Three days before the start of the 2024-25 school year, the San Francisco Unified School District sent an email telling freshman parents that their kids had been automatically enrolled in a two-semester ethnic studies class. The course — which covers such topics as structural racism, colonialism, and the relative merits of capitalism versus socialism — had been an elective for a decade, but families were now being told it had been made a requirement of graduation.
What parents didn’t know was that the day before, Lainie Motamedi, the school board president at the time, had sent a different email — this one to the district’s general counsel. In it, she noted that the board had never approved funding for the year-long requirement. Motamedi presented two options: The district could seek immediate approval from the board, or pause plans to teach the course.
It did neither.
District leaders have maintained that they moved forward with the mandate for the new ethnic studies requirement properly. But to Motamedi, the way the situation went down was emblematic of a district that lacks “controls, accountability, and transparency,” as she put it in one of several internal emails that were obtained by The Standard.
“I would describe it as hubris and ignorance,” Motamedi said in an interview. “It is the imposition of adult agendas on what students need, and, at the same time, the obstruction of kids getting to choose courses based upon their interests.”
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