CONVERSATION
In 2018, the San Francisco school board set in motion a review of all public school names. The goal: Replace people deemed racists, colonizers, enslavers, abusers of women and children, and more.
A school board vote scheduled for next week could winnow down an initial list of 44 schools that a special committee released last fall, including Abraham Lincoln High, Dianne Feinstein Elementary, Junipero Serra Elementary, and George Washington High, where a controversial mural depicting Washington’s role in slavery and Native American genocide have drawn ire and national attention.
But unlike the mural fight, now tied up in court, the board is pursuing the sweeping name changes while the pandemic remains a crisis and thousands of kids are struggling with virtual school — with scant hope of returning in person until at least the fall. Critics, including Mayor London Breed, have said that given the desperate urgency of the situation, the name changes are a misguided priority. “The fact that our kids aren’t in school is what’s driving inequity. Not the name of a school,” Breed said in a statement last fall. She called the effort in the midst of COVID “offensive.”
Timing and some questionable choices aside, the idea of changing a school name to move with changing times is nothing new. A scan of the district’s schools shows a raft of changes through the years, with few tears shed. What was once Andrew Jackson Elementary is now New Traditions. A nursery school once named after California’s first governor, a proponent of racist exclusion and genocide, now honors the district’s first Black female principal.
School board president Mark Sanchez vouched last fall that the tip-to-toe review of names was not distracting from efforts to reopen schools, yet the deadline for school communities — principals, teachers, parents, and students — to weigh in if they’re on the list keeps getting pushed back. (Current target: April 19.) They should get every opportunity, except that they’re also focused on keeping schools afloat and keeping kids from losing months, even a full year, of education.
The Frisc brought together two people for a blunt conversation on renaming schools. Kim-Shree Maufas is a member of the names committee and a former SFUSD board member (2007 to 2015). Greg Peters is an educational consultant whose nonprofit, SF-CESS, does faculty training focused on social justice and equity. (In 2017, The Frisc wrote about SF-CESS and its multiyear contract to conduct sessions with Lowell High School faculty around bias and accountability in the wake of a student incident that prompted the school’s Black students and their allies to walk out.)
We began the discussion with the possibility of the school district hiring consultants (“facilitators”) to help beleaguered school communities discuss their placement on the list, do more research, and offer alternative names. The idea came up at the previous committee meeting on January 6 and will be a hot topic of discussion in coming weeks.
The conversation, moderated by The Frisc editor in chief Alex Lash, has been edited and condensed.
Kim-Shree Maufas: At the [January 6] meeting it came up that everyone was so overwhelmed. Administrators are, like, now you’re going to throw this at me with all the stuff that’s happening?
If school leadership is in charge of the process, they get all the arrows pointed at them. So [the committee is asking] what can we do to help? Maybe get a third-party facilitator to help have these conversations so the administrator doesn’t get labeled as the bad guy. It would also help if a committee member would go with the facilitator to give context and answer questions.
The Frisc: Greg, you take exception to a push to move fast. Does this new development give you comfort?
Greg Peters: I feel the committee and board are being responsive to what they’re hearing. The committee has been meeting for a couple years, but schools felt they didn’t have the same luxury and had to quickly act with the backdrop of COVID. If this were a normal year, the timeline might have been fine.
It’s not unusual in systems such as schools that, in our efforts to interrupt patterns of power or injustice, we sometimes use the very mechanisms of power and injustice. Schools and principals feel this is being done to them. We’re actually reproducing white supremacy culture by doing to someone in the name of doing with others. There’s irony in there.
Imposition of rules from the top down is a trait of white supremacy culture?
Peters: “Sense of urgency” is a shortened description of one characteristic of white supremacy culture. An unapologetic sense of urgency to address the needs of our least-reached kids and to interrupt anti-Blackness and racism? That’s not white supremacy culture. White supremacy culture is the urgency of getting stuff done even at the expense of doing it well.
