San Francisco school district officials denounced on Wednesday a city lawsuit claiming they violated state law regarding the reopening of schools, calling the allegations frivolous, petty and embarrassing.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who filed the legal action earlier in the day, said he decided to take the school board and superintendent to court for failing to do their jobs by not having a specific plan to get students back into classrooms.
Instead, he said, they’ve voted to rename 44 schools and are looking to alter the admission process to Lowell High School.
“Private and parochial schools in San Francisco have figured it out,” Herrera said in a statement. “In-person instruction needs to be the Board of Education’s singular focus — not renaming schools that are empty, or changing admission policies when teachers aren’t in classrooms. It’s unfortunate we have to take them to court to get it figured out, but enough is enough.”
The unprecedented lawsuit is the latest volley in an ongoing battle over when and how the city’s public schools should reopen for its 52,000 students. The district late last year said the first schools would reopen at the end of January, but later canceled that plan because of ongoing labor negotiations.
Public health officials have offered a path to reopening since September, including providing small cohorts of the most at-risk students access to school sites.
More than 100 private schools have reopened in the city, with nearly 16,000 students back in class full or part-time, Herrera said.
Yet, “not a single SFUSD student has set foot in their 21 schools in 327 days for in-person instruction,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit addresses whether the district created a specific Learning Continuity and Reopening Plan as required by state law. Herrera alleges the district’s plan is vague, with plans that include “rethinking time and space” for classroom instruction.
It is a plan for a plan, he said.
Superintendent Vincent Matthews said Herrera’s allegations have no merit.
“We absolutely have a comprehensive plan,” he said. “We are reassessing different parts of the plan, but the plan is still there.”
Matthews said Wednesday the district has a comprehensive dashboard with the steps required to reopen. He said the district is ready to reopen the first schools for the youngest and most at-risk students, but lacks the final step in the plan: an agreement with the teachers union and other labor groups.
He added the lawsuit was a distraction.
“This isn’t helpful when we’re all in this together,” he said. “To turn on those of us trying to solve this is not helpful whatsoever.”
The district’s teachers union, also panned the lawsuit.
“United Educators (of San Francisco) is very disappointed that the City has chosen to attack rather than support the school district,” president Susan Solomon said.
The legal challenge was one of many across the country over the reopening of schools, but the only one involving a city suing a school district. In other cases, parents have sued districts or the state or labor unions have sued to prevent the reopening of schools.
“We’re in a once-in-a-century pandemic situation that has created some never-seen-before challenges to our public education system,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney for Public Advocates, a civil rights law firm. “Unfortunately at the moment, a lot of our society and our political leaders are frozen in terms of figuring out how to move forward.”
Whether the courts will weigh in on reopening city schools is uncertain.
“Courts do not want to get in the business of being superintendents of education” and “are often deferential to decisions of public school boards,” said Bill Koski, a Stanford law professor specializing in educational law.
“But this is as much an issue of public health” as an educational issue, Koski said. “Courts may feel more comfortable wading into public health waters.”
Steve Sugarman, a UC Berkeley law professor, said the lawsuit’s limited scope — seeking only a more specific plan, rather than a judicial order to reopen the schools — is a subject the courts can probably address, but may not accomplish much.
“The trial judge could tell the school district to come up with a plan. ... It’s a first step,” Sugarman said. But “it’s still contingent on the union agreeing to send the teachers back in,” he said.
Still, San Francisco parents, city officials and others cheered the lawsuit, saying they are angry and frustrated at the lack of clear communication and specifics needed to get school open again.
Matthews told families recently that it’s unlikely middle and high schools will reopen this school year.
“I’m glad that the city is suing them,” said parent Joya Pramanik, whose daughter is a sophomore at Lowell High School. “Our kids are suffering and this is going to be a scar in their lives.”
Mayor London Breed has grown increasingly impatient with the district’s pace in reopening to students and supported the lawsuit, even though her education adviser, Jenny Lam, is on the school board and now a defendant in the case.
“This is not the path we would have chosen, but nothing matters more right now than getting our kids back in school,” Breed said in a statement. “The city has offered resources and staff to get our school facilities ready and to support testing for our educators.”
To help struggling families and students, the city sponsored in-person learning hubs across the city at community centers to help vulnerable students navigate distance learning, but those were staffed by after-school and community organizations.
School board President Gabriela López said Wednesday that the city has not helped the district enough with testing and teacher vaccinations despite requests. Health officials do not require vaccinations for schools to reopen but López and Matthews suggested that schools wouldn’t reopen without them. She said the city is “playing politics,” which is not helpful in reopening schools.
“This is an embarrassing day for San Francisco,” López said.
Yet just a month ago, San Francisco officials announced a partnership with the school district to offer testing to teachers, starting at the district office and then expanding to other sites, with funding provided by the city.
While Matthews criticized the city’s lack of help in testing and vaccines Wednesday, a month earlier, he thanked the city for their expertise and additional resources.
The city-funded program started testing teachers and other staff in January, but suspended it after concerns were raised over the accuracy rate from the testing provider, Curative. The district is looking for another company to do the testing, with guidance and support from the city.
Meanwhile, San Francisco public schools are seeing significant learning loss, especially among students of color and those from low-income families, although López declined to address that recently, saying instead that students “are learning more about their families and their cultures, spending more time with each other.”
National and state health officials have increasingly called for classrooms to bring back students given the negative impact of distance learning, including academic declines and mental health issues.
Many public schools in surrounding counties have been open for months with little to no in-school transmission.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has also urged schools to reopen, saying they can safely do so.
“We have many, many districts that have schools open and have been able to do it safely,” he said, adding teacher vaccinations aren’t required to get students back to class, which the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoed Wednesday. “We can safely reopen schools as we process a prioritization of vaccination to our teachers.”
Jill Tucker and Bob Egelko are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker @bobegelko
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