SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — San Francisco Mayor London Breed sharply rebuked the city’s school district Friday over plans to remove the names of historical and political figures from a third of its schools, saying its focus should be on reopening schools, not renaming them.
Breed said the plan, reported Thursday by the San Francisco Chronicle, shows that the district has clearly misplaced priorities. Public schools remain closed citywide despite being allowed to open since September.
“Parents are frustrated and looking for answers,” she said.
Breed said it was offensive that the school district should focus its energy on renaming some 44 public schools while parents and children struggle to learn at home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It’s offensive to parents who are juggling their children’s daily at-home learning schedules with doing their own jobs and maintaining their sanity. It’s offensive to me as someone who went to our public schools, who loves our public schools, and who knows how those years in the classroom are what lifted me out of poverty and into college. It’s offensive to our kids who are staring at screens day after day instead of learning and growing with their classmates and friends.”
Breed said the city gave the district $15 million of the taxpayers’ money to support reopening and she expects them "to do what needs to be done to get our kids back in school.”
The San Francisco Unified School District began working in earnest over the summer to purge the names George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln from its public high school and grammar schools; Washington and Jefferson because they owned slaves, and Lincoln because of his administration’s wars with American Indian tribes which resulted in the U.S. Army’s massacre of hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people.
The district board of education announced two years ago that it would form a panel to review the names of schools in the district and oversee the renaming process.
An accompanying resolution listed about a dozen schools that had been renamed in the past 30 years, including changing the name of Parkside Elementary School to honor Dianne Feinstein.
Now Feinstein’s name is on the chopping block, the Chronicle reported, because she replaced a vandalized confederate flag in front of City Hall.
District administrators sent letters to school principals last week asking that their schools give suggestions for alternative names by Dec. 18. The Chronicle reported that the school board will likely vote on name changes early next year.
But the district’s request did not sit well with Breed.
“Look, I believe in equity. It’s at the forefront of my administration and we’ve made historic investments to address the systemic racism confronting our city. But the fact that our kids aren’t in school is what’s driving inequity in our city. Not the name of a school," Breed, who is Black, said.
“We are in a pandemic right now that is forcing us all to prioritize what truly matters. Conversations around school names can be had once the critical work of educating our young people in person is underway. Once that is happening, then we can talk about everything else. Until those doors are open, the school board and the district should be focused on getting our kids back in the classroom.”
Laura Dudnick, the public relations manager for the school district, said in an email the district understands that the timing of the renaming effort may be difficult for schools and that the district “has conveyed concerns to the advisory committee regarding the challenges of making recommendations at this time given that we are in distance learning due to the pandemic.”
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