[SFGP] Greenzine - Meeting next Wed, Health Care, Oppose School Board Recall

[Announcement list for SF Green Party, updated weekly]

January 21, 2022
GREENZINE
SF Green Party Weekly News and Events

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Dear Greens,

    Please join us next Wed, Jan 26, for our monthly meeting.  Details
and agenda are below.

    Voting by mail is underway in the School Board recall election,
going through Election Day on Feb 15.  The Green Party has endorsed NO
on this recall.  Our statement explaining our reasoning is at the end
of this newsletter, so please share with others.  It is also on our
website, here:
  http://sfgreenparty.org/endorsements/99-school-board-recall-2022-endorsements

    A Single Payer Healthcare bill (AB 1400) has moved out of State
Assembly committees, and currently moving to the full Assembly for a
vote.  Watch for upcoming phone banking events on
https://events.medicare4all.org/.  Green Party activist Barry
Hermanson is one of the organizers, and he wrote the following article:
  https://sfbayview.com/2021/12/will-democrats-enact-universal-health-care/

    Finally, the Green Party and Peace and Freedom Party are jointly
fielding a "Left Unity Slate" for the 2022 CA statewide elections.
The slate is led by Green poet Luis Rodriguez, and other members are
listed below.  We are considering adding two candidates to the slate,
Mohammad Arif for Lt. Governor and Marco Amaral for State
Superintendent of Public Instruction.  We will make the decision at
our upcoming meeting next Wednesday (agenda and candidate bios below).

*===========================*

What:  Green Party Monthly meeting
Where:  Redstone Bldg (2940 16th Street, near South Van Ness) #301, SF
When:  Wed, Jan 26, 7-9 pm

Agenda:

* Introductions
* Planning for Elections this Year: review of schedule and
  offices open, actions we can take
* Single Payer Health Care Update
* Signature gathering update (statewide slate)
* Endorsement Decision on adding candidates to the statewide
  slate: Mohammad Arif for Lt. Governor and Marco Amaral for State
  Superintendent of Public Instruction.  Bios below.

Mohammad Arif, 53, is an immigrant from Pakistan.  His wife is an
immigrant from India, and they have four children born in California.
He earned a bachelor's degree from Hailey College and a masters in
economics from Punjab University in Lahore.  After coming to
California in 1991, he attended Abraham Lincoln Law College in Los
Angeles.  He has worked as a paralegal for many years in California
and Arizona, and now works in that capacity for a law firm in Corona.
He speaks English, Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi, with some Arabic.
Mohammad Arif was an independent candidate for governor of California
in the 2003 recall election.  He later joined the Peace and Freedom
Party, and was a candidate in that party's primary for governor in
2010.  He joined the Peace and Freedom Party State Central Committee,
and became the party's Kern County chair.  He was the Peace and
Freedom Party candidate for State Senate in the 2013 16th district
special election.  Mohammad moved to Arizona in late 2013.  The Peace
and Freedom Party is not on the ballot in Arizona. He registered in
the Green Party, and appeared on the ballot in 2018 as the Green
candidate for state senate in the 11th district.  Mohammad Arif
returned to California in late 2021, and now lives in Covina in Los
Angeles County.  He is a candidate for lieutenant governor in the June
2022 primary election as a Peace and Freedom Party member.  He
endorses the entire Left Unity Slate of candidates for statewide
office.

Marco Amaral's bio is on his website, here:
https://www.amaral4sup2022.com/about
He is registered "No Party Preference".  The Statewide Candidates
Subcommittee, along with two Peace and Freedom Party representatives,
met with Marco online earlier this week and were favorably impressed,
and recommend endorsement.  (Also, Rick Greenblatt, in San Diego
county, where Marco lives, knows Marco and recommends endorsement
too.)

Mask policy: Masks are currently required indoors.  We recommend
wearing a good (N95 or equivalent) mask during the Omicron wave.  We
now provide the option for SF Green Party members to participate in
our meetings via Zoom, so email cc at sfgreens.org for info on how you
can join us virtually.

Every 4th Wednesday the SF Green Party meets to discuss issues of
concern, listen to interesting speakers, endorse events, plan outreach
and more!  Everyone welcome.  All meetings are wheelchair accessible.
To make a presentation or gain the SFGP endorsement of events and
issues, please contact our SFGP County Council at: cc at sfgreens.org

*===========================*

What:  Signature Gathering for Statewide candidates
Where:  everywhere
When:  now through Feb 9

At our post-holiday celebration, we kicked off signature gathering for
our slate of statewide candidates.  We have the opportunity to
eliminate $25,000 in fees for them -- just by getting people to sign
our candidates' forms!  If you can help, please contact us at
cc at sfgreens.org and we'll get you the forms.

As you may have heard, the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party
are jointly fielding a "Left Unity Slate" for the 2022 statewide
races.  This cooperative strategy increases the likelihood that both
parties will be able to reach 2% of the vote in at least one statewide
race, which is the minimum threshold needed to retain ballot status.
These groundbreaking Left Unity Slate candidates are listed below,
starting with Luis Rodriguez, the author of 16 books, a former Poet
Laureate of Los Angeles, and our 2014 Governor candidate.  For 5
weeks, starting in early January, YOU can help our candidates gather
signatures for their campaigns!  These "signatures-in-lieu of the
filing fee" will help eliminate those fees, which range from $3,278 to
$4,371 per candidate, depending on the office.  Each voter can sign
forms for all 7 of the candidates below:

Luis Rodriguez (Green), CA Governor
Gary Blenner (Green), CA Secretary of State
Laura Wells (Green), CA Controller
Dan Kapelovitz (Green), CA Attorney General
Meghann Adams (Peace and Freedom), CA Treasurer
Nathalie Hrizi (Peace and Freedom), CA Insurance Commissioner
John Parker (Peace and Freedom), US Senate

*===========================*

SF Green Party Statement on School Board Recall

The School Board Recall Election is happening between now and Election
Day, February 15.  If you are voting by mail, your ballot must be
postmarked on or before February 15.  You can also vote in person on
Election Day, or beforehand at City Hall.

