The San Francisco school board has suspended a plan to rename 44 schools as part of a racial reckoning that critics said went too far.
NBC Bay Area reports that the board voted unanimously to reverse its much-criticized decision to strip the names of a third of San Francisco’s public schools, which it said honored figures linked to racism, sexism and other injustices.
Among the schools are ones named for presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, writer Robert Louis Stevenson and Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere.
The renaming proposal was one of several controversies the San Francisco school board has faced during the pandemic.
Parents, students and elected officials blasted the board for some of its targets — and its timing. Mayor London Breed, among others, called it “offensive and completely unacceptable” for the board to focus on changing school names rather than getting children back into classrooms.
The renaming effort also was criticized for historical inaccuracies and research that included consulting Wikipedia rather than historians.
