Third Party Watch

Mark Sanchez, a San Francisco Board of Education commissioner and Green Party member, was elected to serve as the Board’s new President this week.

From the Bay Area Reporter...

The San Francisco Board of Education opens the new year with many changes, as Mark Sanchez was elected as the third openly gay person to serve as president on Tuesday, January 9.

Three new women commissioners, who were sworn in Friday, January 5, also bring more diversity and make women the majority sitting on the board.

The new school board assembled for its first meeting of 2007 on Tuesday and the sense of change filled the air with anticipation. Three new faces took their seats around the crescent table as Commissioner Jill Wynns swiftly got the meeting under way to elect the new president and vice president.

Sanchez received unanimous votes by the commissioners to become the new president. He was nominated by Norman Yee, the former president. Yee joined the meeting briefly by phone from his hospital bed, where he is recovering from an accident that occurred last month when he was struck by a car while in a crosswalk. He is expected to resume his duties on the board in a few weeks.

Sanchez proceeded to nominate Yee to serve as the vice president, and that motion also received a unanimous vote by the commissioners.

“As a teacher and as a social justice activist, I think that he’s going to bring in a lot of fresh air into the school district,” said Commissioner Eric Mar about Sanchez’s new role on the board.

Sanchez immediately took the president’s seat and began to outline the direction the board will take this year.

Smiling at interim Superintendent Gwen Chan, Sanchez said, “I hope that you consider throwing in your bid to become our next superintendent.”

Finding a permanent superintendent is the first item of business the board will undertake. In a telephone interview with the Bay Area Reporter in late December, Sanchez said filling the superintendent position for the school district is the largest and most important task that the board will address.

Finding a new superintendent for SFUSD isn’t the only ambitious challenge before the board. Other issues outlined by Sanchez include reversing low student test scores; school assignments to implement more integration within the school district; revisiting school policies for review and revisions; and ensure implementation of the Small Schools by Design policy.

Signaling his style of leadership, Sanchez proposed to have school board meetings start at 6 p.m. (rather than the current 7 p.m.) and to streamline the agenda to swiftly take care of business in an effort to shorten the historically lengthy meetings. The suggested changes were met with applause from those in the audience.

New commissioners

Sanchez laid out an ambitious plan, but he has plenty of assistance with new Commissioners Jane Kim, Hydra Mendoza, and Kim-Shree Maufas.

“We came onto the board knowing that there were a lot of big issues,” said Mendoza. “I think that we have a wonderful board to work with and I think we all are really thinking about how our work is going to benefit the kids so we will stay on track and really pay attention to what we need to.”

Kim, 29, Mendoza, 41, and Maufas, 44, were sworn in on Friday, January 5 at an event that felt like a small town gathering with city political leaders, families, and community members gathered into the Tenderloin Community Schoolճ gymnasium while the School of the Arts Jazz Band performed.

Mayor Gavin Newsom swore in Mendoza, his education adviser.

“This is a big deal for me to have someone I trust, someone I admire, someone that I work closely with everyday now independently elected to the school board,” Newsom said.

Newsom views Mendoza’s new position as a way to “build a real bridge between the city and the school district” and with her experience in education and policy making “to really get into discussing” how the city’s educational system can be improved to retain families and children in San Francisco.

Mendoza isn’t the only new addition to the Board of Education that is experienced with city politics. Maufas, who was sworn in by District Attorney Kamala Harris, is a policy analyst for the Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. She also led the community to address the police riot that happened at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in 2002.

Kim, who took her oath of office from Supervisor Chris Daly, is a first year law student at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, and is a former fellow at the Greenlining Institute, a multi-ethnic public policy, research, and advocacy institute.

“I feel really good. It’s a very diverse board that is reflective more than ever of the students and the families we serve,” Sanchez said. “It’s the first time in recent memory that we have a real solid progressive majority. I think that it’s a great start to a new year.”

This entry was posted by Austin Cassidy on Saturday, January 13th, 2007 at 2:44 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.