SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — The city’s scandal-plagued school board officially suspended a decision to rename 44 schools as part of a racial reckoning that critics said went too far on Tuesday, granting a reprieve to America’s founding fathers.
On Zoom, the city’s Board of Education voted overwhelmingly to reverse its widely panned decision to remove the names of a third of San Francisco’s school children.
Honored people who are associated with racism, sexism and other injustices have been mentioned. These included schools designated for the Presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Revere, hero of the Revolutionary War. A school called Sen. Dianne Feinstein for many years was also listed.
The decision of Tuesday 6-0 means that, after all students have returned full time to learning, the school board cancels its vote from January and revisits the matter. It does not set a particular schedule.
The renaming debacle, along with many lawsuits and public ridicule was one of several self-inflicted debates the San Francisco School Board had to face during the pandemic.
Some of the objectives of the Board were pushed out by parents, students and elected officials – and the timing. The decision came at the end of January, with all public classrooms in San Francisco closed due to restrictions on coronavirus. They remain. They are still. Mayor London Breed, among others, considered that the board should focus on changing school names and not bringing children back into the classrooms as “offensive and totally unacceptable.”
This month, after more than a year of distance learning because of the pandemic, some of the youngest students in the city should return to their personal training. There is no schedule for returning students in middle and high schools.
The city’s names for a Roman Catholic saint were named by missionaries, the columnist and city scribe Carl Nolte wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle after a vote. “That obviously fits the new name guidelines.”
Feinstein Elementary made a list because it was decided to replace a flag that belonged to a long-standing display outside the town hall when she was mayor in 1984. It was not replaced when the flag was pulled down again.
Paul Revere was wrongly accused of seeking to colonise the Penobscot people by a renamed advisory committee. The name of Alamo primary school was also confused with the battle of Texas, rather than the Spanish word poplar.
Seeyew Mo, head of San Francisco Families, said on Thursday’s vote, “It feels like truth won. This time.” His group opposed the process of renaming and pointed at the faulty research. Mo, who also objected to the board’s “taking down procedure,” when a small group made the decision without a wider community in their schools: “I’m glad they came to their senses after lawsuits and the public pressure.” “Many people agree that names are being revisited, but simply disagree with what has happened.”
A committee set up in 2018 to study the names of district schools, in an international assessment of racial injustice that followed deadly clashes at the White Supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, led the renaming process. Schools and institutions across the country assess whether they should change names as their heroes reevaluate.
The meeting on Tuesday was also the first since last week the Board voted to remove one of its members, Mr. Alison Collins, from its function as Vice President and other titles on Asian Americans Tweets from 2016.
Collins said in the tweets, “white supremacists” were used by Asian Americans to think. Last week, she resisted appeals to resign and sued the district of school and five of its six colleagues for violation of its freedom of speech. She’s looking for damage of $87 million.
Harold Holzer called for the first “over correction” of the school board to be renamed. Holzer does not agree with the removal from high school that Abraham Lincoln’s name is due to Native Americans’ treatment in the administration of the San Francisco Committee.
Holzer, Lincoln Scholar and director of Roosevelt House of the Hunter College Public Policy Institute told Holzer, “I know people are going to be inspired and do not worship false images. “But, honestly, I have no better example of American history than Abraham Lincoln, at its highest level of idealism.”
Among other accomplishments including emerging from poverty, the struggles for equal opportunities, and the splitting away of the country, was the Emancipation Declaration issued by Lincoln in the mid-1863 Civil War.
“We are in great trouble if Lincoln doesn’t win,” Holzer said. “The results so far outweigh the errors. He’s worthy of adulation, I think.”
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