The San Francisco Unified School District in California and the Giltner school district in Nebraska held recall elections against a total of four school board members on Feb. 15. Voters in both school districts approved the recalls, removing the board members from office.
In San Francisco, three school board members were on the ballot: Gabriela López, Alison Collins, and Faauuga Moliga. They will be removed from office once the county has certified the election results. That is expected to happen on March 1.
Recall supporters said they were frustrated that schools in the district remained closed for nearly a year in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. They also said they were upset that the board had spent time voting to rename 44 buildings in the district rather than focusing on opening schools. “From day one, the campaign was a campaign to get politics out of education,” Siva Raj, one of the recall petitioners and a district parent, said. “What we saw consistently was a pattern where the school board leadership focused on a lot of political stunts and symbolic gestures like trying to rename schools, and doing that ultimately badly.”