Three members of the School Board, Alison Collins, Gabriela López, and
Faauuga Moliga, are up for recall.  Although López is the only one of
the three who previously earned our endorsement, the SF Green Party
has endorsed a "NO" vote on recalling all three of the Board members
in this election (i.e., we support keeping them in office through the
next regular election in November 2022).

If one or more of the Board members is recalled, the City Charter
gives Mayor Breed the authority to fill each vacancy with one of her
own hand-picked candidates.  Greens don't want our public schools to
be subject to the same corruption as we see at other City departments
run by the Mayor, such as the Department of Building Inspection,
Recreation and Parks, and the MTA (which operates Muni).

As we wrote in our School Board endorsements in 2020, concerning our
non-endorsement of Jenny Lam
(http://sfgreenparty.org/endorsements/95-november-2020-endorsements):

  Our biggest concern with Lam is not the policies she supports, but
  rather her close ties to the Mayor's office.  The School Board is
  supposed to be an independent body from the rest of SF government,
  so having a Board member who directly reports to the Mayor is very
  problematic.

Having four such appointees would give the Mayor the majority of the
seven seats on the School Board, allowing her to spend bond money and
give out contracts to Machine-friendly companies without any public
oversight.

Greens have long advocated for a charter amendment that would allow
voters to choose replacements (using ranked choice voting) on the same
ballot as the recall election.  Until that happens, voters who the
Mayor does not listen to can not meaningfully exercise our
constitutional right to recall elected officials.  Because the Mayor
is the only person who gets to choose replacements for elected
officials who are recalled, these elections (other than recalling the
Mayor herself) can only benefit the Mayor and her supporters.

This is not to say that Greens are completely happy with the
performance of the current members of the School Board.  In 2020, we
wrote in our endorsements:

  The biggest issue facing the School Board over the next year will be
  when, and how, to safely reopen SF's public schools.  Zoom classes
  don't work for young children, and keeping kids at home has had a
  serious impact on parents, especially on women, who
  disproportionately provide for childcare and homeschooling.

Based on research from UCSF that showed serious mental health impacts
of Zoom school, and low in-school transmission risk, Greens advocated
for reopening our elementary schools in the Fall of 2020.  We also
advocated for SFUSD support for "pods" of public school students in
all grades (TK-12) as a bridge to full school reopening, noting that
SF's summer camps that were organized into pods of 12 kids did not
result in any COVID outbreaks.

Although SFUSD failed to reopen schools in a timely manner, and lost
many students to private schools, Greens think the majority of the
blame lies with the Superintendent rather than the Board.  The
Superintendent attempted to waste money on an outside consultant
rather than taking free advice from experts at the Department of
Public Health and UCSF.  Although the SFUSD central administrative
budget (i.e., money not spent in classrooms) has ballooned under
Superintendent Matthews, the public (including SFUSD parents,
students, and teachers) have yet to see any benefits.

Members of the School Board also deserve some blame for their failed
attempt to rename a number of public schools.  The centralized
renaming committee, poorly managed and dominated by insiders,
advocated renaming some schools based of inaccurate information, while
being completely comfortable leaving "Willie Brown Middle School" in
place.  This was a stark contrast to the process used to rename (the
former) Drake High School in Marin County, which empowered the
students at the school to participate in the process and therefore
became a learning
opportunity. (https://www.marinij.com/2021/05/12/tam-board-oks-archie-williams-for-new-drake-high-school-name/)

On the other hand, our Board had a major success in reforming
admissions standards at Lowell High School.  For years, Lowell appears
to have been in violation of the CA Education Code, which requires a
"random, unbiased" process to determine which kids get to attend
schools in high demand, and forbids admissions standards based on
"academic or athletic performance."
(https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=35160.5.&lawCode=EDC)

Lowell's previous admission standards used a combination of GPA and
standardized test (SBAC) scores to measure academic
performance. Greens believe that standardized tests have significant
racial and class biases, and are a poor measure of academic potential
(http://sfgreenparty.org/10-campaigns/79-opt-out-of-standardized-tests). We
therefore applauded the School Board's change to change Lowell
admissions to the lottery-based system used at other SF schools, which
does not consider test scores.

With this change to admissions policy, racial diversity at Lowell
improved dramatically, with the number of Black and Hispanic freshmen
nearly double that of prior
years. (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Lowell-got-rid-of-competitive-admissions-New-16415271.php)
And despite the fears of those parents who opposed the change,
academic standards at the school have remained high.

In summary, the current School Board has had some successes and some
failures, which SF political groups should take into account when
interviewing candidates for office in the next regular election in
November 2022.  If voters instead decide to turn control over to our
corrupt Mayor, it will almost certainly make things worse for our
students and for the City as a whole.  Vote NO on all the recall
questions.

*===========================*

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