The SF Unified School District is such a mess that most school board candidates declined to run for re-election. These are the people running for the four seats that are up for a vote on Election Day.
The Tuesday, November 5 election will determine the direction of the San Francisco Unified School District in many consequential ways. For one, San Franciscans will vote on whether to grant SFUSD a $790 million bond measure, the largest in the city’ history, as the district struggles with a massive deficit. And there are also four seats on the SF school board up for grabs on the ballot. This is a particularly difficult decision because only one member is running for reelection, as the three other sitting board members decided to cut bait and not run again.
So four of the seven school board seats will be filled by Tuesday’s vote. Eleven candidates are running, and the top four vote-getters will win those seats. And they’ll have to deal with huge decisions on whether to close schools after Superintendent Matt Wayne’s sudden resignation left the school closing process in limbo, how to replace the new interim superintendent, and how to address a possible state takeover of the district’s finances after years of fiscal mismanagement.
If you thought the 2022 school board recall would stabilize the district, lordy, it has not. Yet another political school board controversy bubbled up in June when the teacher’s union gave its endorsement of four candidates. The union endorsed Matt Alexander — the only sitting member running for reelection — and moderate candidates Jaime Huling, Parag Gupta and John Jersin, who had teamed up to form a “slate.” That endorsement is quite coveted, and many voters would simply look to that endorsement and vote for those four candidates.
But many of recall-backing parent activist groups were furious that Huling, Gupta, and Jersin formed an alliance with Alexander, and froze out their preferred moderate candidate, attorney Supryia Ray. Ray had been a big advocate for bringing back eighth-grade algebra and merit-based admissions at Lowell High.
And if you’re a recall backer, Mayor Breed’s post-recall appointment Ann Hsu, who lost her 2022 reelection bid, is running again. Hsu gained notoriety over remarks about Black students that were widely considered pretty racist.
Other candidates include Laurance Lem Lee, who authored a recent civil grand jury report on the district’s shortage of credentialed teachers. Nonprofit founder Virginia Cheung is endorsed by both Breed and Aaron Peskin, so she’s got some unique coalition-building skills. Min Chang is the candidate with a ton of Republican endorsements. Lefteris Eleftheriou founded a private arts school in Belmont.
And candidate Madeline Krantz has unique perspective in just having graduated from an SFUSD high school in June, though on the flip side, that means she is only 19 years old.
Remember, the SF school board election is the one issue on which non-citizens can vote.
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
