Our Take on SF School Board Recall
THE RECALL PROCESS
The California recall process can be considered The People’s Impeachment; a necessary tool to be used by voters when no other remedy is available.
Despite what opponents of recall may say, recalling an elected official is a democratic process. It is an exercise of the same power that elects an official: voting, and is a tool that reminds elected officials that they are not given carte blanche to do whatever they wish in office.
The California Constitution allows voters to recall and remove elected state officials and justices of the State Supreme Court. Likewise, the San Francisco City Charter allows people to remove elected officials before the end of their term. Our state and local laws do not require a justification for recall, but they require a significant number of voter signatures in order to hold a recall election. In San Francisco, a recall petition must be signed by at least 10% of voters from the previous election and submitted to election officials.
Voting is an individual decision. We believe the decision to support or oppose a recall (either by voting and/or by signing the petition) belongs to each voter and should be respected. It is a personal, democratic, and hopefully, informed decision.
Families for San Francisco supports the mechanism of recall as a lawful democratic process. However, cutting short an elected official’s chance to govern should be carefully considered. Therefore, we believe any decision to recall must be based on well thought-out guiding principles that can be applied equally to all elected officials.
PRINCIPLES FOR RECALL
Although our state and local laws are silent on what justifies a recall, we believe that similar to an impeachment the justification for a recall must clear a high bar.
Volunteers at Families for San Francisco came together to discuss what sort of principles ought to apply when evaluating recalls in California. As a group, we agreed that a recall decision should take into account the following principles:
Performance: failure to perform the duties of the office to the minimum standard; abdication of duty.
Process: undemocratic process while in office; blatant disregard of rules and procedures.
Power: abuse of power and position to harass or diminish the voice of constituents.
Interest: placing personal interest over the interest of the public and/or the institution the official oversees.
Conduct: pattern of conduct that disrupts the proper functioning of the position, office, or agency.
As background to inform our debate, our volunteers researched the recall rules in other states. We found the following grounds for recall in other jurisdictions instructive:
Criminal conduct
Misconduct
Gross incompetence
Failure to perform duties
Lack of fitness (mental/physical)
Malfeasance (wrongdoing)
Misfeasance (permissible but inappropriate conduct)
Nonfeasance (omission)
Misappropriation of public property or funds
Violation of ethical code
Violation of oath of office
Corruption
Oppression
Extreme bias
Misuse of office
It is our recommendation that recalls in California be based on one or more of the five principles listed above. Again, we believe a recall should only be used in an emergency as a tool of last resort.
APPLICATION TO SFUSD BOARD OF EDUCATION COMMISSIONERS
San Francisco’s public schools are suffering from many years of dysfunctional governance by the Board of Education. Long-lasting improvement will only come from an intelligent well-crafted reform of the governance structure of the Board (we are particularly excited about the work being done at Better Public Schools). Recalling individual commissioners will not accomplish this necessary goal.
This particular Board has acted so egregiously that it has provoked an attempt to recall all three commissioners who are currently eligible for recall. We now assess the merits of the recall campaign, both in its general use and in its particular application to each of the named commissioners.
Applying the principles we agreed upon as a group, Families for San Francisco recommends the following:
President Gabriela López - RECALL
We support the recall of President López for multiple reasons. She has not been performing to the minimum standard (principle #1) as the leader of the school board. During this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, she has been unable to meet the moment and focus on the critical needs of the SFUSD student body. Time and again, President López has ignored prescribed processes in managing meetings and taking Board actions (principle #2), demonstrated extreme bias (principle #4 and #5) and abused her power and position to harass or diminish the voice of constituents (principle #3).
The first example of President López’s disregard for democratic processes is her manipulation of public comment in a way that skewed public perception of the level of support for various proposals. The most recent example occurred at the March 25, 2021 Board meeting, in which more than 1,000 callers dialed in hoping to speak about Commissioner Collins’ anti-Asian comments. President López allocated a flat 20 minutes for each side, which limited the public’s ability to participate in the discussion and obscured whether public opinion on the issue was evenly divided.
Second, President López has manipulated the Board’s meeting agenda to the detriment of public school families. Despite the Board’s claims that reopening was top priority, the topic of reopening rarely appeared at the top of meeting agendas. Instead, school reopening was so low on the agenda that the Board routinely did not address this topic until 6 or more hours into meetings, in effect stifling public comment. While school reopening is a monumental task for any school board to oversee, by law the SF school board has an obligation to provide in-person education to the greatest extent possible and as public servants the Board has a duty to respond to the needs of public school families.
Three other notable examples of President López’s disregard for laws, rules and procedures are:
School Renaming: The Board rushed the renaming resolution without adhering to the legal requirements under the Brown Act. Following massive public outcry and a formal legal objection, President López announced in a newspaper Op-Ed that renaming would be “paused” but did not formally rescind the resolution as required under Board rules. This led to a lawsuit that ultimately forced the Board vote to rescind.
Lowell Admissions: The Board proposed and passed Lowell’s admission policy changes within 10 days. President López allowed certain members of the public who agreed with the resolution to participate in the Board’s discussion after public comments ended. See transcript and video here.