There aren’t villains here. This committee was doing important work, and then it got hit by COVID. It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t get done. But if we can’t get students to show up to classes, or families to show up to meetings, what makes us think that with this expedited timeline we can get those people whose voices are necessary for this cause and purpose to show at these meetings?
Maufas: Slowing down and understanding came last year. Not only did the committee go on pause, but in the pause was, maybe not so up front, an analysis of what’s happening in the district: How could we move forward when the district is in this quagmire? Are we faulting those who aren’t participating?
Peters: There is a culture within this bureaucracy where we don’t actually problem-solve with our people. I do believe some people are saying “you just need to do this.” We can’t just do one antiracist thing and it’ll be great, because we’re working in a racist system.
Renaming schools represents a commitment to antiracism. COVID has elevated [the lack of equity in our society and schools], and this situation was a perfect example for us to do a self-assessment around our commitment and our actual practices. We need to interrogate where we’re getting in our own way, and this illuminated some of that in a beautiful way that’s worthy of a pause.
By “pause,” do you mean wait until the pandemic is over?
Peters: With the reality of what school is like now, let’s take some time to learn about the history of the names of our schools and the lands our schools are on. That could be happening right now — not pausing, but going deeper.
Maufas: This has been going on for three years, a long time coming. When I read the letters and reactions, my feeling is it would have happened regardless of a pandemic. The pandemic is just another fat layer added to the process.
This is a heavy lift, it’s not something you can willy-nilly about, but schools have been renamed before this. I’m not talking about Dolores Huerta Elementary, which was very recent, and people were like, yes, we raise our fist to that. I’m talking about schools in the Bayview, renamed three or four times. Thurgood Marshall High was previously Pelton Junior High.
[Editor’s note: This post originally misidentified the previous name of the school at the Thurgood Marshall site as Woodrow Wilson High. Wilson no longer exists, but it has been replaced by Phillip and Sala Burton High.]
[Peter Hardeman] Burnett was the first governor of California, but he also advocated for the genocide of indigenous Californians and that Chinese and African Americans shouldn’t be allowed here. [SF removed his name from a preschool in 2011, and many other schools across the state have done the same.]
But there’s a street still named after Burnett. It’s like, “What? You didn’t hear the room of people who showed up to get that name off that school?” What can SF learn from this process?
Another comment I often have is around the Sierra Club’s uproar about John Muir Elementary being renamed. I ask: Were you involved in that school in any real way before this issue? It turns out, no. Wouldn’t it make more sense if you had been involved in this little school before? Now you’re in an uproar and it seems disingenuous to me.
Should a difficult decision come down to a vote of the school community? For Lincoln High, for example, what if a majority of students and faculty and alumni say don’t rename it. How much weight do you give those voices?
Peters: What’s happening here is courageous and sometimes that does not mean the popular vote. Even if 75 percent say they didn’t want it, we have to be courageous and say 75 percent don’t want to interrupt racism. I personally don’t think the decision whether to be antiracist should be up to a vote; it’s up to courageous leadership. Sometimes resistance is good, and sometimes it’s about the status quo.
‘We should engage in reflection and education to understand why one person’s César Chávez is another person’s John Muir.’
— Greg Peters
Maufas: That’s what I meant when I heard some school communities have said that this is the first time they’ve heard about this. They’re reading the newspaper that their name is on the list, and they’ve never heard from the school leadership.
Slowing down also means letting schools on the list expand the information the committee has, whether they say they belong on the list or not.
Can the robust discussion you’re both calling for happen online? Or do we need people back in a room or auditorium together, as messy as that can be?
Maufas: I don’t know if in-person is better. We’ve had meetings we’ve had to shut down, where emotions ran high. We’re going to have to do the best we can with what we have. There’s not going to be a “right way.”
Peters: There are positives and negatives to both, like Kim-Shree said. In the same way we have to do work to get people into a room, we have to do work to get people into a Zoom room. And we have to do significant thinking to structure the space and time so people can have those hard conversations. We have to plan for it.
