Frequently Asked Questions

• Where do I donate?
  
  Make your check out to
  
  Recall School Board Members Lopez, Collins & Moliga
  
  include a note with your occupation and employer
  (we have to collect this before we can accept your donation)
  
  and mail it to:
  
  BoE Recall
  150 Post Street, Suite 405
  San Francisco, CA 94108
  
  or donate online via credit card, ACH, or PayPal at
  
  https://www.efundraisingconnections.com/c/RecallofBoardofEducation/recallofboardofeducation/
  
  Thank you for your support!
• Where is the petition?
  
  https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/petition-packets
  
• Where do I send my petition?
  
  Please send the petitions to our lawyers at:
  ‍
  BoE Recall Petition
  150 Post Street, Suite 405
  San Francisco, CA 94108
  
• Do you have an example letter for soliciting signatures?
  
  Yes, here is a template:
  ‍
  Dear Friends and Neighbors,
  
  Many of you know that our kids (XX and XX) are both enrolled at XX School, a public school here in San Francisco. It has been a very difficult year for our children and a year of very little learning. An effort is now underway to recall three school board commissioners: Alison Collins, Gabriela Lopez, and Faauuga Moliga. The central argument is that the Board of Education (BOE) has failed to prioritize getting our students safely back into classrooms and instead has prioritized ideology and politics.
  
  I am now collecting signatures to support the recall and I am asking for your help. I have petitions at my house and if you are a) a registered voter in San Francisco b) interested in signing the petition please contact me. You can email or text me at XXX to let me know when a good time is to come and collect your autograph.
  
  Here are some bullet points with helpful links (all underlined below) to provide you with some background:
  
  Failure of the SFUSD Board of Education:
  
  • Putting ideology over the needs of students: Before the pandemic, commissioners Alison Collins, Gabriela Lopez, and Faauuga Moliga fired the school district’s chief academic officer along with a number of administrators who did not fit their ideology. Superintendent Vincent Matthews relied on the expertise of the people in these positions. Losing such valued administrators undercut his ability to run the schools effectively — especially when COVID hit. The chief academic officer that San Francisco’s school board let go for not meeting its ideological litmus test was quickly hired to lead the schools in Berkeley. We also cannot forget the school board’s fateful decision in June 2020 to not hire a consultant to plan for reopening schools. Superintendent Vincent Matthews begged for the hire, even telling the school board that rejecting the contract would be a “body blow.” Reopening specialists were in short supply because every school district in the nation faced the same problem. But our school board refused to hire the consultant because they had previously done work for charter schools. Watch a compilation video of the remarks commissioners made when rejecting the consultant. Our school board chose to put ideology over the needs of students. They promised to create a plan on their own. But the Chronicle reported all the ways they had procrastinated and flunked the task. Our school board didn’t bother to start planning to reopen schools in earnest until faced with lawsuits, recalls, and protests from frustrated and exhausted parents.
  
  • Renaming schools took priority over reopening schools: The woes of San Francisco’s school board became national news when a profoundly flawed school renaming process was revealed. It became a source of mockery. Yet our school board voted to double down on a process that relied on cursory Wikipedia searches, historical inaccuracies, and didn’t know whether Roosevelt Middle School referred to Teddy or FDR (they found reasons to remove both presidents). Only after intense public pressure did the school board announce it would “pause” the renaming until it could reopen the schools.  And only after a lawsuit and a ruling by a superior court judge did the school board move to rescind its vote to rename the schools. But the school board still refused to acknowledge the flawed renaming process, saying it was “deeply grateful for the work of the [renaming] panel.”
  
  • Ending merit-based admission to a top high school in the nation was more important than reopening high schools: Lowell High School is San Francisco’s only academically merit-based high school, and its student population is majority Asian. As one of the best-ranked schools in the nation, Lowell is a popular option for families who cannot afford private school. More than one-third of Lowell students belong to low-income families. Yet our school board ended merit-based admissions at Lowell in a rushed process with little community input. The stated goal was to increase diversity of the student population and address a culture problem. A study by Families for San Francisco used school district data to show that Lowell is not the only high school with a demographic imbalance. Others are worse and Lowell falls in the middle. The same can be said for Lowell’s culture/climate scores on district-wide student surveys. Many parents ask why not create more high schools like Lowell with high academic standards? We should be protecting the legacy of Lowell High School not dismantling it. (US & News World Reports reported that Lowell was ranked 68th in the nation and 5th in California. This is not an accident; it is due to a motivated student body who commit themselves to excellence. Lowell High School is ranked fifth within California. The total minority enrollment is 82%, and 35% of students are economically disadvantaged. Lowell High School is ranked #68 in the National Rankings.)
  
  • Anti-Asian tweets and a frivolous lawsuit by Alison Collins: Much outrage is rightfully focused on the tweets by school board commissioner Alison Collins that disparaged Asian Americans with racist remarks. Nearly every elected official in San Francisco has called for Collins to resign and she was censored by her colleagues.  No one believed the school board could become any more dysfunctional than it already was. But Collins took the chaos into uncharted territory. She filed an $87 million lawsuit against the school district and her fellow commissioners for censoring her for the tweets. Collins claims she was defamed and her First Amendment rights were violated. She is seeking $87 million in damages for herself when the school district faces a $169 million budget deficit and students haven’t been in classrooms for more than a year. A recall of Alison Collins cannot come soon enough.
  
  Alison Collins, Gabriela Lopez, and Faauuga Moliga are the only three commissioners of seven currently eligible for recall. The rest of the BOE members were recently elected and recall proceedings cannot begin for them until six months into their term. 70,000 verified signatures of San Francisco voters must be delivered to the Department of Elections before September 1 for a recall to qualify for the ballot. Signatures must be pen on paper - online petitions do not count, so we have a lot of signatures to collect.
  
  Please let me know if you are willing to sign the petition or if you have any questions. The BOE has managed to dishearten a public who either has committed to public schools because they believe in them, or because they have no other choice. I long for leadership who will put learning and excellence at the forefront of their agenda.
  
  With gratitude,
  XXX
  ‍
  
• How do I sign?
  
  Download it, print it, and mail it in... or visit a petition-signing site
  
  See the map here:
  https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/petition-packets
  ‍
  
• Are you guys affiliated with other recall campaigns?
  
  No; we're not affiliated with anyone.
• Are you guys affiliated with other parent groups?
  
  No; we're not affiliated with anyone.
• Are you affiliated with any political party?
  
  No; we're not affiliated with anyone. There was a Republican group that created a campaign committee for a school board recall... but that's not us.
• Are you affiliated with Friends of Lowell?
  
  No; we're not affiliated with anyone.
• Are you working on the charter amendment?
  
  No; our group is only doing the recall.
• Why are you only recalling three board members?
  
  The other four have not been in office long enough. Once they've been in office six months, they will be eligible for recall.
  
  At that point, we will talk with our community and make a decision.
• Did you guys really go on Glenn Beck?
  
  Yes. We'd never seen the show. They reached out to us in the first week of our campaign and as a nonpartisan campaign, we have a policy of talking to everyone regardless of political affiliation.