SF School Board President Accuses Mayor Of ‘Division’ For Criticizing Renaming, Re-Opening Plans

The president of the San Francisco school board accused Mayor London Breed of stoking division after Breed criticized the school board for renaming 44 public schools that are closed and don’t have a firm re-opening date.

“When it comes to schools, any opportunity to cause further division is what the mayor has contributed to,” School Board President Gabriela Lopez told The New Yorker Magazine in an interview published on Saturday. “And it’s unfortunate because we need to be clear about where we are in this process.”

Breed, who has been open to the idea of renaming schools, has repeatedly said that now isn’t the time to do it, and that the public school system needs to focus on re-opening. After the school board voted 6-1 in favor of changing the names of 44 schools, including some named after Dianne Feinstein and Abraham Lincoln, Breed rebuked the board.

“What I cannot understand is 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,” said the mayor, whose own city attorney is currently suing the school district over its re-opening plans.

Lopez called the idea that the district doesn’t have a reopening plan “completely false,” and said they were working to reopen schools “every single day.” She also defended the board’s decision to rename schools, a policy that has been criticized for not including historians and containing factual errors.

“They included a diverse set of community members, people with a set of experiences that contribute to these discussions, people from different backgrounds who are also educated in their own rights,” Lopez told The New Yorker. 

More from The New Yorker interview:

[NEW YORKER]: The reason I bring this up is that some of the historical reasoning behind these decisions has been contested—not so much how we should view the fact that George Washington was a founder of the country and a slave holder but, rather, factual things like Paul Revere’s name being removed for the Penobscot Expedition, which was not actually about the colonization of Native American lands. And so there were questions about whether historians should have been involved to check these things.

[LOPEZ]: I see what you’re saying. So, for me, I guess it’s just the criteria was created to show if there were ties to these specific themes, right? White supremacy, racism, colonization, ties to slavery, the killing of indigenous people, or any symbols that embodied that. And the committee shared that these are the names that have these ties. And so, for me, at this moment, I have the understanding we have to do the teaching, but also I do agree that we shouldn’t have these ties, and this is a way of showing it.

[NEW YORKER]: I guess part of the problem is that the ties may not be what the committee said they were. That’s why I brought it up.

[LOPEZ]: So then you go into discrediting the work that they’re doing, and the process that they put together in order to create this list. So when we begin to have these conversations, and we’re pointing to that, and we’re given the reasoning and they’re sharing why they made this choice and why they’re putting it out there, I don’t want to get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done.

Reads the full interview transcript here.

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