By James Sword, HANC Board
Despite the surge in COVID19 cases in SF and the higher transmissibility of the Delta variant particularly among children, San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) schools are open to in-person learning with fewer mitigation strategies than there were in the spring, and distance learning has been restricted to a small group of students. That was the single goal Decrease the Distance (DtD) had been pushing since Fall 2020.
By Fall/Winter 2020, after months of closed schools, having their kids at home, and long after tweeting “teachers are amazing, they should be paid more!” many parents in San Francisco turned on SFUSD. Not everybody within SFUSD became targets, certainly not the district administrators who wield power within 555 Franklin. The targets of the anger were some on the Board of Education (BOE) and the teacher’s union (UESF). For a little background, although the BOE has been the launching pad for Supervisors Haney, Walton, & Fewer, it is an obscure elected board that most people without children don’t pay attention to, but it is the site of a typical SF political battle between the Progressive left and Neo-Liberal center. It is also one of the only areas of our democracy that allows all adults, regardless of citizenship, to have a say through voting. Those elected serve a 4 year term, are paid squat, and spend a ridiculous amount of time in meetings. If you think being a teacher is a thankless job, run for the BOE. They have the power to ask questions and write resolutions stating their goals for SFUSD (which they did regarding school reopening in Dec 2020), but ultimately it’s the District Administrators’ jobs to ensure these resolutions are being followed.
While school districts around the country were opening in 2020, many with weakened or no teacher unions, San Francisco was mired in a debate between those demanding schools open “now” and those demanding a layered safety plan to protect the children and adults in school buildings. During this ever-deepening political fight I went to a DtD rally and a United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) rally. I wanted to see what DtD was all about and to provide some evidence that not all white, middle class, socioeconomically stable parents shared the same view. My wife (former teacher) and kids joined me at the UESF rally as it was important in the climate of SF politics to support those who have made a career of educating our children.
The DtD rally was well attended, 100s of parents, kids, and a few politicians. Myself and another parent (who also happens to be a teacher in SFUSD) quietly stood at a nearby corner with signs that read “I support UESF,” “Kids over Politics,” and a couple other non-hostile, union and teacher supporting signs. While most of the crowd was friendly, we even had a couple come up and say they supported and appreciated us, the people in the crowd that stood out were the handful of people who booed or hissed at us as they walked by, and a parent who yelled, “we don’t want teachers like you!” Sadly, when these folks did such actions nobody in the crowd around them called them out – silence is acceptance.
The UESF rally was a bike supported car caravan that started near the Bayview, wiggled through the Mission, and ended at 555 Franklin (SFUSD headquarters) - there were probably 100 cars. The UESF rally was translated in two languages, didn’t run into any issues, and peacefully blocked traffic on Franklin for about 5 minutes as the leaders spoke to how teachers looked forward to the return to school and why they wanted to wait until there was a comprehensive safety plan. Given what we knew then, and especially given the COVID19 Delta variant hitting SF at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, anybody with any choice would do the same – note that City Hall did not open up until Summer 2021, and many of the parents at the DtD rally (including myself) still work from home. Teachers knew that safety procedures needed to be layered, and given how hard they have had to fight for basic needs pre-COVID19, they didn’t necessarily trust the school district to take all precautions if they weren’t made explicitly clear to all.
After 6 months of political mudslinging, Elementary Schools in SFUSD reopened in April 2021, as did middle and high schools for small groups of students. Remember that COVID is evidenced to spread easier through children over 10. Prior to reopening, all cautions were taken to minimize spread within schools (thanks to UESF’s activism and strong negotiations), except for decades old needs for improved infrastructure. For teachers, families with people at home who are immunocompromised or other health conditions, and anybody who was sympathetic to teachers – who still think teachers are under paid and overworked, this timing was appropriate. For those who were pressuring the core of SF centrist Neo-Liberal politicians to jump in, it was 6 months too late.
By the end of the school year, DtD supported efforts by State Representatives – Weiner, Chiu, and Ting - to withhold $12m from SFUSD because high schools opened to all seniors for only a few days at the end of the school year (note, family of DtD leadership gave the maximum donations to Ting and Chiu summer 2020). While this may have been playing into the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law, it came off as vindictive and petty given financial constraints to California public schools due to Prop 13. DtD also lobbied legislators in Sacramento to not renew the distance learning waiver that schools had used to be able to continue teaching when school buildings were closed.
In the Summer of 2021 DtD rebranded to become San Francisco Parent Coalition (SFPC). Presumably DtD is rebranding because they don’t want to be associated with outlawing distance learning, which they fought to get rid of despite distance learning being seen as a necessary option by many parents concerned about their children’s health and safety. With nearly 150 positive cases in the first 2 weeks of school leading to numerous quarantines, and the threat of wildfire smoke looming this fall, the district has been restricted in its ability to use distance learning as a way to continue students’ access to education through a constantly changing pandemic and climate crisis.
DtD/SFPC is soon to be a 501c(4) to “…weigh in on Board of Education elections.” It is curious that this “grassroots parents collective” has quickly become a lobbying organization. They have also created a parallel universe to SFUSD where they’ve started their own Parent Advisory Committees (PACs) that mirror those of SFUSD. These PACs do not adhere to the same accessibility requirements required of SFUSD. DtD does not consistently offer sign language translators, captioning, nor translate their activities into multiple languages. While they claim to speak for so many families in San Francisco, their actions seem to speak for a vocal minority.
One of the issues I have with DtD/SFPC is they are another example of the top of the socio-economic food chain sweeping in years after many others have been trying to fix something. An example of this is after a couple days of effort in trying to get ventilation improvements in the district – after schools had reopened – DtD/SFPC took credit for those needed changes implemented soon after their efforts. No credit was given to one BOE member who brought up issues with air quality and ventilation in Fall 2020, nearly a year before DtD/SFPC, nor to UESF who were demanding air filters in every classroom and district teachers who brought up the lack of opening windows in their schools pre-COVID19. Once any improvement occurs, they then take credit for said improvements despite the efforts of others and the fact that the changes were in the works before any petition was drafted.
It isn’t that lobbying sympathetic politicians to get your way isn’t an effective tactic, it is how our system works, the issue is that these politicians only seem to be sympathetic to the same people that wield power and connections, and this is how our broken system always plays out. It will be interesting to see where the funding comes from and whether they push for positive change or continue to push for the status quo. We need to support and amplify the communities that have been working on these issues, not punch them down, not attack them in social media and behind the scenes. Instead of then taking credit, we need to recognize those who came before us.
In order to help them support community efforts in bringing our city back to life under COVID19, I have reached out to DtD/SFPC and asked them to support community efforts for SFMTA to immediately activate the 21 Hayes and 6 Parnassus MUNI lines. These two bus lines support no fewer than 10 public and private schools, including the one where I and the founder of DtD’s/SFPC’s husband went to school. We challenge them to use their newfound clout to bring needed changes to this city as we dig out of difficult times and not just settling for what didn’t work for so many before COVID19.