A San Francisco public school district committee this month recommended that 44 schools with “inappropriate” names be renamed, with Junipero Serra Elementary School near the top of the list.
The district’s superintendent appointed the School Names Advisory Committee in 2018 to assess which schools, if any, ought to be renamed.
Among the committee’s recommendations for schools that ought to change their names were schools named for George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir, and Francis Scott Key.
St. Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan priest and missionary, has been criticized by some activists as a symbol of colonialism and of the abuses that many Native Americans suffered after contact with Europeans. However, historians say Serra protested abuses and sought to fight colonial oppression.
Among the criteria that the committee reportedly used to asses school names were those of “anyone directly involved in the colonization of people, slave owners or participants in enslavement, perpetrators of genocide or slavery, those who exploit workers/people, those who directly oppressed or abused women, children, queer or transgender people, those connected to any human rights or environmental abuse [and] those who are known racists and/or white supremacists and/or espoused racist beliefs.”
The panel has requested schools share alternate names by Dec. 18, with the school board voting on proposed new names in January or February of 2021, the Chronicle reported….
There is another Junipero Serra Elementary school near San Francisco in a different school district, whose name also has come under recent scrutiny. Members of the South San Francisco Unified School District Board of Trustees proposed a change to that elementary school’s name in June. The name has so far remained as it is.
The above comes from an Oct. 22 story on the site of the Catholic News Agency.
I bet they wouldn’t have a problem with Pope Francis High School.
Inappropriate would be schools named for Harvey Milk, Willie Brown, Kamala, Feinstein, Pelosi, Jerry Brown, Gavin, etc. Time for them to just give schools numbers and refer to them in that way, no doubt beginning with 666. The students will loose in the way that kids always suffer at the hands of wayward adults.
It is no honor to have a school in San Francisco named after you. I’m sure that Saint Junipero isn’t worried about the decision of some Marxists in San Francisco.
Well, paragraph five just about leaves out the whole world. We are going to have a whole lot of nameless schools/
If this is a public school, I think a Pope Francis school would run into First Amendment problems, as well as with some atheists. Why not leave the names as is and teach the students that all historical figures have ‘imperfections’. Some of these are factual, others open to differing opinions.
Why didn’t Junipero Serra Elementary School run afoul of First Amendment problems? Naming a public school after a priest? You see, it’s because when the school was named after Fr. Serra California was a sane state and the Democrat party was mostly classical liberal instead of communist woke. How about the name of the city? San Francisco? Naming a city after a Catholic saint? Why isn’t that against the First Amendment? How long before the woke communists who run San Francisco want to change the city’s name?
There should be more concern about what is and is not being taught in these schools. Current curriculum is weak. History is revised and civics is being taught incorrectly, if at all. There is a public high school in San Diego named Serra. Nothing has come up about it yet, but the teachers union is more concerned about their salaries than changing a school name.
They should consider dropping San, and Santa from California cities and counties as well.
i left my heart in
Sam Frank’s Disco
Well maybe “Sam Frank” has oppressed women.
My vote is for St. Nicholas who saved three young women from a life of prostitution by providing them with dowries, but of course he inherited his money, so someone is bound to complain that his parents got rich by oppressing others, whether they do so or not.
What I see here is a whole lot of breaking the commandment against coveting. You know, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors goods.” The “green eyed monster (oops, derogatory to green-eyed people) is on the prowl.