Welcome to my special newsletter about ways to change the San Francisco school board and how to get involved. This is update 11. 

Our first drive-thru for signing the school board recall petition was a huge success. Nearly 500 people showed up! And 20 volunteers made everything run smoothly.

We’re going to do more drive-thrus to meet demand. Here are the next two dates:

Sunday April 18
11am to 1pm
Eucalyptus Drive in front of Lowell High School

Saturday April 24
11am to 1pm
Eucalyptus Drive in front of Lowell High School

Drive-thru traffic flow map

Volunteers needed!
We can’t meet the drive-thru demand without volunteers.

Please fill out this form if you can help on April 18 or April 24.

NOTE: Only adults are allowed to handle petitions. If your teenagers want to volunteer, we need people to hold and wave direction signs at nearby intersections.

Get your own petition
Click here to download, print, sign, and mail your own petition today. Or drop it off at the Sunday drive-thrus. Anything you sign online doesn't count. The actual recall petition must be signed with pen on paper.

This newsletter also contains:

• The Case for Recalling the School Board

• Recall Timeline

• Action Items

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Thanks for your support,
Joel Engardio

THE CASE FOR RECALLING THE SCHOOL BOARD
There’s a strong case for recalling the San Francisco school board. Here are the reasons:

• Voting to fire top administrators not in line with the school board’s ideology, which created instability and left a vacuum of expertise that made navigating the pandemic even more difficult.

• Voting against hiring a consultant to create a plan for reopening schools.

• Voting to rename schools with a flawed process before making any plans to reopen schools.

• Voting to dismantle one of the nation’s top high schools rather than focus on reopening high schools or creating more high schools with high academic standards.

• Plus, Commissioner Alison Collins wrote racist tweets about Asian Americans in 2016 that resurfaced in 2021. She then sued the school district and her fellow commissioners for $87 million after they censured her for the tweets. Note the school district faces a $169 million deficit. 

The greatest indictment against the school board is that it neglected its core job: Getting students safely back into classrooms to avoid the harmful learning loss and mental health stress of being isolated at home on Zoom for more than a year.

As the school board descends into ever-more chaos and controversy, it’s important to remember how a majority of school board commissioners had failed parents and students long before the racist tweets by Alison Collins were exposed. 

And we can’t forget that the school board didn’t bother to start planning to reopen schools in earnest or back off its school renaming debacle until faced with lawsuits, recalls, and protests from frustrated and exhausted parents.

Click here to read the full case in more detail.

RECALL TIMELINE

TAKE ACTION
Fixing the school board is going to take four actions in the following order:

1. Decreasing the Distance: This parent-led group is focused on the need to safely reopen all public schools full time. Join their advocacy work. Read a profile about one of their “super mom” founders.
   

2. Recall SF School Board: Next, we need to recall the school board members who have failed their core responsibilities in so many ways. Get your petition here. Be sure to sign up on the recall website to stay informed or volunteer. The recall effort is run by parents Autumn Looijen and Siva Raj. Learn about their background in this profile video.
   

3. Better SF Public Schools: After the recall, we need to structurally change how the school board is formed so we don’t end up in the same situation again. This political action committee is run by parents Patrick Wolff and Jennifer Butterfoss. They are working to amend our city’s constitution with an initiative on the June 2022 ballot that would make the school board an appointed body with certain qualifications for running schools. Read their excellent research paper that makes the case for an appointed school board.
   

4. Friends of Lowell Foundation: If your children aspired to attend Lowell High School, join this group to restore Lowell as an academic and merit-based public high school and to boost academic preparation for all San Francisco public school students. Join here.

Do you have friends who would like this newsletter? Ask them to sign up here.

NOTE: This newsletter and previous updates are also published as blog posts. Click to read and share on social media:
Update 11 (Drive-thru petition success and more dates)
Update 10 (Drive-thru petition signing, the full case for recall)
Update 9 (Recall petitions ready for signing, petition instructions)
Update 8 (Perspective on why school board reform called for in first place)
Update 7 (Q&A with Decreasing the Distance leader Meredith Dodson)
Update 6 (Charter amendment launches to appoint versus elect school board)
Update 5 (Recall helpers 7,000 and growing, recall timeline)
Update 4 (Recall launches, find out who is behind it)
Update 3 (Where is the recall? What are the options?)
Update 2 (Lowell becomes lottery, school board says gay dad not diverse enough)
Update 1 (City Attorney lawsuit)
First Edition (How do you recall the school board? Process and hurdles)