SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — After a successful recall election last month, three new members were appointed by Mayor London Breed for the San Francisco Unified School District board.
Co-leader of the Recall San Francisco School Board Effort Siva Raj shared his thoughts on the new members.
He says it was a long year to get this far, but was amazing to see the recall succeed.
“They’re going into a house on fire and they have a bunch of things to address very quickly,” Raj says.
Breed officially swore in Ann Hsu, Lainie Mota-Medi and Lisa Weissman-Ward on Friday.
“Two of them actually went through an open process that we ran,” Raj said. “We gave the mayor access to the results.”
The recall effort published 21 potential candidate resumes and polled the public.
Raj says Hsu and Mota-Medi were both on it and polled well. Both women have experience on school district committees.
All three appointees are currently parents of San Francisco Unified School District students.
Recall supporters believed this was a key factor needed from the new appointees.
“They’ve experienced personally all of the challenges that we experienced over the last year,” Raj said.
Even though Raj is happy with the results, he believes all members will have to prove they are capable of the new positions.
“I think the next year is going to be critical for the school district,” Raj said. “We have so many issues to deal with firstly a new superintendent to hire, there’s a learning loss, there’s also the budget crisis that we need to solve.”
Each new member will serve the remainder of the vacated term on the board until November.
All three seats will be up for election at that time.
