Schools dither as frustration rises
Throughout the controversy over the San Francisco Board of Education’s decision to spend time renaming scores of schools that remain empty, district officials insisted it was unfair to suggest the rebranding project interfered with reopening efforts. They argued that they could do more than one thing at once.
This week, school board members declared that they were forced to postpone a vote on a deal with unions to resume inperson instruction. Why? Because someone sued them and they had to discuss the legal challenge. So much for multitasking.
The inability of public schools to emerge from their collective coronavirus stupor in the city and across much of the region and state has become a certified national scandal.
Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a Republican running to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in a potential recall election, staged a campaign event this week at San Francisco’s shuttered Abraham Lincoln High School, one of the most infamous targets of the school board’s historical revisionism. The superintendent of Oakley’s schools, in Contra Costa County, apologized after school board members were recorded criticizing parents who “want their babysitters back.” President Biden vowed to get more schools open only to become mired in an inadvertent debate with his own press secretary over what exactly he meant.
San Francisco’s school board has responded to this outburst of longsimmering angst with more ostentatious dithering. Last week, in a tonedeaf reprise of the debate over whether Lincoln himself measures up to its standards, the board spent hours debating whether a gay white father would sufficiently diversify an allfemale, allstraight, racially mixed parent advisory panel.
For their next act, on Tuesday, board members canceled the vote on the ballyhooed reopening plan while indignantly blaming those with the audacity to challenge them in court for forcing them to discuss a lawsuit in closed session. While it wasn’t clear which lawsuit was being discussed, one recent legal challenge came from the city itself, which argues that the board’s failure to substantively plan for resuming inperson instruction is at odds with California law.
Progress at the state level has been almost as glacial. Newsom has tried to encourage more school districts to reopen but remains engaged in what he called a “stubborn” negotiation with teachers’ unions. Legislative leaders, meanwhile, announced a plan to spend three times what the governor offered on reopening incentives.
What’s missing is any apparent will to overcome the resistance of school officials and unions to the overwhelming facts in favor of reopening classrooms. The politician who can muster that has yet to emerge, but he or she will have earned the public’s lasting gratitude.