Published Sep. 22, 2026at6:00am
On an October day in 2002 (opens in new tab), a pair of fist fights broke out between a few students at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School, prompting more than 90 members of the SFPD to descend upon the school in what some later called a “police riot.” Students uninvolved with the fights were shoved to the ground, hit with batons, and cuffed by officers. As students tried to flee, some were pushed back by police marching through the school’s hallways in riot gear. An English teacher recording the mayhem on a camcorder was arrested, along with three students.
The incident prompted outrage. Marshall was known to many as “the Lowell High for Black and Latino kids,” so the police action felt like an attack on the city’s brightest, traditionally disadvantaged youth.
For me and other members of the San Francisco Youth Commission at the time, the police action at Marshall was a punch in the stomach. Most of us commissioners were current or former public school students. We knew the kids at Marshall, or kids like them. Though I was 19 and in college by then, I had attended SF public schools, many of my friends had graduated from Marshall, and my best friend’s little sister was a junior at Marshall who witnessed the police action firsthand. I spoke to her a few days later. She was still in shock, unable to say much beyond that “it was scary” and “it was wrong.”
Shortly afterward, I presided over a hearing convened by the Youth Commission, where we questioned San Francisco Unified School District officials and representatives from the SFPD about what happened. We recommended ending the program that stationed cops in schools, a cause that was taken up by former Supervisor Chris Daly. (Our proposal went nowhere. In 2020, amid a national reckoning with police brutality, the city’s Board of Education voted to cut ties with the SFPD (opens in new tab).)
I wonder if a similar chain of events would play out today given the current composition of the Youth Commission. This year, Mayor Daniel Lurie gave all six mayoral appointments (opens in new tab) to the Youth Commission to young people who attend or attended private schools. Six supervisorial appointments to the commission also hail from private schools, meaning that currently 11 of 17 commissioners attend private schools. This in a city where 74% of kids attend public schools, according to data from the California Department of Education.
Students arrive at a SFUSD Board of Education meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday, March 24, 2026. | Source: Noah Berger for The Standard
I’m not agitating for a class war, especially among youth, and I’m sure the commissioners whom Lurie appointed will work hard and kick ass. Young people, when given a chance, usually do. But I worry about such a striking disconnect between the majority of San Francisco’s kids and the body charged with representing them in government. Because unlike most, or perhaps all, city commissions, the Youth Commission is a voice in City Hall for a population that cannot otherwise directly participate in government via voting.
As San Franciscans, we should be proud of what the Youth Commission has accomplished in the name of that population in the nearly 30 years since voters wrote the commission’s existence into the city charter. In my era, the commission pushed for the city (opens in new tab) to embrace its place as a skateboarding mecca by creating a task force that planned more skate parks, effectively decriminalizing the sport. We wrote the legislation adopted by the Board of Supervisors to oppose the recruitment of high schoolers into the armed forces during the height of the Iraq War.
More recently, the commission spent years pushing for, and ultimately winning, free Muni rides for anyone under 18. The commission also advocated for the closure of juvenile hall. Although the hall is still open, the movement resulted in major changes that made it a more humane place to jail children.
These are the sorts of policies that help youth who need it most; namely, those whose parents cannot afford to send them to private schools. Kids for whom saving a few bucks per day on a Muni ride can mean a meal in their stomach or a new pair of shoes. Kids who are statistically more likely to end up in juvenile detention (opens in new tab).
The Youth Commission often weighs in on San Francisco’s public schools. Last year, the commissioners passed a resolution (opens in new tab) urging the city to work with SFUSD to improve the quality of lunches. In 2022, they took up the cause (opens in new tab) of student activists to urge the city to restart a task force to address sexual harassment and assault in schools. The standing education committee, which I once chaired, has weighed in on these meaty matters for decades. Its members need an intimate connection to the students and schools they’re commenting upon.
In appointing only private school kids to the commission, Lurie plays into the stereotype that his detractors regularly lob at him: that he’s a mayor focused on making the city better for the wealthy and connected. In a Mission Local article about the appointments (opens in new tab), one community activist said they say a lot about the mayor “being out of touch with those folks that are in public school.”
In abdicating his mandated responsibility to, as the city charter states, “appoint five members from underrepresented communities to ensure that the commission represents the diversity of the city,” the mayor potentially prevents the body from intimately understanding the needs and wants of most kids.
The mayor’s office told Mission Local it was “proud to have appointed a slate of youth commissioners who come from different backgrounds and walks of life.” One of the commissioners is at private school on a scholarship. Nevertheless, a Youth Commission without a strong understanding of the experience of public school kids might not push for the sort of progressive policies it has traditionally championed — policies that, in a city where wealth equality is skyrocketing, youth of meager means need now more than ever.
After initially defending Lurie’s appointments, the mayor’s office on Friday issued a mea culpa (opens in new tab), calling the appointments “an oversight” and promising that “going forward, we will be more intentional about ensuring SFUSD representation across our commissions.” I hope this is true, and that the mayor and the city take this misstep as an opportunity to recognize the value of a strong, representative voice for youth in City Hall.
Last year, I interviewed Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was a city supervisor and then mayor when I was a Youth Commissioner. When I reminded him of our overlap, he slapped his forehead, tilted his eyes to the sky, and said, “You guys were such a pain in the ass!” He half-jokingly told me that in creating the Youth Commission, he and other politicians of the day had just wanted to “do something nice for young people.” Maybe he imagined that upon being appointed, those young people would spend their terms smiling and nodding agreeably, rubber-stamping whatever the Board of Supervisors sent them to review. Instead, for 30 years, they have raised the best kind of hell and pushed government to do better by its children. Let’s make sure that the commission continues to do its important job of accurately reflecting and promoting the voices of San Francisco’s young people at City Hall.
Watch a conversation between Jesse Alejandro Cottrell and “PST” host Emily Dreyfuss on this topic