Interview of Parent Advisory Council Applicant: President López showed an egregious lack of leadership in allowing an unprofessional, offensive, and borderline unlawful discussion to ensue regarding Parent Advisory Council applicant Seth Brenzel. The two-hour “interview” consisted of the Board scrutinizing Mr Brenzel’s race and sexual orientation (as well as the race of his child) without asking him a single question. This identity politics debate in Mr Brenzel’s presence and at his expense only avoided being illegal because of the last minute intervention of the SFUSD lawyer.
The above examples also exhibit President Lopez’s extreme bias (principle #4 and #5) and abuse of power to diminish constituents (principle #3). She allowed the Board -- amidst a global pandemic -- to become distracted by the sloppy renaming effort and the fast-tracked change to Lowell admissions, rather than remaining laser focused on maintaining or improving academic standards and student mental health and connecting equity to student opportunity, learning, and achievement. In fact these distractions at the board level have compounded inequity. They have resulted in an overall lack of confidence in the district, decreased 2021/22 enrollment, potential loss of funding from the state ($12 million), national embarrassment, and most importantly a decline in the academic achievement of our students with students of color suffering the most, according to SFUSD data.
Most recently, President López exhibited extreme partisanship, placed personal interests over those of the public and the district (principles #4 and #5) in her response to Commissioner Collins’ anti-Asian bias and the $87 million dollar lawsuit against the district and fellow commissioners. The Board president is the principal officer to be held to account when the Board’s and school district’s actions are challenged. President López has a duty to represent and protect the interests of the district. Instead, she attended the rally where the lawsuit was announced, thus making clear that she stood with the person suing the district for almost 10% of the district’s entire budget during a time of budgetary shortfall. By aligning herself with an individual who is adverse to the district she allowed her personal prerogatives to trump her duty to act as a steward of the school district or at least remain neutral in the conflict.
We believe the people should respond by removing President López from the Board of Education.
Commissioner Alison Collins - RECALL
Commissioner (and former Vice President) Collins has failed to perform to the minimum standard of a vice president (principle #1), disregarded proper processes (principle #2), abused her office to harass and diminish constituents (principle #3), demonstrated extreme bias in her actions on the Board (principle #4 and #5), and has continually disrupted the proper functioning of the Board (principle #5) -- all while failing to focus on the critical needs of the SFUSD student body during the pandemic.
Commissioner Collins has demonstrated extreme bias (principle #4) in her actions on the school board. In one significant example on June 6th, 2020, she, as a non-officer Commissioner at the time, was the driving force against the Superintendent’s request to hire a consultant to shepherd the district through the pandemic towards reopening. She staunchly objected despite the Superintendent’s statement of dire need for outside help and his determination that the proposed consultant was suitable. Her objection was based on an ideological stance against charter schools and the proposed consultant’s involvement with them. By leading the charge to reject the proposal, she allowed her personal bias to trump the immediate needs of the 54,000 students in the district.
Moreover, the recently uncovered anti-Asian tweets by Commissioner Collins illustrate her extreme bias (principle #4 and #5) against the AAPI community who make up 40% of SFUSD’s student population, and her subsequent refusal to apologize unequivocally illustrates her disregard for the reputational harm she caused to her SFUSD constituents. She apologized “for the pain” her words “may have caused” but defended her comments as part of an attempt to fight racism against BIPOC students. Consequently, many AAPI constituents, SF voters, the mayor, and a plethora of elected leaders and political organizations lost confidence in her ability to serve the district in a fair and unbiased manner and have called for her resignation.
To make matters worse, her decision to launch a lawsuit seeking outrageous financial compensation from both her fellow commissioners and the school district in response to the Board vote to remove her VP title and committee assignments shows a blanket disregard for her fiduciary responsibility to the district she was elected to oversee (principle #3). These actions, coupled with her refusal to resign from the Board, have encumbered the Board with a conflict of interest that puts her own financial gain directly at odds with financial loss to the District and other Board members (principle #4) and clearly disrupt the proper functioning of the Board in a very real way (principle #5).
Before the anti-Asian tweets were uncovered, Commissioner Collins has abused her power and position to harass or diminish the voice of constituents (principle #3).She consistently questioned the motives of commenters, calling parents racist when they disagree with her, and attacking student journalists at the Lowell student newspaper after making a false accusation (tweet). A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle documented in detail cases in which she forced out SFUSD employees.
Finally, while she was Vice President she displayed a disregard for board processes (principle #2), Commissioner Collins pushed the decision on admission changes to Lowell after promising parents that no permanent changes to Lowell admissions would be made during the 2020-21 academic year. She did so without consulting the SFUSD Climate Survey on student experience that was available and produced by the district.
The actions taken by Commissioner Collins have antagonized the people she is charged to serve. The people should respond by removing her from office.
Vice President Faauuga Moliga - NO RECALL
We do not see a reasonable argument to support recalling Vice President Moliga based on the principles that we have laid out. His performance, however, has been sub-par. For example, he voted to:
Decline professional consulting help explicitly requested by the Superintendent to reopen schools.
Support the Renaming Resolution despite its flaws.
Support changing of Lowell Admissions policy without consulting data.
It is worth noting that Commissioner Moliga was not in a leadership position on the Board of Education until recently. While he voted along with the majority to support Board actions that have led to a waste of time and SFUSD resources during a period of crisis, we do not believe that these actions amount to an abdication of duty, an undemocratic process, an abuse of power to oppress constituents, a showing of self-interest, or a pattern of disruptive conduct that would justify a recall.