SF parents react to school board replacing superintendent, halting closures

San Francisco Unified School District parents are reacting after the school board announced Friday it would replace the superintendent and pause a controversial school closure plan.  
About a dozen schools were on the closure list, including Sutro Elementary in the Richmond District.
Sutro families have been advocating for the school non-stop since the closure list was released nearly two weeks ago. They even created a parent group called “Keep Sutro Open.”
Crystal Ejanda is one of the parents in that group. She says Friday’s news took her by surprise.
“At first I was in disbelief,” said Ejanda. “It caused all of this tension, energy, fear, and anger, then to see that our work helped to cause this change felt really good.”
But her older son, Charlie, is still disappointed by the school closure threat. He graduated from Sutro Elementary last year.
“I’m still pretty mad about what happened, but it’s nice that they finally decided to keep it open,” said Charlie.
Parents say Sutro is a high achieving academic school. It’s the only Cantonese bi-literacy program in the Richmond district.
Third grader Patrick Coleman is proud to attend the school and grateful that it will stay open.
“There’s always teachers and other kids here to support each other,” said Coleman.
Now they’re hoping the new superintendent will support their school. The previous superintendent, Matt Wayne, resigned Friday after recieving backlash for the closure plan.
Dr. Maria Su is expected to be officially appointed superintendent at the Board of Education’s next meeting on Tuesday.
She is part of Mayor London Breed’s School Stabilization Team. Ejanda says she’s staying hopeful about the change.
“If I wasn’t optimistic then it would be really hard to be in the public school system,” said Ejanda.
Another parent, Kaitlin Solimine says she hopes the SFUSD community can change the naritive around the school.
“In this city we have one in three students attending private schools and that is the highest in the nation, it’s higher even than New York City,” said Solimine. “That is a problem. It’s a cultural problem.”
She hopes to continue advocating for her school, and the district as a whole, to bring in more students and hopefully prevent future closures.
The parent group has also requested the data that lead the district to putting their school on the closure list. They want to understand why that happened, and prevent it from happening again.