Jane Kim and Norman Yee Does a Switcheroo to Get JROTC Back at SFUSD (edit this)
Today, Commissioner Jane Kim and Commissioner Norman Yee engineered a special meeting to vote to adopt JROTC with the condition that students could not use the credits for JROTC for their physical education requirements tonight after the community meeting on the budget.
Jane Kim’s and Norman Yee’s resolution would reinstate JROTC into SFUSD and voted to allow the resolution to become official on first reading.
The Chronicle reports that the board vote 3-3 on the resolution. It would had to have passed unanimously in order to pass. A year ago, the Board voted 5-2 (Mar and Sanchez) to give JROTC an additional year to figure out how JROTC would be phased out of SFUSD. Jane Kim’s and Yee’s resolution would keep JROTC in schools. The resolution noted that the Board would waive the second reading, so that the resolution could be approved with only one reading.
It was interesting to note that the meeting was not noted at the Board’s regular meeting last Tuesday and the notice was posted on Monday, June 16. The meeting was not given a specific start time but rather started after the Augmented Budget and Business meeting on the 2008-9 budget was concluded. The meeting was also scheduled on the same day as the Harvey Milk Club’s 30th anniversary dinner.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:18 am e
Good! Get these fascist homophobics out of the schools. You see these ROTsees around town in parades, and it seems to be some sort of fetish thing among immigrants.
Public schools are bad enough around here already. Now that we (progressives) pretty much control the school board, the next step is to convert all schools into charter schools so we can instill truly progressive values in these public school kids.
This is the only way to save the schools.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:44 am e
The Chronicle suggested that while Jane Kim co-sponsored the resolution, she wasn’t at the meeting.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/18/BASO11ANOA.DTL
They wrote:
“The San Francisco school board’s surprise attempt to eliminate physical education credit for the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps failed during a special meeting Tuesday.
If passed, the resolution would have drastically reduced enrollment in the popular program.
The school board gave only the required 24-hour notice for the meeting, leaving both proponents and opponents of the JROTC program little time to react. To make matters worse, the special meeting didn’t have an official start time; it followed a previously scheduled 6 p.m. committee meeting.
But the board split the vote 3-3, defeating a plan to end the credit - with dozens of JROTC supporters in the audience, said district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe.
Board members Norman Yee, Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar voted for the resolution, and Hydra Mendoza, Jill Wynns and Kim-Shree Maufas voted against it. Board member Jane Kim, who co-sponsored the resolution, was absent.”
The Chronicle suggested that Norman Yee and Jane Kim were concerned that the School District was going to get sued so they had a special meeting to discuss it.
The Chron said:
“The district has been threatened with a lawsuit, with San Francisco-based Public Advocates questioning the legality of giving gym-class credits for JROTC.
State law requires high school students to take two years of physical education. The majority of school districts offering JROTC in California also give PE credit, but Public Advocates singled out San Francisco in questioning the practice.
In a letter, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell told JROTC officials in April that the practice appears to violate California Education Code because the curriculum isn’t aligned with state physical education standards. Also, the curriculum created by the military hasn’t been approved by the California Board of Education.
However, O’Connell added, it is up to local school boards to determine which courses meet graduation requirements.”
June 18th, 2008 at 10:35 am e
I love Jane Kim, but why was she not at the meeting when her own motion was being voted on — especially if her vote would have made the difference? Doesn’t strike me as too politically smart.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:19 am e
What ever happened to our commitment to sunshine laws, to public disclosure, to discussion and debate before policy is made in San Francisco?
Mar and Sanchez have tried unsuccessfully to ram an important measure through the board on the sly without any public debate whatsoever. I expect their opponents to use this against them in the upcoming election.
Also, I suspect that despite the editorials in the Guardian Weekly and other progressive forums recently that tried to bully Jan Kim and Kim-Shree Maufas into voting out the JROTC, they ultimately listened to their constituents and decided they wanted to keep the program. Many of Jane Kim’s foot soldiers and volunteers in Chinatown have family members in the JROTC and Maufas’ daughter was apparently in the program herself.
JROTC is very popular among working-class students in public high schools in San Francisco. And one thing that progresses are supposed to do is listen to the working class.
