Three board members in particular—Eric Mar, Sarah Lipson and Mark Sanchez—need to start working with Ackerman, not fighting with her virtually on a daily basis.
Reported the San Francisco Chronicle, "Mayor Newsom said he was saddened but not surprised by Ackerman's resignation considering the ongoing bickering that has gone on between her and a faction of the school board.
His tenure as president included the hiring of new SFUSD Superintendent Carlos Garcia, the shortening of the Board of Education's regular meetings, the debate over San Francisco's popular JROTC program and a resolution for Lennar to halt construction in Hunters Point Naval Shipyard because of health concerns.
"The proposal failed but a watered-down version that passed the board called for a day of on-campus public discussion about the possibility of a war in Iraq.".
[10] "Opponents said the armed forces should have no place in public schools, and the military's discriminatory stance on gays makes the presence of JROTC unacceptable.
[10] AsianWeek magazine criticized the schoolboard for closing down the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps in San Francisco high schools: "Supporters of JROTC acknowledge problems with the U.S. military and gays, but say Mar and (Norman) Yee are discounting the tremendous benefit JROTC has provided to minorities and low-income students.
In June 2019 Sanchez voted with the rest of the board to paint over the murals in George Washington High School, which had been controversial since 1960s due to their depiction of slavery and a dead Native American.
[13] Sanchez declared that "this is reparations",[14][15] and later added that simply concealing the murals wasn't an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.”[16] The cost was estimated at $600,000 to $875,000.
On July 27, 2021, superior court judge Anne-Christine Massullo ruled in favor of the alumni association, preventing the school from covering the mural.
[22] The 12-person committee, chaired by a first grade teacher and activist Jeremiah Jeffries,[23] was assembled in 2020 and recommended 44 names that met the criteria of being associated with the European colonization of the Americas, slavery in the United States, exploitation, racism, or abuse for renaming.
[29][30] Critics called the effort ill-timed, amateurish and wasteful—citing factual errors, the absence of historians on the committee, inadequate amount of public input, and the US$1,000,000 price tag during a budget deficit estimated to be at around US$75,000,000 as primary issues.
Mayor London Breed, State Senator Scott Wiener, and Supervisor Hillary Ronen called for a refocusing on school re-openings during the COVID-19 pandemic in the San Francisco Bay Area rather than the renaming effort.
The San Francisco Chronicle noted that schools named after Cesar Chavez, who called undocumented workers "wetback" and other pejoratives,[33] and Malcolm X, who had worked as a pimp, were excluded from renaming.
[35][33][34] Factual historical errors endorsed by the Board included: confusing the name of the Alamo elementary school with the battle in Texas rather than the Spanish word for poplar tree; mistaking a revolutionary war battle Paul Revere participated in with a raid against the Penobscot tribe; holding the local philanthropist James Lick responsible for an objectionable monument, the Early Days statue, commissioned more than a decade after his death; mistaking the name of the Sanchez school with that of a conquistador instead of an early mayor of San Francisco.
Many other examples were cited as lacking in nuance or proper historical context, such as questioning whether the abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell believed firmly in the right of black people to vote.
Columnist Carl Nolte of the San Francisco Chronicle opined that by that logic, the city itself should be renamed, since it was christened by Spanish missionaries for a Roman Catholic priest, which “clearly fits the guidelines for a new name.