San Francisco will rename 44 schools, including campuses named after former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
The near-unanimous Monday vote by the San Francisco Board of Education, with only one dissenter, comes after years of debate — and much scorn, including from Mayor London Breed — over the reckoning of historical figures and their contentious, flawed legacies.
“It’s a message to our families, our students and our community,” board member Mark Sanchez said in the meeting, per the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s not just symbolic.”
The new namesakes for the schools must adhere to a new set of guidelines, including that individuals honored by a renaming are not slave owners or abetted in slavery or genocide, attached to human rights violations, or are “known racists and/or white supremacists.”
Washington and Jefferson, for instance, were slaveowners, while former San Francisco mayor Feinstein was listed after reportedly reinstating Confederate flags by City Hall in the ’80s. Lincoln, widely revered for his issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, was chosen based on “his treatment of First Nation peoples,” first-grade teacher Jeremiah Jeffries told the Chronicle in a widely circulated December quote.
Some other namesakes’ legacies, such as Junipero Serra, Jose Ortega and Vasco Nunez de Balboa, were based on colonization and abuses of indigenous people. Another storied figure, John Muir, was also selected for renaming due to comments that invoked racist stereotypes made toward Black people. (The Sierra Club’s executive director recently condemned its founder for these remarks.)
Schools have until April to determine the new names for their campuses, per KNTV-TV, which will then be voted on by board members.
The issue of renaming San Francisco’s schools has drawn national attention, with former President Donald Trump lending his tweeting powers in opposition to the decision. Some have criticized the lack of historian involvement in the renaming decision.
Even Mayor London Breed entered the fray, criticizing the renaming of schools and calling it “offensive” last year amid the pandemic and the continuation of school closures.
Breed said in a statement Wednesday: “This is an important conversation to have, and one that we should involve our communities, our families, and our students. 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.”
“Let’s bring the same urgency and focus on getting our kids back in the classroom, and then we can have that longer conversation about the future of school names,” her statement goes on to read.
A parent of a student at Adolph Sutro Elementary who spoke at the meeting, reported the Chronicle, spoke favorably of the decision. Sutro, a former mayor, discriminated against Black people who wanted to visit the baths named after him.
But others, such as Spring Utting, a parent of a student at Lowell High — another school set to be renamed — were concerned that the renaming deflects on the broader, more crucial issue of schools reopening.
“Is this meant to distract parents so we don’t ask what the school reopening plan is? Do they have one?” she told SFGATE. “Why isn’t that the first item on their agenda?”
“It’s deeply disappointing,” said Seeyew Mo, the executive director of Families for San Francisco, a school reopening advocacy group, “that the School Board paid zero attention to community input, even to the point of ignoring factual corrections.” The group published a report earlier this month, calling the work done by the renaming committee “deeply flawed.”
The saga concludes just a week after a scandal at Lowell in which racist slurs and pornography were shown in a schoolwide virtual forum.
Elsewhere in the Bay Area, UC Berkeley is continuing its efforts to rename or “un-name” buildings on campus. It removed the signage from the former Kroeber Hall, which was named after Alfred Kroeber, an anthropologist whose work, indigenous activists say, contributed to the erasure of Native Americans.
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