San Francisco school renaming effort stalls

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The movement to change the names of dozens of San Francisco public schools hit a roadblock Sunday when the board of education said it was canceling the renaming proceedings until schools reopen for in-person learning, a blow to activists in the city who came under fire from the right and the left for their renaming plan.

After years of discussion and committee meetings, the San Francisco School Board voted six-to-one in January to rename 44 schools in the district that they felt honored people with discriminatory legacies

The backlash was immediate. The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board denounced the decision. Fox News and others said changing schools named for Lincoln and Washington was a step too far.

Pundits called it liberal overreach, woke insanity, cancel culture. But unlike the usual right wing reactions to progressive proposals, the school board also faced backlash from the left.

The city’s mayor, London Breed, a Democrat, joined the chorus of criticism in January, calling the plan “offensive” and a distraction from more pressing issues like getting students back in the classroom.

activists and some board members said the comparison created a false choice. The two issues had little to do with each other, and their conflation only fanned the flames of the backlash, they said.

A senior adviser to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, didn’t sound too different from Trump when he told Politico that his party had “become parodies of ourselves.”

Those involved in the movement said this backlash was a willful misinterpretation of their work.

Alison Collins, a school board member who voted for the change, said that the intent is not to erase history but to “create space for new people who deserve to be celebrated.”

“Nobody is going to not know who George Washington is. Nobody is going to not know who Lincoln is,” Collins said.

The San Francisco Unified School District’s board president, Gabriela Lopez, supported the renaming, but ultimately sided with its critics, announcing Sunday she would shelf the renaming effort until after schools reopened.

“We need to slow down and provide more opportunities for community input,” Lopez wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “That cannot happen until AFTER our schools are back in person.”

This isn’t the first time the school district faced backlash when trying to update its schools. In 2019, the school board caused an uproar by deciding to paint over a series of murals at George Washington High School that showed Washington owning slaves and beginning the conquest of Native Americans. The board ultimately reversed its decision, instead choosing to cover the murals. But the damage was done.