San Francisco school board to vote on school renaming, again
SAN FRANCISCO >> America’s founding fathers are expected to get a reprieve Tuesday when San Francisco’s scandal-plagued school board revisits a decision to strip 44 schools of names as part of a racial reckoning that critics said went too far.
The city’s Board of Education, which convenes Tuesday on Zoom, is poised to reverse its much-criticized decision to rename a third of San Francisco’s public schools it said honored figures linked to racism, sexism and other injustices.
Among them are schools named for presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, writer Robert Louis Stevenson and Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere. A school named for longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein is on the list as well.
Parents, students and elected officials blasted the board for some of its targets — and its timing. The decision in late January came while all of San Francisco’s public classrooms were closed because of coronavirus restrictions. They still are. Mayor London Breed, among others, called it “offensive and completely unacceptable” for the board to focus on changing school names rather than getting children back into classrooms.
Some of the city’s youngest students are expected to begin returning to in-person instruction this month after more than a year of distance learning because of the pandemic. There is no timetable for middle and high school students to return.
The renaming effort also was criticized for historical inaccuracies and shoddy research that included consulting Wikipedia rather than historians.
A renaming advisory committee wrongly accused Paul Revere of seeking to colonize the Penobscot people. It also confused the name of Alamo Elementary School with the Texas battle rather than the Spanish word for poplar tree.
Feinstein Elementary made the list because when she was mayor in 1984, a decision was made to replace a vandalized Confederate flag that was part of a longstanding display outside City Hall. When the flag was pulled down a second time, it was not replaced.
“It feels like truth won this time,” Seeyew Mo, head of Families for San Francisco, said about Tuesday’s vote. His group opposed the renaming process and brought attention to the flawed research.
“I’m glad they’ve come to their senses — after lawsuits, and public pressure,” said Mo, who also objected to the board’s “top-down process” in which a small group made the decision without the wider school community. “A lot of people agree with the idea of revisiting names, but they just disagree with how it was done.”