A big thing in schools right now is continuous improvement cycles. That’s what this is: organic inquiry and work of not knowing what the right step is, but taking some step and not being afraid to pause to do a midcourse correction and reflection. That’s where we’re at.
‘The media portrayal has been that we’re bulls in the china shop. But if we’re bulls, we have ballet slippers on.’
— Kim-Shree Maufas
People have been taking a more complicated look at César Chávez. It doesn’t take away the grand arc of his work, but he was a flawed human being, not an angel or saint. What about the possibility of renaming a school then having to rename it again because other things come to light? We don’t have to talk about Chavez specifically …
Peters: No, I think we should because this is why having a cycle of continuous improvement is important. So we’re not just moving through tasks to find the next name, but engaging in reflection and education to understand why one person’s César Chávez is another person’s John Muir. It’s hard if not impossible to exist in a society rooted in anti-Blackness and racism and not have some history of anti-Blackness or racism.
Here’s a great essential question some school communities are asking, but there hasn’t been time to engage in: Is it possible nobody’s name should be on our buildings? The answer might come down to this committee saying no person’s name should be on [a school].
Maufas: It’s been brought up in the committee several times. Someone sent us an email that elementary schools should be named after the root of a plant, and on up to high school, it would be the fully grown oak or redwood. Like the growth path of a living creature.
Peters: [Laughs] And then you’ll have somebody who says, “But that tree is not native and kills off native plants!”
For the record, I do believe we should name some schools and buildings after people. People have grown and made commitments to change. Some people say no schools should be named after white people; I disagree. White people in particular need antiracist models who look like them. I don’t think we should reduce it to all or nothing. We have to have complex conversations that’ll get messy.
We need to have conversations when we’re clear about our criteria. Not just which person, but the criteria. I think there should be a disproportionate number of names that refer to whose land we’re sitting on. There should be a criteria of somebody who has benefited from racism but has had a reckoning and repaired the harm they benefited from. There’s a difference between benefiting from racism and actively subscribing to it.
The criteria Greg is referencing are spelled out in the committee’s documents. Are those set in stone or open to change?
Maufas: Criteria are set in stone. We get that there are some things [in people’s history] that are troubling, and there are other instances where we didn’t get the arc of the whole person’s being. We want our school communities to understand the breadth of this person, not just the troubling things. Like the Lincoln example. He authorized the execution of dozens of Native Americans, but saved so many other people — this is one of the examples we’re wrestling with. These aren’t going to be easy decisions.
The media portrayal has been that we’re bulls in the china shop. But if we’re bulls, we have ballet slippers on.
Peters: I appreciate you talking about the arc of a whole human being. As a white man, I feel so much of the change lies in the laps and the work of white people. If no matter how hard I’m trying I’m always going to be seen as a racist and not seen in the full arc of my being, it won’t hurt my feelings, but I know most of my people won’t do the work. They will unsubscribe. That can’t happen. We have some work to do, and unfortunately some of it is messy. The good news and the bad news of it is that it will keep getting messier.
Maufas: I’m not shying away from that messiness. The only caveat when we have meetings is there are young people on the committee who’ve received death threats. This is a big step for them to participate. Maybe a few of us have forgotten that we’re all human beings.
Peters: People making death threats shouldn’t be allowed into the conversation. They have work to do before they’re allowed into the conversation.
Maufas: True, but we don’t have a chance to decide that in the public forum. Internally I’m like, “What? Would you want someone saying that to your children?” But externally I’m like, “Thank you very much. Thank you for coming.” We could all be doing something else, even the angriest person who says, “I don’t like what you’re doing, but I’m going to take time out of my world to make sure you hear me.” Public engagement has always been huge in my life, whether I’m making certain my voice is heard, or whether I’m listening to other voices. I want it all: The scary, the misinformed, the uneducated, but also the curious.
I don’t expect everyone to be on board right away. But come and learn.