There was a meeting Sunday at Third Baptist Church in San Francisco at which several Black parents spoke about racist incidents their children had suffered at SF public schools.

"What do we do about this school district that's continuing to fail our children?" asked one grandparent, Paulette Brown, per KPIX.

Brown told the assembled group, organized by the NAACP, that her grandson Marcus had been kicked off a play structure at his school and was forced to transfer schools.

"Our children are being left behind," Brown said. "Our grandchildren are being left behind and we're tired of it. We shouldn't have to fight like this."

The Reverend Doctor Amos C. Brown, who is both a pastor at Third Baptist Church and the president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, led the meeting and said that he had received five separate complaints of racist incidents targeting Black students in the last three months alone.

According to KPIX, the meeting included discussion of a potential class-action lawsuit against the San Francisco Unified School District.

Reverend Brown added, per KPIX, "We have lost over 40,000 Black people from this city since 1970 and it's because of subtle and sometimes overt bigotry and racial attacks."

The San Francisco Unified School District has faced multiple claims of racism in recent years — and the debate about racial equity at the merit-based Lowell High School is likely to reignite this week after the release of the racial makeup of the incoming class there. The Class of 2028 at Lowell High is only going to be 1% Black if all 14 of the admitted Black students choose to attend. And it will be only 12.8% Latinx, with the remaining 84% of students in the class split between white and Asian students. In the broader city school population, as the Chronicle reports, Black students make up 7% of the student body, and Latinx students represent 35%.

This has frequently been the case in Lowell High classes, which are majority white and Asian, raising questions about the equity of the merit-based system, which favors students from middle- and upper-income families who have received better elementary school educations.

In 2020, the school board attempted to switch permanently to a lottery system at Lowell, to which parents broadly objected, and the board switched back to the merit-based system after the pandemic.

A newer, mayor-appointed school board member who was in favor of the merit-based system, Ann Hsu, also faced accusations of racial insensitivity in 2022, and she lost her election several months later to a challenger.