Board pauses effort to rename schools
Facing intense pressure on multiple fronts including school reopenings and a recent decision to halt meritbased admissions at Lowell High School, San Francisco’s school board president has signaled that its members are pausing controversial efforts to rename 44 district schools.
In an opinion piece published Sunday on SFChronicle.com and in Monday’s print editions of The Chronicle, Gabriela López acknowledged mistakes in the process that have resulted in a potential lawsuit and recall efforts targeting several board members, including López.
“There have been many distracting public debates as we’ve been working to reopen our schools,” she wrote. “School renaming has been one of them. It was a process begun in 2018 with a timeline that didn’t anticipate a pandemic. I acknowledge and take responsibility that mistakes were made in the renaming process.”
López said working to reopen schools will be the board’s “only focus,” and renaming committee meetings will be canceled in the meantime. She said the board plans
to make the process more “deliberative” by getting local historians involved.
“In the meantime, this is the last time I’ll comment publicly on renaming until schools are reopened,” she wrote. “We will not be taking valuable time from our board agendas to further discuss this, as we need to prioritize reopening.”
Other board members declined to comment.
On Feb. 10., San Francisco attorney Paul D. Scott sent a demand letter addressed to López alleging a violation of the Brown Act, California’s openmeeting law. He argued that the board did not properly notify the public that it was making a final decision to rename the school sites and provided advance notice only that it would decide on a list of “potential” schools to be renamed.
He said families and the public were denied due process, and the matter instead should be handled on a school-by school basis. The letter gave the board 30 days to reverse the decision or legal action would be taken. On Tuesday, the board held a sevenhour closed special meeting that presumably addressed the legal challenge and renaming issue.
In response to the opinion piece, Scott said he is glad the board has “evidently seen reason,” but he wants “specifics in writing” before deciding whether to continue with any legal action.
“Changes of this magnitude should not be imposed from on high on our local communities,” he said. “Parents, students, teachers, alumni and others connected to each school are the true stakeholders. They should be trusted to make good judgments for their particular school and have their point of view be respected.”
On Jan. 27, the school board voted 61 to rename 44 schools because they bear the names of historical figures said to be linked to racism and oppression, from Dianne Feinstein Elementary to Jefferson Elementary to Abraham Lincoln High School.
Critics of the renaming cited errors made by the committee appointed to recommend schools to be renamed based on connections to slavery, oppression, racism and coloniza
tion. In several cases, the committee members relied on Wikipedia to make a decision on whether a name met criteria.
In the case of Alamo Elementary, the committee cited the Battle of the Alamo and its connection to the taking of Mexican land during the Texas Revolution. But in reality, the school was more likely named after the Spanish word for cottonwood tree, based on the tree that identified a traveler’s rest station in the city, which is now Alamo Square.
“I’m delighted to hear that the school board has an understanding of how flawed the process was,” said Terence Abad, executive director of the alumni association for Lowell High School, which was also on the list for renaming. “Like most people, I do think the process on renaming is important, and I welcome doing it in
an orderly and appropriate way.”
Abad noted that because of the renaming process, additional research has shown that Lowell likely wasn’t named after James Lowell, the poet, but rather just Lowell, perhaps based on Lowell, Mass., given a letter from the district superintendent in 1894 referred to the school’s new name as only “Lowell High School.”
The decision garnered national attention and has been criticized by leaders and parents for being poorly timed while families struggle during the pandemic. In October, Mayor London Breed slammed the renaming plan.
Meanwhile, pressure has been building on school officials to reopen classrooms, which have been shut for almost a year. At a news conference Wednesday, Lopez and
San Francisco Unified Superintendent Vincent Matthews said officials are trying to resume inperson learning as soon as possible, but declined to guess when the first students might be back. The district said recently the goal is to have six weeks of partial live instruction before the school year ends June 2.
San Francisco’s city attorney has sued the school district, alleging that officials failed to create a specific reopening plan as required by state law, and violated the state Constitution and equal rights laws by not providing inperson instruction despite the ability to do so.
The controversy helped fuel a signature drive, begun Friday, to recall three members of the board. So far, more than 1,200 city residents have signed a petition to recall President López, Vice President Alison Collins and Commissioner Faauuga Moliga.
The effort will need 70,000 signatures for each of the three members to get the recall on the ballot. Organizers Autumn Looijen and Siva Raj, who are parents of five children, said they wanted to “get politics out of education.”