S. F. mayor says new effort to rename 44 schools is ‘ offensive’ in COVID crisis.
Mayor London Breed blasted a proposal Friday to force 44 San Francisco public schools to change their names, calling it an “offensive” waste of time, energy and resources from a district that still has no date to bring kids back to the classroom.
More than a third of the district’s 125 schools learned this week that they should work to come up with new names for their schools, which have been deemed “inappropriate” by the San Francisco School Names Advisory Committee for cultural, racial or historic reasons. The school board will likely vote on the proposal early next year.
Sites include those with names honoring deceased presidents — Lincoln, Washington, Madison and Jefferson — as well as dead generals and writers; and even a sitting politician is on the list: Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Breed said now is absolutely not the time for such an overhaul, especially as parents, students and teachers struggle with distance learning amid the pandemic. Instead, she said, the dis
trict should be sharply focused on bringing kids back to school — not an expensive endeavor that could cost each school tens of thousands of dollars.
“In the midst of this onceinacentury challenge, to hear that the district is focusing energy and resources on renaming schools — schools that they haven’t even opened — is offensive,” Breed said.
The proposal comes amid a national reckoning on the country’s history of racism and on which figures are honored and memorialized in public settings. School board President Mark Sanchez previously said he doesn’t think there “is ever going to be a time when people are ready for this.”
“Predictably people are going to be upset no matter when we do this,” he added.
Supporters say it’s not appropriate to send children to schools that honor slave owners and those who hurt native peoples, for example. Schools are also not required to participate in this process, according to the district.
Still, the mayor said the plan is an “offensive” blow to parents who have been juggling their own jobs and their children’s education, and to “our kids who are staring at screens day after day instead of learning and growing with their classmates and friends.”
Frustrated parents have been circulating a petition calling on the district to reopen the schools and criticizing the city for prioritizing opening gyms, bars, churches and salons instead. Some residents have questioned why the mayor and supervisors aren’t doing more to reopen the schools, though they have almost no say in the process. The district, with approval from the health department, has the ultimate authority to get students back in their seats.
Breed said “the achievement gap is widening as our public schools kids are falling further behind every single day.”
She touted the city’s efforts to plug the holes left by the district. City departments are running community hubs to help the most vulnerable students with supervised online learning.
“Look, I believe in equity,” she added. “But the fact that our kids aren’t in school is what’s driving inequity in our city. Not the name of a school.”
When asked if he would be open to changing the name of his school, Lope Yap Jr., vice president of the George Washington High School Alumni Association, said “never.”
“It is a historical academic campus,” he said.
Yap said he was frustrated at all of the dustups that have occurred in the district lately, from the controversy around covering a mural depicting slavery and Native American mistreatment to the recent fight over Lowell High School’s admission policy.
“Between the murals, name change, now the Lowell admissions policy ... you just go on and on and on. When does it end?” Yap said.
The committee has requested input from schools on their name changes by the end of the semester in December. Laura Dudnick, spokeswoman for the district, acknowledged that the timing of the proposal may be “difficult for schools” during the pandemic.
The district “has conveyed concerns to the advisory committee regarding the challenges of making recommendations at this time given that we are in distance learning due to the pandemic,” she said in a statement.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen, a frequent critic of Breed, said in a tweet that “I have to agree 100% with the Mayor on this one.
“Where is the urgency, creativity, passion to get our kids back in school? I hear from parents everyday that are desperate and at their wits end. We must do better. I am here, fighting, ready, and willing to do anything to help.”