School board suspends plan to rename schools

» The school board voted Tuesday night to formally suspended a plan to rename 44 schools as part of a response to racial justice concerns.

The board, which convened on Zoom, voted unanimously to reverse its much-criticized decision to strip the names of a third of San Francisco’s public schools, which it said honored figures linked to racism, sexism and other injustices. Among them were schools named for presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, writer Robert Louis Stevenson and Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere. A school named for longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein was on the list as well.

Tuesday’s 6-0 decision means that the school board is rescinding its vote from January and will revisit the matter after all students have returned full time to in-person learning. It sets no specific timetable.

Historian Harold Holzer called the school board’s first stab at renaming an “over correction.” Holzer disagrees with deleting Abraham Lincoln’s name from a high school, which the San Francisco committee said was due to the treatment of Native Americans during his administration.

“I know people want to be inspired and want not to be worshipping false idols,” said Holzer, a Lincoln Scholar and director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House of Public Policy Institute. “But, honestly, to me there is still no better example of the American story at it’s highest level of idealism than Abraham Lincoln.”