School board set to reverse renaming vote
Just over two months after voting to rename 44 schools, the San Francisco school board is poised to reverse that decision Tuesday to avoid costly litigation.
The upcoming vote represents the latest development in a monthslong initiative that culminated amid the pandemic. In late January, the board voted 61 to change dozens of school names associated with slavery, oppression, genocide and colonization as public schools districtwide remained closed.
The process began in 2018 with a resolution to create a committee to advise the board. The committee ultimately recommended changing 44 school names, including Lincoln, Washington, Mission and Balboa high schools, as well as Alamo, Jefferson and Serra elementary schools.
Many communities supported the effort,
with parents saying it was hurtful to have their children wearing school sweatshirts with the name of James Denman, a former district superintendent who denied education to Chinese students, for example.
Others considered the effort too farreaching and expensive, with no cost estimate on what it would take to rebrand more than three dozen school sites. Examples across the country put the price tag at somewhere between $20,000 and several million dollars per school, depending on the school’s size, signage and other items related to the previous name, like band uniforms.
A civil lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court said the school board’s decision violated the Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law, given the publicly noticed agenda item said the vote would decide on a list of potential schools to be renamed.
The notice was “inadequate and misleading,” and “the agenda item associated with the renaming issue gave no indication that the Board was going to make a final decision to rename 44 San Francisco public schools in a single vote at the meeting,” the lawsuit stated.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University professor emeritus who has argued 35 appellate cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, joined attorneys representing the plaintiffs, which include district high school alumni associations.
“I’m definitely on board that sometimes names ought not to be preserved,” Tribe told The Chronicle. “I think it goes dangerously far when the Great Emancipator is treated as insufficiently woke.”
Tribe said the renaming process was arbitrary and lawless, lacking communitybased, informationrich debate.
“I get outraged when people are trampled on,” said Tribe, who has fought for gay rights, animal rights and the constitutional personhood of corporations during his lengthy career. “Whether they are trampled on by jackbooted federal officials or wellmeaning local idiots, it seems we have to fight back.”
The process was widely panned as lacking in historical accuracy and reliant on Wikipedia rather than experts. The renaming advisory of Alamo Elementary School with the Texas battle rather than the Spanish word for poplar tree. Such a tree was a stopping point for travelers in San Francisco, located at what is now the city’s Alamo Square.
The renaming committee was expected to bring back a recommendation on new names for the sites in April. School board President Gabriela López, however, paused the process in late February amid criticism that the board was not focused on reopening schools.
In a public opinion piece in February, Lopez acknowledged mistakes were made in the selection of schools to be renamed, saying that the district would move in a more “deliberative process” involving historians in future discussions.
Yet the board’s January decision to rename the schools still stands and requires each school site to suggest a new name by midApril, with a formal recommendation submitted to the board by a renaming committee after that.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman issued a ruling last month calling on the district to do what is requested in the lawsuit — to rescind the vote and dissolve the committee — or show cause later this month on why they shouldn’t be compelled to do so.
committee conflated the name
“The end result of this incredible obstinacy and refusal to take responsibility has been an enormous waste of time and resources by all concerned, when the Board should have been focused on getting kids back to school, rather than creating a legal mess that private citizens have had to clean up by resort to the courts,” Paul Scott, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, said via email.
The resolution up for a vote Tuesday, however, does not acknowledge critics’ concerns about a faulty process or the need for historians. Instead, it denounces the lawsuit.
“Petitioners’ lawsuit is nothing more than a transparent attempt to thwart a lawful and dulynoticed action with which it disagrees,” states the resolution before the board. “The board is deeply grateful for the work of the panel, but wishes to avoid the distraction and wasteful expenditure of public funds in frivolous litigation.”
The vote will also occur under a cloud — during the first meeting after board member Alison Collins sued five of her six colleagues over their decision to strip her of the vice presidency and her roles on committees over racist tweets she posted in 2016 against Asian Americans.
The resolution calls on the district to revisit the renaming of schools after students have returned to inperson learning full time.