School board’s course correction

The San Francisco Board of Education has signaled a belated but welcome recognition that its misbegotten renaming of scores of empty schools has given the district itself a bad name. The board’s stated shift in focus to reopening those schools will be that much more appreciated if it returns children and teachers to them safely and soon.

School board President Gabriela López acknowledged in a Chronicle opinion piece Monday that the plan to rename a third of the district’s schools has been one of “many distracting public debates as we’ve been working to reopen our schools.” She added that getting students back to classrooms would rightly be the board’s “only focus” until the job is done. The renaming, meanwhile, would be paused only to resume as “a more deliberative process” that “includes engaging historians at nearby universities to help.”

López deserves credit for climbing down from a rebranding project that, for all its presumably good intentions, was marred by slapdash research, limited analysis and, above all, ter

rible timing. Especially alongside the other distracting debates that have occupied the board in recent months, the name game looked like a particularly trivial pursuit for a board overseeing schools that have been shuttered for nearly a year.

The school board should apply the same new principles to other counterproductive distractions, at least until schools are open again. They include the misguided move to eliminate the academic standards for admission to Lowell High School, an attempt to address legitimate concerns about racism and underrepresentation by questionable means.

But the most important measure of the board’s seriousness will be its success in returning children to classrooms before another school year ends. The district, and many of its counterparts across the Bay Area and California, is woefully out of step with the expert consensus that schools can and have reopened without substantially increasing transmission of the coronavirus — and that their prolonged closure is hurting children and their families, particularly among the disadvantaged groups for which the board claims special concern.

With a lower rate of viral spread than any other major U.S. city, San Francisco is particularly wellpositioned to resume inperson learning. With the exception of Los Angeles, the largest districts in those cities have all returned some children to classrooms despite higher levels of community transmission.

In the city and in Sacramento, where Gov. Gavin Newsom is rightly pushing schools to reopen statewide — though to little avail so far — teachers’ unions are arguing that their members must be vaccinated before they can show up for work, a position their allies in the Legislature and on school boards are also adopting. That’s bound to further prolong school closures, even though experts, up to and including the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have said schools can open safely before all teachers are vaccinated.

The unions making such demands are setting a standard that has not applied to any other class of essential workers. They are also threatening to cut in line for vaccinations ahead of senior citizens, people with underlying conditions and other Californians who are in more danger from the virus than many teachers.

School board members, legislators and other politicians may be supported and underwritten by the unions. But they will ultimately answer to the public.