SF Board of Education Advances Plan to Rename Schools

San Francisco (January 27, 2021) - The San Francisco Board of Education conducted a review of the 46 campuses that have been recommended by a volunteer panel to be considered for renaming and passed a resolution Tuesday to further the process for renaming those schools.

“This is an opportunity for our students to learn about the history of our school's names, including the potential new ones,” Board President Gabriela López said. “This resolution came to the school board in the wake of the attacks in Charlottesville, and we are working alongside the rest of the country to dismantle symbols of racism and white supremacy culture. I am excited about the ideas schools will come up with.”

The resolution does not change the names or remove the names for a school or campus; it serves as the Board's commitment to replace the names. 

In the spring of 2018, the SF Board of Education passed a resolution to establish a blue ribbon panel to review San Francisco public school names. Panel members applied to serve on the panel and the Board of Education ratified the members. The school names advisory committee is responsible for considering the relevance of school names and appropriateness of these names when they honor historical figures.

The panel has gone through a process to set standards for why the name of a school would be changed, to research to the best of their ability the backgrounds of the individuals or places that are namesakes for a school, and analyze those under the panel’s established guiding principles. From this process, the panel generated a list of 44 schools covering 46 campuses to recommend to the Board for renaming.

Schools with names that the Board wants to see replaced will have the opportunity to continue engaging their communities and propose alternate names to the Board. Suggestions from the broader community are welcomed and individuals can use this portal to submit alternate names and view those suggested by others. Any final decision to change school names rests with the elected members of the Board of Education. 

Read the resolution here.

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