By suing its own school board and school district, San Francisco has transformed a painful and emotional argument over how to bring students back into classrooms into a legal battle.
Now, stakeholders — from parents to teachers to elected officials — are citing differing sets of statistics and experiences to , with the issue of equity emerging as a fault line.
On Wednesday, the city filed a petition for a court order directing San Francisco Unified School District to prepare to bring students back into classrooms "now that it is possible to do so safely," City Attorney Dennis Herrera's office said.
At a press conference, Herrera ticked off reasons for SFUSD to invite its 54,000 students out from behind their home computers and back into schools.
He cited assessments by city and state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that schools can safely reopen, and he held up in-person learning currently taking place at 113 private and parochial schools in the city as what should be possible for public schools as well.
He also referred to data showing a widening achievement gap in the student population.
"Black, Latino and other students of color in San Francisco, as well as those from low- income families, have lost significant academic ground compared with wealthier and white students during the pandemic," he said.
But in an appearance on KQED's "Forum" radio program last week, Susan Solomon, president of United Educators of San Francisco from the teachers union, defended teachers' insistence on more stringent safety measures before returning to the classroom by citing racial disparities in a different areas — COVID-19 transmission.
"[W]e know that in San Francisco as well as in surrounding counties, the families and communities who are hardest hit by COVID — namely Black and brown communities — are seeing much higher rates [than] the rest of the neighborhoods and communities," Solomon said. "And we are emphasizing a lower community spread [before returning to schools] so that we can mitigate the effects of people being together who are in multigenerational households, who are experiencing ... higher rates of COVID."