The city of San Francisco announced Wednesday that it is suing its own school district to force it to reopen public schools, which have been closed for nearly eleven months as a result of the covid-19 pandemic.
San Francisco prosecutor Dennis Herrera filed the lawsuit in a city court arguing that the school district and its leaders – elected and independent officials of the city council – had not implemented a reopening plan in accordance with the rules of the state of California .
“Not a single San Francisco public school student has set foot in a class in 327 days,” he lamented at a news conference.
“More than 54,000 San Francisco school children are suffering. They are turning them into ‘Zoom-bies’ with the school over the internet. Enough is enough,” Herrera continued.
The prosecutor’s action is supported by the mayor of the city, London Breed. “It is not the path we would have preferred, but nothing matters more now than getting our children back to school,” he declared on Twitter.
The San Francisco schools received authorization to reopen since last September, Herrera explained in a statement, in which he stressed that around 90% of the centers in the neighboring county of Marin have already restarted classes with the presence of students.
In San Francisco itself, 113 private schools, mostly independent and religious, have either reopened or are still open, he added.
In both San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as in many large American cities, teacher unions are reluctant to return to the centers until they have been vaccinated, despite mounting pressure from parents and authorities.
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