Recently the San Francisco Board of Education (SFBoE) had its first meeting of 2022. I was cautiously optimistic. Everyone had taken a few weeks off and I really hoped we could all put our knives away and work together.
For some reason, that is just so not the SFBoE. I tweeted about Chris Clauss, a Special Education teacher at George Washington who begged for help. It was hard to hear.
But more problematic to me was the naked open warfare among the commissioners themselves. At that meeting, the SFBoE elected the 2022 President and Vice-President. Important decisions, but the issue did not merit the amount of time it spent.
After a relatively non-controversial vote in support of Commissioner López—something I tweeted about at the time—the meeting took bizarre turns.
First, Ms. Collins accused her colleagues of “undermining” the safety of our schools:
Then she accused her colleagues of “enabling” cyber-bullying and hate speech.
Mr. Moliga was nominated for Vice-President (as was Ms. Lam and Mr. Alexander). But the bickering continued.
Prompting Mr. Moliga to just say “screw it, I’m out.” For fun, Mr. Alexander did too. And, really, who can blame them?
So Ms. Lam prevailed, but watch the video. You can read the body language as well as I can.
We have serious issues in 2022. We need to find a new Superintendent. We need to go back to the State in June with a budget. We need to figure out a way to close the learning gap for our most vulnerable kids. We need to tackle seriously our declining infrastructure. We simply have no time for petty arguments like we saw at that first meeting.