Organizers of S.F. School Board Recall Look for Replacement Candidates

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) -- San Francisco Mayor London Breed has the power to appoint replacements for three school board members recalled last month and the citizen group that organized the recall is offering the mayor a little help with a list of candidates selected by the people.

"1914 ... so over 100 years ago," said Autumn Looijen describing the last time an elected official in the city was recalled.

"We were like -- it's extremely unlikely that it'll work but someone has to do it. Someone has to stand up for the kids!"

She and fellow co-founder Siva Raj were a little surprised that it worked but, for them, it doesn't stop there. Now comes the task of finding replacements.

"Sometimes you get a case where someone gets put into a situation just because they're well-connected," said Looijen. "And we've got so many things on fire in the school district that we wanted to make sure to put people into place who were also going to do a good job."

The appointments rest with Mayor London Breed but the recall group has offered her some help by setting up a kind of do-it-yourself primary election. On their website, they invited people to apply, posing a series of questions about issues facing the district -- from budget deficits to equity gaps to the controversy over admissions policies at Lowell High School. Twenty-one candidates answered the questions and people voted for their favorites. The top eleven vote-getters were submitted to the mayor.

Rohit Agarwal is one of them.

"I like that they took it to the next step, saying, 'yeah, we've done the recall but now who's actually going to go in these seats?' And the people going into these seats, are they going to represent students first?" Agarwal said.

Often in San Francisco politics, positions like school board member have been seen as a stepping-stone to higher office and are frequently backed by powerful political groups in the city. But the recall organizers said those who were thrown out of office were pursuing their own agendas and not listening to the people. They said don't want that to happen again.

"The real failure we saw over the last year is a failure of the social contract that exists between the elected representative and the people they were elected to serve which is, when you're elected to a position, you have to put the interests of the people first," Raj said. "This recall was really a wake-up call, I would hope, to every elected leader in the city, saying, 'hey, don't forget that your first and only job is to serve the people you were elected to serve.' That's it, nothing else should matter."

The three board members were recalled by wide margins. (The other four members had not been in office long enough to be legally subject to recall.) Mayor Breed can select whoever she wants, they don't have to be on the list, but those who created the recall say they want the replacements to be in it for the right reasons.

"I think we wanted to make sure that the community had a voice here," said Looijen. "And that after all the hard work that the community did, they were able to stand up and say, 'These are the people we want.'"