San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
To school board, gay dad isn’t diverse enough
A gay dad volunteers for one of eight open slots on a parent committee that advises the school board. All of the 10 current members are straight moms. Three are white. Three are Latina. Two are Black. One is Tongan. They all want the dad to join them.
The seven school board members talk for two hours about whether the dad brings enough diversity. Yes, he’d be the only man. And the only LGBTQ representative. But he’d be the fourth white person in a district where 15% of students are white.
The gay dad never utters a single word. The board members do not ask the dad a single question before declining to approve him for the committee. They say they’ll consider allowing him to volunteer if he comes back with a slate of more diverse candidates, ideally including an Arab parent, a Native American parent, a Vietnamese parent and a Chinese parent who doesn’t speak English.
Was this an episode of “Portlandia,” the TV satire about liberalism gone to ludicrous extremes? No, it was just another Tuesday night at the San Francisco Board of Education, a group that would provide great entertainment if the consequences weren’t so serious.
Parents teach their children to treat everyone fairly. To not
be rude. To listen more than speak. To do research before forming opinions. To not waste other people’s time. To focus on what’s important. To acknowledge mistakes. It’s too bad school board members haven’t learned these lessons over the past dreadful year of distance learning for the more than 52,000 children in their charge.
“What’s wrong with these people? They’re committing political malpractice and educational malpractice seemingly at every meeting,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, a gay man who represents the Castro and said he’s heard repeatedly about gay students in city schools facing bullying and discrimination. “But we don’t want someone queer with an actual seat at the table?”
The Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club slammed the board Friday for its “misguided fumbling towards a goal of diversity.”
The person who was perhaps the most stunned was Seth Brenzel, the gay dad whose daughter is a fourthgrader at Glen Park Elementary. “At any moment, I expected a commissioner to address me,” he said, “because there I was.”
Knowing his face was beamed live across the city on Zoom, Brenzel kept a neutral expression as the board discussed his race, gender and sexual orientation — and whether they were a worthy mix for the Parent Advisory Council.
“I thought maybe somebody would ask me a question. Like, ‘Hey, Seth, why do you want to be a member of the PAC?’ Or, ‘Hey, Seth, can you tell me about your volunteering in the district?’ ” he said. “None of that happened.”
Brenzel, 48, lives in Bernal
Heights with his husband, a child psychologist, and their daughter. He’s the executive director of the Walden School, a nonprofit that runs music education camps, and he sings tenor for the San Francisco Symphony. He’s the copresident of the parentteacher organization at his daughter’s school.
Seems like a topnotch candidate for a volunteer position. Especially since, as PAC coordinator Michelle JacquesMenegaz explained, recruiting parents during the pandemic has been next to impossible. She’s asked the school board repeatedly to help her find parents from underrepresented backgrounds, and they haven’t.
She knew Brenzel’s advocacy for reopening schools safely might be an issue. But any normal board would have at least tabled the appointment, quietly, rather than publicly humiliate him for two hours, said PAC chair Naomi Laguana. After all, hundreds of parents were waiting to speak about opening schools, a topic that, as usual, didn’t come up for seven hours.
“There were 500 parents along for this rollercoaster ride of insanity, and I felt responsible,” said Laguana, who had recruited Brenzel.
But the confounding move was just the latest by a school board that seems to specialize in them. I’d like to get their side of the story, but Commissioners Gabriela Lopez, Alison Collins, Mark Sanchez, Matt Alexander and Kevine Boggess didn’t return requests for interviews. Commissioner Faauuga Moliga couldn’t be reached.
Asked whether she regretted what happened Tuesday, Commissioner Jenny Lam said, “It’s more about recognizing that I’m clearly stating my support for Seth as a candidate. The next step is bringing together his candidacy along with additional candidates for the slate for the PAC. I’m focused on those next steps.”
She acknowledged that the meetings need to be better structured and that the board needs to be clearer that safely opening schools is its top priority.
That has not always been evident over the past year.
There was the stripping of 44 names — including Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein — from schools, an important pursuit in general that became an international punch line with the revelation that the volunteer committee leaned on Wikipedia for research and made blatant mistakes.
Then came a crucial discussion about racism at Lowell High, known as a feeder school for top universities, and whether to drop the meritbased admissions system in favor of a lottery. The board approved the change Tuesday, but only after limiting opponents to 30 minutes, while giving supporters far more time — an apparent violation of the Brown Act, which dictates how government meetings must be run.
Before the vote, Collins blasted high school journalists at the Lowell on Twitter for sharing a petition to keep the current admissions system
and for not covering a racist incident at the school. Neither accusation was true. Collins apologized but never explained why she was publicly slamming teenagers in the first place.
These lapses, tarnishing necessary discussions about race and equity, continue as the school board fails to show much empathy for parents and kids devastated by a year of distance learning with no clear end in sight.
School district data shows that Black, Latino and Asian students are falling behind their white counterparts. But Lopez told the Chronicle, for a story about students’ learning loss, “They are learning more about their families and their culture, spending more time with each other.”
In texts obtained by a parent through a public records request and shared with me, Collins seemed to dismiss women’s concerns about supervising their children’s learning while working full time. She texted Superintendent Vince Matthews, “Professional moms are losing it right now. They want to hear something they want to hear.”
Jinan Mahmoud is Arab and Palestinian, and her son’s father is Black. Her son, Mustafa, is a thirdgrader who struggles to focus on Zoom school. She quit her job as a child care provider to stay home with him, then hired a therapist when she grew concerned about his mental health.
For now, the single mom is getting by with money from three other families whose children she supervises. She said she’s frustrated by endless hours of conversation at the school board that result in no concrete change for her son.
“A lot of talk, but no action doesn’t get anyone anywhere,” she said. “Everyone I know has been applying to private schools, but not everyone has that option. I certainly don’t. Where does that leave my son?”
Responding to the disconnect between the board’s distracted focus and the needs of families, city Supervisor Hillary Ronen is proposing two changes. She wants to dissolve a joint committee of the supervisors and the school board, creating instead a supervisors committee focused on children’s issues. She also plans to introduce a Charter amendment that would allow voters in districts to elect school board members, arguing that citywide votes for each seat mean no board members are responsible for particular schools and those families’ concerns.
Though she has no direct control over the school district, Ronen said she’s been working almost full time on trying to get schools open. “I do wish that during this time the school board had that singular focus and attention on reopening the schools instead of considering other controversial items,” she said.
Like humiliating a dad who just wants to volunteer. Asked whether he’d ever run for school board, Brenzel gave a flat no.
He does have another offer, though. “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” wants him as a guest. Because when it comes to political comedy, the school board is pure gold.