San Francisco\u2019s most influential political groups have fractured over who should fill three school board seats in next month\u2019s election, breaking apart a coalition that largely lined up behind the same candidates two years ago.<\/p>\n
GrowSF and the San Francisco Democratic Party are backing board President Phil Kim, former PTA president Autumn Brown Garibay and municipal finance analyst Tim Tung. SF Parents Action, meanwhile, is backing Kim, Brown Garibay and incumbent Alida Fisher. The teachers union has endorsed an entirely different slate. The third seat is open because Commissioner Lisa Weissman-Ward, a Breed appointee who won a full term in 2022, isn\u2019t running.<\/p>\n
The divisions mark a sharp turn from 2024, when the teachers union, along with moderate groups, such as GrowSF, the Democratic Party and SF Parents Action, all backed Parag Gupta and Jaime Huling, who went on to win seats on the board. Now, the groups are splintering as the district faces major decisions over its enrollment system, school portfolio, and instructional practices.<\/p>\n
Behind the split are two political fault lines: the union\u2019s falling-out with Fisher and a divide among the city\u2019s moderate political groups over Tung.<\/p>\n
Fisher\u2019s shifting political fortunes illustrate how dramatically the alliances around the school board have changed since the bitter 2022 recall.<\/p>\n
Fisher, a <\/a>special education advocate<\/a>, won her seat in 2022 with the union\u2019s endorsement, in the first regular election after voters recalled three board members. Fisher, who had opposed the recall, <\/a>beat Breed appointee Ann Hsu<\/a> by about 3,600 votes.<\/p>\n Over the following years, however, Fisher\u2019s political alliances shifted. She developed a close working relationship with Kim, whom Mayor London Breed appointed to the board in August 2024, and became a steady supporter of Su. At the same time, her relationship with the teachers union deteriorated.<\/p>\n The split widened during February\u2019s <\/a>teachers strike<\/a>. Commissioner Matt Alexander, the board\u2019s most consistent union ally since the 2022 recall, walked the picket lines with teachers. Fisher did not. When United Educators of San Francisco dropped her, it cited her response to the strike and her close alignment with Su, whom the union has organized against<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen thousands of educators and their communities are out on the picket line taking a risk, putting their livelihood on the line, fighting for better schools, that\u2019s when we really expect people that are our friends to show up for us,\u201d Alex Shmaus, who runs UESF\u2019s political program, told The Standard.<\/p>\n In June, Fisher endorsed Kim in his special election to complete the term to which Breed had appointed him. The union backed his opponent, Virginia Cheung, who <\/a>lost<\/a> and is running again on the union\u2019s slate with Reina Tello and Ryan Hazelton. Cheung finished sixth of 11 candidates for four seats in 2024 and picketed with teachers during the strike. Tello, an SFUSD graduate and organizer with the Latino group PODER, has two children in district schools. Hazelton runs Mariposa Kids, an after-school nonprofit, which he kept open at no cost during the strike.<\/p>\n \u201cAlida isn\u2019t clearly aligned with either one,\u201d Shmaus said of the labor and moderate camps. \u201cIf you try to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to nobody.\u201d<\/p>\n As Fisher lost the union\u2019s support, however, she gained the backing of a group that had once been firmly opposed to her: SF Parents Action, which opposed her in the 2022 election and during the bitter fights over school closures during the pandemic.<\/p>\n \u201cFisher made the slate despite how far apart we were during the COVID years,\u201d the group wrote in a recent email to members. \u201cHer record over this term changed minds.\u201d<\/p>\n The group cited Fisher\u2019s support for literacy and math reforms and her steady backing of Su whose leadership SF Parents Action has supported. But SF Parents has been her only major endorsement.<\/p>\n If Fisher\u2019s candidacy has exposed the divide between labor and parent groups, Tung\u2019s has opened another fault line \u2014 this one among the city\u2019s moderate political organizations.<\/p>\n Tung entered the race in late July, after SF Parents Action had completed its endorsement process, but quickly won the backing of GrowSF and the Democratic Party. His sister, Nancy Tung, chairs the San Francisco Democratic Party<\/a> and has advocated for his election.<\/p>\n Tung is pitching his finance background. He spent 12 years at S&P Global Ratings as lead analyst for California local governments, and he chairs the district\u2019s bond oversight committee.<\/p>\n In an August email, former SF Parents Action executive director Meredith Dodson <\/a>wrote to her group<\/a> that Tung\u2019s entry into the race put Brown Garibay, the group\u2019s top pick, \u201cat greatest risk.\u201d Brown Garibay, a first-time candidate, has spent six years serving on parent-teacher associations at Flynn Elementary and James Lick Middle School.<\/p>\n Dodson suggested that other moderate groups were pressing SF Parents Action to add Tung to its slate, despite concerns that doing so could draw support away from Brown Garibay. Nancy Tung did not dispute that account. \u201cEven if he were not my brother, I would be so excited to have a candidate like this in the race,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n GrowSF has <\/a>committed to spending six figures<\/a> on Kim, Brown Garibay and Tung, an investment the group says would be the largest ever by an outside group in a San Francisco school board race.<\/p>\n The spending gap sets up another test for the teachers union: whether it can translate the organizing strength it demonstrated during February\u2019s strike into electoral influence. The union does not expect to match GrowSF\u2019s spending and instead plans to rely heavily on grassroots organizing.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be able to keep up with the billionaire PACs,\u201d Shmaus said. \u201cBut other traditional grassroots organizing tactics, like real people talking to real people face to face, can still win.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco\u2019s most influential political groups have fractured over who should fill three school board seats in next…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[37945,27851,15,989,41358,101,103,102,44339,104,106,105,15254],"class_list":["post-494675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-2026-election","tag-board-of-education","tag-education","tag-elections","tag-growsf","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-school-wars","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-sfusd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}