Covid anger drives recall election concentrating on 3 San Francisco college leaders
In this Sept. 26, 2018 photo, Alison Collins, right, speaks during a meeting in San Francisco. | Liz Hafalia / San Francisco Chronicle via AP, file
SAN FRANCISCO – Voters with “recall fever” will decide next year whether they want to recall three members of the San Francisco school board in one of the most significant firing attempts in the country, fueled by parents’ anger over pandemic closures and controversial school renaming, including Senator Dianne Feinstein was considered unworthy.
The city’s electoral department on Monday confirmed a February 15 dismissal for three officials on the San Francisco Education Committee – President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins. Recall supporters filed 80,000 signatures to remove each commissioner, far more than the 50,000 required.
The San Francisco elections were announced just weeks after California voters overwhelmingly rejected the removal of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom. It is the most recent reminder that voters are in a bad mood after a prolonged period of the effects of Covid-19 on their lives, and shows the politicized environment that school principals are increasingly facing.
“Callback fever is alive and well in San Francisco and the voters are all in,” said Democratic strategist Katie Merrill, who supported the effort but had no formal role. “They were angry, they were frustrated with the school board, which” shirked its responsibility during the pandemic – trying to get children back to school. “
Joshua Spivak, one of the country’s foremost recall experts, said Monday that the movement in San Francisco reflects how school board members in particular have been targeted by recalls across the country this year, in some areas due to Covid-19 policy and in others because of fears that schools teach “critical racial theory”.
In 2021 there were around 200 individual attempts – the lion’s share unsuccessful – to recall members of the local California school board, Spivak said. And that makes the San Francisco Board of Education perhaps one of the largest and most momentous of those efforts in the country right now, he said.
Spivak said the “largest and most important recall by the nation in the country’s history” was the removal of school board members in Little Rock, Ark. in 1959 for attempting to maintain segregation.
While most efforts to recall school board members never get to the vote, Spivak said that once they qualify, there is a 75 to 80 percent chance of success, which means that the San Francisco effort is likely to pass with an all-absentee ballot. And with issues that “bridge the partisan divide that makes it even more interesting” – a choice that is being watched across the country, he said.
López and Collins did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but Moliga said the recall had little to do with his positions on education.
“Trying to call me back is politically motivated, not educational,” he said. “This electoral process will bring these motives to light, and I look forward to this discussion.”
As with the Newsom recall, the attempt to recall the San Francisco school board was fueled by parents’ frustration with the pandemic policy. San Francisco took weeks longer than other major counties to fully open this spring, despite the city having comparatively low Covid-19 rates, a situation that upset parents who were pushing for classroom instruction.
The board further angered some voters during the pandemic by deciding to end performance-based admission for its elite Lowell High School, a decision that should address racial inequalities.
In perhaps the most sensational move, the board drew national ridicule for its decision in January to remove the names of 44 schools, including President Abraham Lincoln, President George Washington, and Senator Feinstein – all while the actual campuses were closed. The board decided that the historical figures were linked to historical racism or oppression; In Feinstein’s case, it was problematic that in 1984 it replaced a destroyed Confederate flag that had been part of a historical exhibition in City Hall.
The board finally decided in April not to continue the name changes, but not before it was derided by more conservative corners as an example of liberalism going too far.
Lopez’s meandering interview with The New Yorker in February didn’t help, as it seemed to gloss over whether some of the reasons for the decisions were historically correct. Lopez told The New Yorker, “Lincoln is not someone I normally admire or see as a hero because of these specific instances in which he has contributed to the pain of decimation of people – this is not something I want to ignore. “
Collins sued the school district and her fellow board members in March after they voted to remove her from her vice presidency based on tweets she wrote in 2016 criticizing Asian Americans. Collins, who accused Asian Americans of “using white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘move forward”, dropped her $ 87 million lawsuit on the same day in September that callback supporters filed the signatures to try to displace them.
A federal judge had dismissed the lawsuit a month earlier, and Collins chose not to fight it. Lopez was the only board member not named in the lawsuit.
