The board opened some schools for a single day at the end of the school year, just to qualify for state funding to pay teachers.
The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes.
The board has a member who made racist remarks on Twitter and, despite not losing her position, is suing the school board: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board...
These are other reasons to be dissatisfied.
More concerning to some people is that becoming a member of the SFBOE is a common launching point for the SF Board of Supervisors.
Kids weren't vaccinated.
A large unvaccinated reservoir population in constant contact with the vaccinated population is how you breed variants that are, e.g., more dangerous to young people (like Delta already is) and more likely to break through existing vaccines (which Delta also is, though not intensely so from the information I've seen.)
Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used only when really unavoidable, but to claim kids are a-OK and shouldn't be vaccinated ain't based on science I've read so far.
> Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms.
> Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction.
> Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
> A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate.
SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.
This is relevant because younger kids need more supervision and are less likely to spread COVID, while older kids need less supervision and are more likely to spread; therefor keeping older kids home and sending younger ones in might be totally rational. But it doesn’t seem like this gets brought up.
I'd like to expand on this one, as it's been a particular frustrating one. It launched San Francisco's school system into the national spotlight as our Board of Education debated this publicly and initially planned to spend millions of dollars before the outrage and backlash canceled these plans.
Amongst other issues, they did short, haphazard research on the origins of the names of the schools, instead typing common Hispanic surnames into Google/Wikipedia, finding the first result, and deciding that the word colonizer being mentioned in the Wikipedia article was sufficient to rename the school. They problem? Wrong person, they didn't bother to look so far as the school's website to determine who it was named after. Here's a video of the full deliberation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1jj33NBAH8
Some articles summarizing other issues with this process: https://abc7news.com/sfusd-san-francisco-unified-schools-dis...
While here, I'd also like to throw in this article about Alison Collins, the school board member who is suing her colleagues and the city for $87 million dollars: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Alis...
During the pandemic, the Board of Education announced that 44 schools were named after oppressors (many were justified, but the names committee also made numerous errors) and that principals and families needed to come up with new names for their schools over Zoom. Board member Gabriela Lopez defended even the egregious mistakes, demonstrating that she only cares about “uplifting” and “holding” people of color but not facts https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Unfortunately, Lopez is not up for recall yet, but her enablers are.
Alison Collins led the resolution to remove academic admissions to San Francisco’s magnet high school Lowell High. But instead of debating the pros and cons of having a magnet school, she caricatured the school as bed of “toxic racism” and dismissed the Asian parents who supported an admissions criteria as “a bunch of racists”. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?l... Afterwards, people discovered her previous tweets stereotyping Asians and her pattern of abusing her power (https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352). When her colleagues selected a different Vice President, she lashed out with a lawsuit calling her opponents racists (https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-...)
The other board members haven't done anything offensive but haven't shown any leadership either. They just enabled the radicals. We don't know exactly why SFUSD didn't open the schools this year (negotiations were behind closed doors), but I suspect it has to do with the board members' extreme deference to the teachers' union that endorsed them.
I encourage anyone who is a San Francisco citizen to print out the recall petitions and mail them in https://recallsfschoolboard.org/
See also this explainer The Case for Recalling the School Board https://www.engardio.com/blog/school-board-recall-case
> that's not a good enough reason
On the contrary, it's hard to think of more salient reason than that.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted my child to go back to school ASAP, but then I reminded by a teacher friend that their health was important, too.
I believe no one should be forced to work if the health conditions are unsafe, why should teachers exempt form this? There are too many examples of teachers who did die from COVID-19.
https://www.whsv.com/2021/02/17/ny-teacher-dies-from-covid-1...
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/nobody-knows-how-...