Parents, politicians rally to fully reopen S.F. schools
With San Francisco public schools having agreed to a gradual and modest reopening plan, a parentled movement to get kids back in the classrooms stepped up the pressure Saturday, calling for five full days of inperson education.
Hundreds of parents and kids marched from Alamo Square Park to Civic Center Plaza, where Mayor London Breed and a host of elected officials joined their rally. The event, organized by the group Decreasing the Distance, was the latest in a campaign to get the San Francisco Unified School District to develop a plan to fully reopen public schools.
San Francisco closed its public schools a year ago. Only last week, the school board approved plans to begin bringing back inperson learning for preschool through fifthgraders, special education students and vulnerable older groups starting April 12. The decision followed months of oftenbitter debate between frustrated parents, the school board and the teachers union.
The union said Saturday that its members approved the plan on a vote of 1,753 for and 427 against. The agreement is “crucial in keeping educators, staff, students and families safe as we head into a hybrid model,” union officials said.
But parents and politicians said Saturday that the limited return to school, which does not include middle or high school students, falls short. They called for all public schools to offer inperson education for all interested students immediately and to guarantee, and start planning for, a full resumption of classes for the start of the next school year, in Au
gust.
“They’ve finally started prioritizing reopening,” Meredith Willa Dodson, cofounder of Decreasing the Distance, said of the school board. “And I hear from insiders that it’s because of us.”
The mayor, state Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblyman David Chiu, all speaking from a makeshift stage in the bed of a gray Toyota pickup truck, credited the parents.
“I didn’t make this happen,” Breed said. “You made this happen.”
Participants in the march, many of them families carrying signs, said they decided to join the demonstration because they’re fed up with online education and believe classes can safely resume with proper pre
cautions, including mandatory masks and spacing requirements for students and staff, and with most teachers either vaccinated or in the process of being vaccinated.
Breed said that San Francisco has been cautious in its approach to the coronavirus and that it’s paid off in S.F. being among the top metropolitan areas in combating the spread of the coronavirus. Despite that approach, she said, “our very conservative public health officials” allowed schools in San Francisco to resume inperson learning in September, and many private and parochial students have done so.
“Over 15,000 kids are in school in San Francisco as we speak, and we haven’t
seen any significant outbreaks,” the mayor added. “Time and time again, we have made decisions based on science, based on data. We understand people are scared and we need to make adjustments for that, but it’s time for the excuses to be thrown out the window and it’s time to us to reopen our classrooms.”
The school district released a statement Friday saying it is committed to reopening schools for prekindergarten to 12thgrade students in the fall, but did not specify five full days a week.