Lawsuit tossed
A federal judge said S.F. school board member Alison Collins’ suit seeking $87 million in damages from her fellow board members was without merit.
A federal judge tossed out an $87 million lawsuit filed by San Francisco school board member Alison Collins against the school district and five of her fellow members Monday, saying the claims had no merit and there was no need to argue the case in court.
The ruling came three days before the case was scheduled for its first hearing in court. Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said in his ruling that no further arguments were necessary.
Collins filed the lawsuit in March, accusing her colleagues and the school district of violating her free speech rights
when they voted to strip her of her vice presidency and remove her from committees over tweets she posted in 2016 about Asian Americans.
Collins referred messages to her attorney, who did not respond to requests for comment.
The dismissal is good news for city education officials as more than 50,000 students headed back to school Monday and the district tries to steady itself following a year of upheaval, including controversies and lawsuits. But with the potential recall of three school board members, including Collins, likely to move forward this fall, conflicts and heated politics might continue.
“We’re focused on supporting students as they begin the new school year,” said district Deputy Superintendent Gentle Blythe. “It’s a relief to have this distraction removed.”
Collins sought an injunction in the suit to restore her as vice president and to her committee position, a request the judge also denied.
Collins’ lawsuit sought $72 million in general damages from the district and board members Jenny Lam, Mark Sanchez and Kevine Boggess as well as board Vice President Faauuga Moliga. She also asked for $3 million from each board member in punitive damages.
President Gabriela López was the only member of the board not named in the suit.
Gilliam’s ruling, per standard procedure, allows Collins to amend her complaint against the individual board members, but not the district, which is a government agency and therefore not subject to lawsuits.
The judge deferred ruling on the district’s request to strike the complaint entirely, which would require Collins to pay the district’s attorney’s fees and other costs of defending the lawsuit. Such a ruling would come after Collins has an opportunity to file an amended complaint “that adequately states a federal claim,” the judge said.
So far, the district has been billed for $115,000 in legal fees for the case, but not all costs have been accounted for yet, district officials said.
The judge’s decision offered something of a rebuke to Collins’ arguments.
“Nowhere in her complaint does Plaintiff allege facts supporting this legal conclusion,” Gilliam said in the ruling. “And Plaintiff does not explain in her opposition how the resolution that removed her from her position as Vice President constitutes an ongoing violation of federal law. While the Court is required to construe Plaintiff ’s allegations in the light most favorable to her, the Court cannot find that this unsupported legal conclusion is adequate to plead an ongoing violation of federal law.”
Attorney John Affeldt, an expert in education and equity, said Collins could appeal the ruling, but the decision was a “pretty firm rejection of the plaintiff ’s theories, especially to the district.”
Many parents applauded the dismissal of the lawsuit, saying it was a shadow hanging over a district focused on reopening schools and a school board recovering from a year of lawsuits and controversy.
“This school year needs to be entirely focused on the kids — no distractions,” said Meredith Dodson, founder of the SF Parent Coalition, which advocates for family needs and student equity. “We’re glad the court agreed.”
Collins, in a series of tweets before she was elected to the school board, said Asian Americans had used “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’ ”
She wrote later in the thread: “Where are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump? Don’t Asian Americans know they’re on his list as well?”
Using asterisks in references to the racial epithet, Collins continued, “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n **** r is still being a n **** r. You’re still considered ‘the help.’ ”
Following the discovery of the tweets, city officials — including the mayor, 10 of 11 supervisors, two school board members and the politically powerful San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee — called on Collins to resign.
In addition to school board members asking her to step down, 5,400 people signed a petition saying the 2016 tweet thread “dehumanizes and divides our communities of color.”
Collins said in her lawsuit that the tweets were taken out of context and were not racist. She argued that board members retaliated against her because she, in her tweets as a private citizen, spoke out against the “racist harassment and racist bullying” of Black and brown students in the district.
Collins’ lawyer, Charles Bonner, wrote in the lawsuit, that defendants “lit their torches” after Collins refused to resign following the discovery of the tweets.
“The false narrative and assertion that Ms. Collins’ comments imploring Asian Americans to resist oppression as ‘racist’ has generated this ongoing and intensifying hostility, (causing) threats and damage to Ms. Collins’ reputation and threatening her and her family’s physical wellbeing,” Bonner wrote.
Following the lawsuit, Collins came under criticism by school district employees who said she damaged their careers. She and her husband were also accused of illegally completing construction without proper building permits at their troubled Russian Hill property, according to a city department.
Legal experts had already predicted the lawsuit would not succeed. Laurence Tribe, a prominent constitutional law professor at Harvard University, told The Chronicle in March that he expected it would be dismissed.
“Courts have more important things to do than provide a stage for the resolution of essentially interpersonal political feuds, especially when the stakes involve the education of children who obviously cannot fend for themselves,” he said at the time.