Once-obscure school boards became centers of attention during the COVID-19 pandemic as parents, students, and teachers struggled with mandated distance learning and other health precautions
Photo: Stephen Lam/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images In a West Coast edition of the national turmoil over education, San Francisco voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly supported a recall initiative aimed at three outspokenly progressive members of the city’s school board. The trio were the only members of the board who had served long enough to be recalled, so the vote was a decisive repudiation of the current leadership.
The recalled board members — board of education president Gabriela López as well as commissioners Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga — angered both liberal and conservative parents by keeping most public schools in San Francisco closed from March 2020 to August 2021 even as nearby districts and private schools reopened. During that time, the board attempted to rename 44 schools to get rid of “injustice-linked” names such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Paul Revere, and current U.S.
The recall election drew modest turnout , but the results were too emphatic to be second-guessed; the pro-recall vote amounted to 79 percent against Collins , 75 percent against López, and 72 percent against Moliga. Mayor London Breed, who supported the recall, will appoint successors within ten days.
While the recall and the events that led up to it will be conflated by conservative media nationally with a “parents rights” backlash against “woke” political leadership and pandemic-driven school closures, the circumstances were largely local. Like Breed and State Senator Scott Wiener , much of the city’s Democratic establishment backed the removal of the school-board members, though there was some shadowy outside money fueling the recall drive that may have been more ideologically driven.
Of course, there’s no risk of San Francisco shifting significantly to the right; just last September, the city gave 87 percent of its vote to Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s successful fight against a recall initiative aimed at him. But clearly the traumatic events of the past couple of years have forced a reconsideration of what one of America’s great bastions of progressive politics thinks of itself.
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