When San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Vincent Matthews announced he would retire this summer, it took a lot of education stakeholders in the city by surprise. KQED education reporter Vanessa Rancaño recently spoke to city Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who represents the Mission, South of Market and other neighborhoods, about Matthews' departure and what might come next for city schools amid a bitter conflict over when it's safe to return every student back to classrooms.
Edited for length and clarity.
What was your reaction to Superintendent Matthews' announcement that was retiring?
Certainly Superintendent Matthews deserves a lot of thanks for leading us through a pandemic, which is a monumental task for anyone leading a school district anywhere in the world, really. There are times when I wish he would have stepped up more, where I wish he would have been a voice taking charge no matter what his bosses on the Board of Education said, and there are times where I think he was a steady voice that perhaps we all needed.
I know that his heart and soul was in doing the best he could by our kids. He was working in an incredibly challenging context with a Board of Education that often didn't agree with him and a union whose members were terrified of being in the classroom. So I don't think it's fair or easy to judge someone's leadership solely by what they achieved during the pandemic, because we are in such unchartered territory in such a difficult time.
What do you see happening with the school board?
I'm working on a ballot measure that would completely change the way the school board functions.
First and foremost, it would professionalize the school board by giving a living wage to every school board commissioner. I think the job of running a massive urban school district with 52,000 kids as a volunteer just doesn't work. Most of our commissioners have full-time jobs and do this in the evenings in their spare time when they're already exhausted. That's not right.
I also want them to be responsible for the real work and challenges happening in our schools, so I really believe in district elections. I know they work quite well for the Board of Supervisors; if anything goes down in District 9, I am going to be seen as the responsible person and I will need to work really hard to make sure I make it right. Otherwise I will be criticized.
If we do district elections for the school board, the commissioner will have a series of schools in their district that's going to ground them to the real issues in the schools they're in charge of. I think that kind of grounding is going to be really helpful and will make things that are sort of pie-in-the-sky like renaming all our schools in the city without a process grounded within the individual schools will much more difficult.
From your perspective, how has the city’s partnership with SFUSD around COVID and reopening worked?
From day one of this pandemic, I've been frustrated with the school district's [lack of] willingness to partner with the city to address the needs of children in the public school system, whether it was, you know, refusing to help us early on, set up the community hubs for the children that were living in poverty and didn't have a safe place at home in which to engage in distance learning, the blame game that went on where perhaps both sides were guilty, somewhat, over things like who is in charge of testing, when vaccines were going to happen, who was at fault for the slow progress, etc.
From the get go, it's been a difficult relationship that everyone has had a part in, including myself. What I hope happens is that we can turn a new page, This has been a rough year. Let's do things differently. Let's work cooperatively because ultimately 52,000 children depend on us getting it together. I think new leadership coming to shake things up that doesn't have the scars we've all developed after this year of distance learning might not be such a bad thing for the city.