The San Francisco Unified School Board will meet in emergency session this afternoon to decide the fate of Superintendent Matt Wayne, who will reportedly resign after two years in office. I spoke with Joe Eskenazi, the managing editor/columnist with the Mission Local, which broke the story yesterday.
(Sunni Khalid): “Well, the news of the day is that Matt Wayne who's gonna be submitting his resignation later on today to the San Francisco Unified School District School Board. This comes in the wake of the tumult over the preliminary leaking of a list of schools to be closed or merged. This is pretty quick. Are you surprised at this? And does your reporting show that he was pressured to do this or this was on his own volition? Why now?
(Joe Eskenazi): “Well, on October 8th, superintendent Wayne released a list of schools that would potentially close 11 of them as well as the schools where those students would potentially be transfer. And this is a much more complete list than the mayor, her school rehabilitation body that she created and the Board of Education thought was going to be released. They thought it was just going to be a list of schools that were vulnerable and there would be conversations about where to go from here. But by having so much more information, suny, it kind of really circumscribes the conversations you can have with parents and families because it really looks like it's a done deal and it kind of does away with the community participation. So, in essence, he had faced the mayor and her team of experts and the Board of Education and they were mad. I think that Superintendent Wayne knew that if he didn't resign, he would be fired.
(Khalid) “Is it going to be difficult to find even an interim successor, let alone to launch a national search for a job that nobody seems to be able to keep?”
(Eskenazi): “So, the answer to the question, Sunni, is yes and no. Today we should all know more after the five o'clock Board of Education emergency meeting about what temporary measures they have in place there. Well, the people in charge it is not going to be an empty seat as for the long term and midterm of what's going to happen. You're right. This is a difficult job to do and I know a number of people probably don't want to do it. However, I have talked to folks who are interested, there are people who want this job at this point in time. So it is not a hopeless thing. There are qualified people who want this job and would do this job.
(Khalid): “What does this do on the status of the merger and closure plan, officially?”
(Eskenazi): “It's not within the power of the Board of Education to change that. But you can read between the lines and see that in its present form, it is done. That doesn't mean that we won't have to come back to this terrible road later on. But I believe in this form with the very problematic process that has bothered so many people, the lack of transparency, the questionable methodology that is done and we will move on and the district has lots of other things it needs to do.”