June 18th, 2008 at 12:22 pm e
Look carefully at how the commissioners voted:
FOR: Sanchez, Mar, Yee
AGAINST: Maufas, Mendoza, Wynns
How could this resolution’s purpose be keep JROTC in our schools if Mar and Sanchez voted for it? Jane Kim did no switcheroo… Kim’s and Yee’s resolution, if it had passed, would have been the fatal heart attack for JROTC. Without PE credit, students would not have time in their schedules to take an elective as JROTC would be by then. If it had passed, JROTC’s enrollment would have declined drastically.
This resolution only needed a majority vote. Politically, if this resolution needed an unanimous vote, Kim and Yee would have never wasted the public’s time by putting this resolution on the board. Wynns is a through and through pro-JROTC ally and would have never voted in favor of this resolution.
The meeting before this special meeting was an Augmented Rules Committee meeting, not Committee of the Whole.
(Nakayama, as much as we hope the School Board practices San Francisco’s policy on open government, they are under the State’s jurisdiction and thus follow the more lenient Brown Act, rather than San Francisco’s strict Sunshine Ordinance)
June 18th, 2008 at 1:01 pm e
Actually, the meeting prior to this Special Committee was an Augmented Budget and Business Services Committee.
And yes, the resolution was to keep JROTC going without the PE credits.
As for Jane Kim not being there, Jane Kim is a key ally of Sanchez-in fact, she is the only commissioner who has endorsed Sanchez as her #1 choice for the D-9 Supervisor.
To schedule a special meeting to consider one resolution takes coordination with the President and the authors of the resolution-and Sanchez would have made sure that Jane Kim was available. So any excuse runs hallow-especially on several occasions, she has attended via telephone in the past.
The resolution would have kept JROTC at SFUSD-but without the pe credits.
In other words, the “new” Board is doing the same things as the “old” Board.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:26 pm e
Hey, even though it’s a fine point, if you are going to contradict yourself, then I don’t care. At least some people took the care of looking up the agendas instead of presuming.
Why did you edit your article to reflect the actual committee meeting before the special meeting but not the fact that this resolution only needed a majority?
Well, it wasn’t like Commissioner Kim was away from technology, she could have participated via teleconference, but she chose not to. Why is anyone’s guess, but a certain social networking site reported her as working at the time.
There were two resolutions actually, one was the Superintendent’s. The Board would have faced MAJOR backlash if they chose to end JROTC right now rather than “keep JROTC without the PE credits.” They would have been not only out of compliance of their resolution from December 07, they would have sent principals across the high school scrambling to place the current JROTC students in PE classes.
No one doubts Jane Kim’s loyalty to Mark Sanchez but why does that loyalty excuse her absence? There is only one more scheduled Board of Education meeting, I bet President Sanchez wanted to get this passed as soon as possible, for the principals and as implied by both sides of the JROTC campaign, that this meeting came at a haste which made it hard for both sides to gather support.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:51 pm e
I would say that, at worst, what Jane Kim did was passive-aggressive. But I think that that possibility is very likely. It really devalues her in my eyes.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:36 pm e
I think she is beginning to see the light.
She’s listening to her constituents.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:36 pm e
I call BS! Mar, Sanchez and their cohorts know that popular sentiment is to let the kids decide whether they want to attend JROTC–so they decide to circumvent the people’s will and have someone from this non profit threaten to sue SFUSD. I wonder who on the non-profit is connected to one of those folks from the Board (a wife, sister, brother, etc.)?
Isn’t it a little suspicious that there’s lots of school districts in CA that offer a PE credit yet they threaten to sue SF? That flimsy excuse about a lawsuit is also bogus.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:53 pm e
The lawsuit, resolution and/or Kim’s absence may well have been politically motivated. Nonetheless, if ROTC does not fulfill the CA state requirement for a P.E. class, then the district has only 3 choices: alter ROTC so that it fulfills the necessary P.E. criteria, offer ROTC but don’t allow it to count as a P.E. class, or eliminate ROTC.
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:31 am e
What is with the Green Party spokesgal’s completely dishonest post on BeyondChron, clearly attempting to sanitize the BOE split over the JROTC issue? It’s jaw-dropping.