San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Liberal parents probably have enough signatures, dismiss foes who say Republicans backed effort
About a dozen smiling people in matching yellow T-shirts wheeled 45 heavy boxes through the City Hall basement to the Department of Elections the other morning.
Inside those boxes sat six months of effort and nearly a quarter million signatures of San Francisco voters that are almost certain to qualify school board members Gabriela López, Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga for a recall.
Get ready for a special election, probably in January or February, that would be the first local recall to qualify for a San Francisco ballot since 1983. Already, supporters of the internationally ridiculed school board have bashed the recall for supposedly being fueled by Republicans, conservatives and dark money, but is it?
Unlike with Tuesday’s recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the answer is no. Everyday San Franciscans with real concerns about the school board — and who believe the city’s kids deserve better — launched the effort and worked tirelessly to gather signatures. And their beefs are far more significant than Newsom’s unwise, unmasked dinner at the French Laundry.
“Do I look like a Republican? Hello!” said one of the men in a yellow T-shirt — plus a rainbow beard, top hat, silver pants and platform boots. “I’m Gaybraham Lincoln. Queens for the recall!”
Honest (and Fabulous) Abe was David Thompson, who pulled his 10-year-old son out of the district after months of the boy’s outbursts and despondency over Zoom school — while the school board mostly ignored families’ concerns and instead focused on distractions like renaming 44 closed schools, including Lincoln High.
A good board catches the mistakes of the administrators it oversees and corrects them. This one ignores
the district’s errors, blasts critics and creates unnecessary messes.
What should it be focusing on? The district’s enrollment drop to 49,774, a 5% dip from June, 2020. And the projected budget deficit of at least $114 million next year. And the fact its teachers are still underpaid in one of the most expensive cities in the world while not a single unit of teacher housing, talked about for at least 17 years, has opened.
There’s also the district’s last-minute change in school schedules, made without parent or teacher input, which the district said saved $3 million in transportation costs, but which budget documents show cost it $2.1 million this year in before and aftercare costs, seeming to negate the point.
Then there’s the new resolution from Collins and López directing Superintendent Vince Matthews to craft a plan to ensure 3 feet of social distancing at schools, weekly testing of students and staff and air filtration in all used spaces including hallways — despite it probably making the budget picture even worse and new data showing there hasn’t been a single case of COVID-19 transmission in the city’s public schools.
Matthews, who agreed to stay on an extra year after his planned retirement when the board promised to not micromanage him, resisted the resolution, saying it would distract his already stretched team.
Backers of the school board say the fact a recall election will cost the district several million dollars means voters should wait until November 2022 when the same three commissioners are up for re-election. But recall supporters point out the group will need to choose a new superintendent and close a huge budget gap well before then, and this crew doesn’t seem up to the job.
Besides, Collins wasn’t concerned about the district’s gaping budget hole when she sued it and her colleagues for $87 million after losing her vice president title because of her anti-Asian tweets. She finally withdrew the lawsuit Tuesday after a federal judge dismissed the case, but she hasn’t offered to repay the district more than $110,000 in legal fees, and there’s no sign
Above: Volunteers have collected boxes of signatures.
Right: Monty Worth, a history teacher at Lowell High School, was among those gathering signatures.
her colleagues will force the issue like they should.
The three school board members could prevent the district spending money on an election by resigning, but that seems improbable.
At a recent meeting of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democractic Club, Collins said of the recall, “When I see certain people getting upset, I know I’m doing the right thing,” according to news coverage of the event. López blamed the recall on sexism, racism and discrimination against young people and said, “They recognize this is an opportunity to bring down someone who is me.”
It seems unlikely that a city that elected a Black woman as mayor is secretly out to get women of color on the school board. Neither Collins nor López returned requests for interviews.
Moliga, who to his credit engages with journalists, texted that the Pacific Islander community strongly supports him and added, “We have seen a tremendous outpouring of support in San Francisco and throughout California from people who are standing with us to oppose my recall.” The Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP and an opponent of the recall, said he hasn’t agreed with the group on everything — including its insistence on covering murals at Washington High — but said recalls are “foolishness” that will “destroy this republic.”
Supervisor Hillary Ronen, though, said she and her colleagues are getting a tremendous amount of email from district parents asking the supervisors to solve problems that the school board and central office won’t address.
“I want a school board that’s going to be laser-focused on the impending budget deficit and on the day-today needs of educators and students to make school safer and more successful,” Ronen said. “That hasn’t happened for quite a long time.”
The recall was initiated by Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, partners who between them have five kids and were furious by the unending Zoom school for Raj’s kids in San Francisco versus an earlier, smooth return for Looijen’s kids on the Peninsula.
Raj, who moved from India in 2010 to run his tech startup, is not a citizen and cannot vote except in local school board races under a proposition passed by city voters in 2016. Looijen is a registered independent who voted for Joe Biden for president.
“Neither of us have any association with the Republican Party,” Raj said. “We are fiercely nonpartisan.”
Campaign disclosures filed with the city’s Ethics Commission show the recall effort has raised $569,000. A lot of that money has come from the tech industry — including $49,500 apiece from venture capitalists David Sacks and Arthur Rock and $10,099 from venture capitalist Garry Tan.
Most of the donations, though, came from 1,400 people giving much smaller amounts including about 50 people who listed their occupations as educators.
Those who signed the petition are all over the map too — literally. Data from Raj and Looijen show people living in the Sunset, Richmond and west of Twin Peaks neighborhoods had the highest percentage of signers. Visitacion Valley and the Bayview were close behind — and had higher percentages of signers than the Marina and Pacific Heights.
One of the recall campaign’s most avid backers is Monty Worth, a history teacher at Lowell High who’s gathered signatures since the spring. He said he was “stunned and embarrassed” by the school board’s refusal to involve historians in its effort to rename 44 schools.
He said he’s a registered Democrat who disagrees with the recall effort against Newsom and District Attorney Chesa Boudin, but believes the school board has been so uniquely destructive and intolerant of others’ views that the recall is imperative.
“It’s damaging to progressivism to have this kind of radicalism,” he said. “We need practical people, and frankly, much more boring meetings.”
Perhaps the happiest person Tuesday as the group turned in its petitions was Kit Lam, the dad whose petitions were stolen at a farmers’ market but went on to collect more than 4,300 signatures on his own.
“My wife wants her husband back,” Lam said with a laugh. “Now we’ll let the voters decide.”