In February, San Francisco voters ousted three of seven members of its school district’s Board of Education. It might have been all seven, if the others were eligible.
One holdover, board president Jenny Lam, almost immediately set a new direction for the oversight body: more focus on students, less meddling with school district staff, and better behavior by board members in public and behind the scenes. That work began in the spring.
In the next few days, Lam’s push for a better board will take clearer shape with two unusual meetings.
The first is this weekend, when the entire board and the new SFUSD superintendent Matt Wayne will spend a summer Sunday discussing priorities and how the board, superintendent, and district staff should work together to reach them. “This is the beginning of a process to establish the district’s North Star goals for student outcomes,” according to Lam.
The second meeting, on Tuesday the 19th, kicks off potential reform of the board’s procedures, which could result in different committee structures and meeting schedules. The idea first came up at the board’s June 28 meeting and elicited skepticism from some attendees.
Board member Kevine Boggess said that “there isn’t a lot of democracy or dialogue” in committee meetings, and he asked that the public “give us an opportunity” to try something different.
A demand for doing things differently was what fueled the February recall, in which board president Gabriela López, along with commissioners Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga, were ousted in a landslide vote, albeit in a relatively low turnout election.
The board spent a lot of time and effort during the pandemic trying to rename schools and changing Lowell High School’s admission policy, all while many students suffered and parents clamored for a return to school — or at least a sign that the board took the idea seriously.
Vision, values, goals, and guardrails
The board’s new priorities remain vague. In an email, Lam told The Frisc that participants in Sunday’s meeting will examine “current student outcome data” and should produce a draft of SFUSD’s new “vision, values, goals, and guardrails [that] will determine the district’s strategic priorities.” She added that the draft would require plenty of feedback.
The board and superintendent will also work on a “community engagement plan,” Lam wrote. “The governance team will revise the draft based on what we hear.”
SFUSD already has guiding principles and a strategic plan using similar language about vision and student performance. Observers will want more.
“We need big changes in the system and I’m glad to see them doing this work, but until we see the details it’s all performative,” said Alida Fisher, a parent and special education advocate who previously ran for school board and is running again this year. She acknowledges patience will be necessary, but in the near term she’d like to see the board and administration avoid “unfunded mandates” — programs and policies that don’t have clear funding attached.
A state windfall rescued the district from the prospect of hundreds of teacher and administration layoffs this year. But painful budget decisions are likely in coming years, with projected deficits tied to declining student enrollment.
We need big changes in the system and I’m glad to see them doing this work, but until we see the details it’s all performative.
alida fisher, parent and special education advocate
Meanwhile, several student outcomes have declined in recent years, even with the pandemic’s full effect not yet clear. Fisher said literacy is the most important problem to address. San Francisco is 267th out of 287 California school districts in one literacy ranking.
Meredith Dodson of the San Francisco Parents Coalition agrees with Fisher: “We’re failing to teach our students to read, and that’s shameful,” she said. “Every child has the right to learn how to read, and our school district is responsible.”
A recent update, attached to Sunday’s agenda, also shows a gap in several student categories between white and Asian students on one hand and Black and Latinx students on the other. (The district notes that some of these data are preliminary or incomplete.)
The new board, reshaped by Mayor London Breed’s handpicked members Ann Hsu, Lainie Motamedi, and Lisa Weissman-Ward, already has reversed decisions that the previous roster said were meant to close these achievement gaps.
For example, Lowell High will return to merit-based admissions. The new board also ended an attempt to cover up murals at Washington High that critics said were harmful to BIPOC students who had to view them every day. An independent oversight committee found that the school district spent more than $500,000 in construction bond money on the legal challenge spurred by the board’s 2019 decision to cover up the murals.
Led by Lam, the board is only giving itself a few months to produce more concrete details from these reform efforts. The push to restructure committees must come up with a plan by September. The more sweeping effort to rewrite and approve district-wide goals and priorities has a first deadline of October 11, with a final deadline for a resolution on October 25.
The date is important, because two weeks later on Nov. 8, parents, teachers, and everyone else with a stake in the school district’s future will go to the polls for the first school board election since the recall. The three board members appointed by Breed will go before voters for the first time. So far, three challengers, including Fisher, have filed paperwork to run as well.
If the board hits its self-imposed deadline, everyone should have at least a few weeks to debate whether those up for election have made progress toward real reform.
