senator from California, won with 81 percent of the vote.
Efforts to recall school board members are increasing across the country, reflecting voter dissatisfaction with how long schools were closed during the pandemic, masking and testing policies, and conservative criticism of curricula inspired by critical race theory.
According to Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform who researches recall elections, more than 240 recalls have been filed against school board members in 2021, roughly three times the amount filed the previous year.
In the last year, the San Francisco Board of Education has been chastised on several fronts. After one of the country's longest periods of online-only instruction, its almost 50,000 pupils began returning to the classroom this past April.
Furthermore, decreased enrollment has contributed to a $125 million budget gap, and the San Francisco Unified School District has suggested eliminating hundreds of jobs in order to avoid a state takeover. The San Francisco Unified School District drew national attention when it pushed an initiative to remove the names of historic figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Sen. Feinstein from buildings for alleged ties to white supremacy and oppression, despite the fact that those campuses remained closed.
With the recall campaign looming, the board put the name issue on hold in February, stating that it would instead focus on reopening schools.
Siva Raj, a recall organizer whose children are in the fourth and tenth grades, said the renaming effort is one of numerous social justice topics that the board concentrated on while schools were closed. Board members also revised the admittance policies of an elite public high school in an attempt to diversity its student body and turned down a gay father who wanted to join a volunteer parent advisory board because he did not meet the criteria for a diverse member.
"We're attempting to elevate an educational system that has reached rock bottom and lift it to a higher level," Mr. Raj explained.
Ms. López stated that she attempted to speak for Latino and Black pupils who were concerned about the school reopening too soon due to the impact of Covid-19 on their neighborhoods.
"Every single day...everyone was on the ground attempting to reopen these schools," Ms. López added.
"If folks felt unseen throughout that time, I myself would just like to say we could have done better," Mr. Moliga wrote in an email.
Ms. Collins did not respond to a request for comment, but in a recent interview, she stated that she was happy of the board's efforts. "Our number one objective was to open schools safely, not to open schools at any cost," she told KQED radio.
The Feb. 15 election will ask voters whether each of the commissioners should be recalled. If a majority votes in favor, that member will be recalled, and Ms. Breed will appoint a replacement for the balance of their term, which expires in January 2023.
The other four members of the school board had not been in office long enough to be eligible for recall when proponents began their campaign.
According to a February poll conducted by independent pollster EMC Research, 60% of San Francisco voters—and 69% of the city's public school parents—support recalling the school board members. More than 60% of those questioned in May had a negative opinion of the San Francisco Board of Education, compared to 33% a year earlier.
Efrain Barrera, a charity executive with two children in SFUSD schools, said he opposes the recall because he feels it is primarily pushed by wealthy parents. He stated that the school board has worked hard to improve outcomes, particularly for Latino kids.
"When people were yelling and screaming for schools to reopen at board meetings, the fact was that many of these families who were essential employees weren't," Mr. Barrera said.
Christine Pelosi, the daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the mother of a seventh-grader in the district, said she is unsure about the recall but wants to hear the school board members admit they failed pupils.
"A lot of parents felt terribly unheard," she said, "and to be told that our worries are just because we're not politically correct or that we're being partisan or elitist does a disservice to what's actually occurring here."
David Thompson has served as the recall campaign's unofficial mascot as "Gaybraham Lincoln," a persona who wears a rainbow beard, tie-dye faux fur, and silver pleather pants at campaign rallies in a spoof of the school renaming issue.
"This isn't about being anti-woke," said Mr. Thompson, whose 10-year-old son is Black and attended a mostly Latino school in the Mission neighborhood until late last year. "It's basically waking up to the truth that the board has an ideological goal that is utterly at odds with the majority of San Franciscans."
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