After watching the board prioritize school renaming over reopening, these parents fought back.
Siva Raj was already frustrated his two kids were not back in class when controversy erupted: The San Francisco Board of Education had decided that 44 local schools named after such troubling American figures as Abraham Lincoln and Paul Revere must be rechristened.
Raj, a new parent in the San Francisco district, was concerned. It was “the first time it really kind of hit me that things were not A-okay” with the school system, he says.
He decided to tune in to the board’s meeting in early February. What he discovered, he told National Review, was “disaster after disaster.” The board spent most of its time on topics such as racial diversity at a highly selective, top-performing magnet school, and whether a gay white dad was “diverse” enough for a volunteer parent committee made up exclusively of women.
School reopening was at the bottom of the agenda. Parents couldn’t speak on it until almost midnight. To Raj, it was clear that social justice was higher on the to-do list than opening schools.
“Suddenly it was obvious that these guys had done no work on the reopening front,” he says. “Labor agreements were not done. School sites were not ready. Reopening was not a priority.”
Days later, over a Valentine’s Day plate of brownies with his partner, Autumn Looijen, and some of their friends, the state of the city’s schools came up. Someone, they decided, needed to recall the school board. Raj and Looijen figured it might as well be them.
Less than a month later, the couple have filed paperwork for an official notice of intention for a recall petition. They’ve got a website, an email list of nearly 8,000 people, a Facebook page with more than 700 followers, and they’ve attracted the notice of local and national news outlets, including the San Francisco Examiner and the Wall Street Journal.
They also appear to have made on impression on the board, which has since postponed the school renaming effort and apologized for the way it was handled. Last week, school officials and teachers’ union leaders agreed on a plan to reopen six elementary schools by mid April, with additional schools reopening later, according to media reports. Class sizes will be limited.
Board President Gabriela López, one of the members Raj and Looijen are trying to recall, declined to comment on the recall effort when reached via email, telling National Review, “We are fully focused on returning to in-person learning.”
The school-board members seem to have “built this wall of indifference around them” to parent concerns, Raj says. The only thing that seemed to make an impression on them was a lawsuit filed by the city trying to force its own school board to reopen schools.
“We started saying, ‘The only other thing we can use to put pressure on them is starting a recall,’” Looijen says.
Raj and Looijen, a couple of Bay Area tech professionals, may seem an unlikely pair to be leading the recall effort. They started dating only last summer after meeting on Tinder, and neither of them lived in San Francisco proper at the time.
Raj was living in Pleasanton, a Bay Area suburb, with his two kids, ages eight and 14. Looijen was living in Los Altos, another suburb, and shared custody of her three kids, four, eight and eleven, with their dad.
Raj and Looijen moved to San Francisco in December. “We moved to San Francisco because personally we wanted to be here, but also we believe generally that the diversity the city offers is unique and something that our kids would value,” Raj says.
While they both live in the city now, Looijen’s kids aren’t enrolled in schools there. They’re still enrolled in the Los Altos district, where their dad lives and where Looijen keeps a small home to stay at on school nights. Her kids are in a hybrid-learning model.
Raj’s kids now are enrolled in San Francisco schools. Distance learning has been hard, particularly for his older son, a high-school freshman who misses friends and playing football.
Looijen says they expected to get pushback for being so new to the district. But most parents have been welcoming and may be happy that someone is taking the reins.
“This is home,” she says of San Francisco. “I think there’s no time limit, there’s no amount of time you have to spend somewhere before you’re, like, ‘Well, this is my home, and I care about what happens here.’”
Raj says they reached out to some other San Francisco parent groups. They were mostly supportive of the recall, but no one else was willing to take the lead, either because they didn’t think that it would be successful, or they didn’t want to stick their necks out.
“We were, like, I don’t care about that anymore,” Raj says. “I care about my kids. There’s nothing that’s more important for me than to see my kids have a life and to feel good about their education — and to take that one thing that I care about the most from me, man, I mean, I’m coming for you.”
The recall is focused on three board members: López, the board president; Alison Collins, the board’s vice president; and Commissioner Faauuga Moliga. They’re the only members who’ve been on the board long enough to qualify for a recall. Collins and Moliga did not respond to emails from National Review seeking comment on the recall.
The board’s four other members won’t qualify to be recalled until summer. Raj and Looijen figure that if they build the support and infrastructure for the first round of recalls, the second round will be much easier.
Raj and Looijen expect to have their petition approved in April; then they’ll have 60 days to collect signatures. They need about 50,000 signatures from registered San Francisco voters, but they’re aiming for 70,000 in case some are rejected.
And how do they intend to collect all those signatures during a global pandemic? “Good question,” Raj says. “Now you know why most people have backed away.”
The couple intend to make petitions available on their website. They’ll have some petition-signing events, including drive-through events. Some local business already have volunteered to be petition-collection spots and to make petitions available to customers.
While the recall effort is clearly political, Raj and Looijen don’t see it as a partisan issue.
“We have talked to people across the political spectrum, and they are all saying the same thing,” Looijen notes. The board members are “totally failing at this basic competence issue.”
Looijen points out that the school board has become a jumping-off point for future political careers in state and local government.
“San Francisco is a city known for earthquakes,” he adds. “Are these the people you want in charge when an earthquake hits?”
Raj and Looijen aren’t the only locals trying to change the direction of the school board. Another group, Families for San Francisco, recently launched its Campaign for Better San Francisco Public Schools. While Raj and Looijen are focusing on the recall effort, the Better Public Schools campaign also is supporting a charter amendment that would turn school-board seats into appointed rather than elected positions.
Attempts to reach leaders of the Better Public Schools campaign via email and on the phone were unsuccessful. Raj and Looijen are not affiliated with that effort, but the two campaigns support each other.
Raj and Looijen intend to move forward with the recall, even if most San Francisco schools do reopen in the coming months. They understand that it will be difficult to achieve success and that it will be up to the citizens of San Francisco to decide whether they want to recall and replace the board members.
“If they do a tremendous job, and they prove themselves to the rest of the city, so be it,” Raj says of the board members. “But we’re going to see this through — all the way through.”