San Francisco residents recalled three members of the city’s school board in the first recall vote in the city since 1983.
Voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the recall of school board president Gabriela Lopez, vice-president Faauuga Moliga and commissioner Alison Collins, according to tallies by the San Francisco department of elections.
Parents had launched the recall effort in January 2021 out of frustration over the slow reopening of district schools, while the board pursued the controversial renaming of 44 school sites and the elimination of competitive admissions at the elite Lowell high school.
Opponents called the recall a waste of time and money as the district confronts challenges that include a $125m budget deficit and the need to replace the retiring superintendent, Vincent Matthews.
San Francisco’s school board has seven members, all Democrats, but only three had served long enough to be eligible to be recalled. Their temporary replacements will be named by Mayor London Breed.
Pressures of the pandemic and distance learning have merged with politics nationwide, making school board races a new front in battles over Covid-19 policies and politics. Across the country, Republicans are increasingly looking to the education fight as a galvanizing issue that could help them sway voters.
But in San Francisco, one of the nation’s most liberal cities, the recall effort split Democrats.
Breed, a Democrat and one of the most prominent endorsers of the recall, had criticized the school board for being distracted by “political agendas”.
Collins, Lopez and Moliga had defended their records, saying they prioritized racial equity because that was what they were elected to do.
Both sides agreed that San Francisco’s school board and the city itself became the focus of an embarrassing national spotlight.
One of the first issues to grab national attention was the board’s January 2021 decision to rename 44 schools they said honored public figures linked to racism, sexism and other injustices. On the list were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein.
The effort drew swift criticism for historical mistakes. Critics said it made a mockery of the country’s racial reckoning. Angry parents asked why the board would spend time renaming schools when the priority needed to be reopening classrooms.
After an uproar, the school board scrapped the plan.
Collins came under fire for tweets she wrote in 2016 that said Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead. Collins said the tweets were taken out of context and posted before she held her school board position.
But she refused to take them down or apologize for the wording and ignored calls to resign from parents, Breed and other public officials. She sued the district and her colleagues for $87m, fueling yet another pandemic sideshow. The lawsuit was later dismissed.
Many Asian parents were already angered by the board’s efforts to end merit-based admissions at the elite Lowell high school, where Asian students are the majority. As a result, many Asian American residents were motivated to vote for the first time in a municipal election. The grassroots Chinese/API Voter Outreach Task Force group, which formed in mid-December, said it registered 560 new Asian American voters.
Ann Hsu, a mother of two who helped found the task force, said many Chinese voters saw the effort to change the Lowell admissions system as a direct attack.
“It is so blatantly discriminatory against Asians,“ she said.
Breed on Tuesday welcomed the results of the vote. “The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” she said in a statement. “San Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.”
