SF School Board Members Recalled After Prioritizing ‘Woke’ Agenda, Failure to Reopen Schools

After much frustration with their school board’s ‘woke’ agenda in lieu of any efforts to reopen schools, residents of San Francisco have decided to recall members after controversial left-wing efforts they believe were over-prioritized.

San Francisco parents began pushing to recall the newest members of their city’s Board of Education in January of 2021, after frustration mounted in regards to their slow approach concerning the reopening of schools. Instead, the board had busied themselves with renaming 44 school sites they claimed honored public figures who were linked to sexist and racist symbolism.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed said she did not understand why “the school board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.”

That plan was suspended by the school board after heated controversy in a city that is overwhelmingly democratic, as 85% of San Francisco residents voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the most recent presidential election.

More than 70% of voters moved to recall School Board President Gabriela Lopez, Vice President Faauuga Moliga, and Commissioner Alison Collins on Wednesday morning. Their temporary replacements will be named by Mayor London Breed, who has called the board’s priorities “severely misplaced.”

"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," Breed 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."

Commissioner Collins was also criticized for tweets she made in 2016 about the Asian community, saying Asian Americans use “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead.” Collins was not a school board member at the time of writing the tweets.

Some came to her defense. "Those messages were not racist. I think they could have been worded more tactfully, but she was in such a position of pain. A lot of us in the Asian community don't speak up enough,” said Lowell High School alum Vivian Tong.

The Asian community in San Francisco saw the school board’s efforts to end merit-based admissions at the elite Lowell High School, where a majority of students are Asian, as an attack on their community. Black students are often overlooked when a school relies on testing scores as opposed to personality and recommendation-based admissions. For Asian students, it is the exact opposite.

“Asian American kids were being essentially graded as having less than half the personality of the average white kid, seven times less personality than the average Hispanic applicant, and eight times less personality than a Black applicant with similar academic qualifications,” says attorney Lee Cheng, a co-founder and director of the Friends of Lowell Foundation.

The vote to recall the school board members for their inability to reopen schools proves what most Americans already know: many are struggling with how to navigate the reopening of schools during the COVD-19 pandemic.

Conservatives have made “parents’ rights” a rallying cry in their efforts to send kids to school, even if that means their child goes to school without a mask or unvaccinated. However, even parents who have received their own adult dose of the COVID-19 vaccine struggle with navigating whether or not to vaccinate their children.

As of January 18, 2022, only 28.1% of those aged five to eleven had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended anyone aged five years or older to get the vaccination, calling it a “critical” tool in mitigating the spread of the disease.