In San Francisco, Virus is Contained but Schools Are Still Closed

[David Lockmiller]

(03-20-2021 05:38 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  I'm obviously not an attorney, but for the life of me I can't see how anyone was harmed in the renaming of any school. I predict that while circuit judges might go along with the suit, it will eventually be rejected on appeal.

Best
Rob

A Poisoned Process - Constitutional Scholar Says School Renaming Effort Lost Credibility

Courthouse News Service by MARIA DINZEO March 19, 2021

The San Francisco school board is on the ropes after a judge ordered it to vacate a resolution scrubbing 44 public schools of their historical namesakes, or explain why it should not be compelled to do so.

It’s uncommon for a judge to rule so quickly, as public school alumni groups and the San Francisco Taxpayers Association just filed their petition seeking the decision’s repeal on the grounds that it was done without due process.

In an interview Friday, attorney and constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe said the order from Judge Ethan Schulman bolstered his conviction that the petitioners he represents have a strong case that the school board’s renaming process was unlawful.

“It vindicated my sense that this is an extremely strong and unambiguously correct case,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to become involved, because I thought the issues were so important.”

The board’s 6-1 vote raised an outcry from parents and alumni who said the process was conducted by fiat through a committee that excluded dissenting voices and did not allow for a properly-noticed public hearing on the individual schools. The petitioners believe this to be a violation of the Brown Act, California’s open meetings law.

“The whole process was poisoned from the beginning,” Tribe said.

A Harvard Law School professor emeritus who has argued innumerable cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Tribe said this case piqued his interest for several reasons.
“One of them is I’m very interested in the issue of how to achieve racial justice in a world where all sorts of things have been named after racists and Confederate soldiers, and much of that renaming happened not at the time of the Civil War, but as part of the opposition to racial progress in the 1960s,” he said. “So I’m not one of those people who say you should never take down a Robert E. Lee statue.”

The issue is also personal for Tribe, a San Francisco native who graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School.

“As a member of the Lincoln High School alumni association, I naturally heard about how it was going to lose its name— and not through some well-reasoned, legally structured process, but through an impulsive, irrational, arbitrary decision that Lincoln doesn’t deserve to be seen as a Great Emancipator but some kind of racist,” he said. “I took it personally. I thought a lot of other people, graduates of a lot of other schools would take personally the idea of being told the name of the school they identified themselves with was being labeled racist, or exploitative of workers. Names carry a lot of weight.”

Tribe added that he also follows local government closely because “with national government being so dysfunctional, state and local government is where all the important action needs to happen in the next quarter century.”

“When the reputation of the Great Emancipator is under attack without due process of law, who better to lend a hand in his defense than the foremost constitutional scholar of our day?” said Paul Scott, a local attorney who is also representing the petitioners.

The lawsuit has raised the question of whether petitioners have standing to challenge the board’s decision on constitutional grounds. Tribe said the petitioners do have standing to bring the case.

“One of the fields I’m most expert in is standing and there’s no question that under California law, anybody who has a beneficial interest, who isn’t a mere stranger to the action but is affected in some particular way, through personal identification or otherwise, can seek an alternative writ of mandate to require a government agency to perform its ministerial duty,” Tribe said. “I’ve no question whatsoever that the petitioners have standing, and anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant of California law.”

The burden is now on the school board and the San Francisco Unified School District to either comply with Schulman’s order, or present a case for why it hasn’t done so at a hearing set for May 6.

Tribe said the country’s racial reckoning is too important to address in a slipshod manner, and believes the sloppy handling of the renaming issue cost the school board and district dearly. While there are certainly schools that should be renamed, he said, the loss of credibility will make effort even harder.

“If the rule of law is something we can toss aside, people will not have confidence in the fairness of the process,” Tribe said. “Now the attempt to rename particular schools is going to be way uphill because the process has been poisoned.”

Tribe said Schulman’s ruling doesn’t mean the case is over, “but the judge indicated that he understands and is persuaded by the points we made. I’d treat that as handwriting on the wall if I were the respondents.”