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

[David Lockmiller]

(11-16-2020 02:50 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  David, you may be aware of this, but I will post the link just in case you are not:

https://www.courthousenews.com/san-franc...-pandemic/

Thanks for posting the link, Roger. It is quite informative.

The beginning of the article states: 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.

“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.”

According to the article, The School Names Advisory Committee will reconvene on Jan. 6 to consider feedback from schools and draw up its recommendations to the board. The board of education will likely consider the recommendations in January or February.

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. . . . The panel has gone through a process to set standards for why the name of a school would be changed, to research to the best of their ability the backgrounds of the individuals or places that are namesakes for a school, and analyzed those under the panel’s established guiding principles. From this process, the panel generated 42 schools covering 44 campuses that it intends to recommend to the board.”

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.

[So, I have made a mistake. It was not President Abraham Lincoln’s December, 1862 order to execute the “Dakota 38” that I had presumed was the basis for the San Francisco Board of Education’s action in renaming Abraham Lincoln High School.]

First grade teacher Jeremiah Jeffries, who serves as facilitator for the School Names Advisory Committee, said in an email to Courthouse News:

“The school renaming process is a continuation of the fight for justice. I know educators like myself and the Mayor are on the same side of things in the fight for justice and wanting to do what we can for young people. We are not the problem. Racism and White supremacy has not taken a break and we will not either from trying to dismantle it.”

I did not know that President Abraham Lincoln was a racist or white supremacy advocate.

I think that it is not a good thing that those who are truly ignorant of our nation’s history are teaching the nation’s children and also making decisions to rename local schools on the basis of that same ignorance.

From the referenced San Francisco Chronicle article, I am adding the following paragraph:

"Frustrated parents have been circulating a petition calling on the district to reopen the schools and criticizing the city for prioritizing opening gyms, bars, churches and salons instead. Some residents have questioned why the mayor and supervisors aren’t doing more to reopen the schools, though they have almost no say in the process. The district, with approval from the health department, has the ultimate authority to get students back in their seats."