Brown Reviews School Board Forum

 
h. Brown at a school board candidates forum
held yesterday evening at Abraham Lincoln High School.
Photos by Luke Thomas

By h. brown

September 26, 2008

Last evening Supervisors Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd hosted a forum for School Board candidates at Abraham Lincoln High School deep in the Sunset. I attended and was joined later by Fog City Journal editor and buddy, Luke Thomas, who took a few pics.  But I was feeling kind of malaised and the event just never caught fire for me. However, it helped me to narrow down my own endorsements for the slots and that’s the purpose of these things. Right?

I’ll share my guesses as to the eventual winners, but first let me set the stage.

I expected trouble

Lincoln’s a bastion of the JROTC and I fully expected an audience full of screaming students. In fact it’s why I entered the race, but it didn’t happen. Oddly, the entire affair was one of the most civil political gatherings I’ve attended in San Francisco.

Of course, that was a disappointment for me. I wore my good conduct pin from my time in the Navy under JFK and wasn’t going to be bullied. I can yell with the best of ’em and this was a group that had threatened the life of an anti-JROTC commissioner last year. No one even tried.

There was some kind of bake sale going on and the students barely noticed the candidates as we entered and exited. Senior school board member Jill Wynns commented that there were a number of cadets in the audience and played to them by calling for “the student voice” to be heard. They didn’t respond.

I broadcast the event live on my Ustream show at www.hbrownhour.com but forgot to save it so that’s that on that angle. Let me just give you a breakdown of the way the candidates and audience broke down for me.

The greatest luminary I saw there was Budget Analyst, Harvey Rose, who’s been on the job since before Romulus and Remus and would make a great Mayor. My guess was that he was there because it was in his neighborhood and he wanted to see a couple of the Mayor’s entries in action. Let me get to them.

Kimberly Wicoff

Kimberly Wicoff

To be contended with. A late entry who doesn’t have a prayer in this contest but is clearly being groomed for high administration. She talked about funneling money and services from the private sector into the homes of 2,500 families in the projects. But, she’s a 25’ish white girl whom I doubt has ever been in a public housing project alone.

Still, I gotta give the girl her due. The original financing for her enterprise came from Bain Capital out of Boston which has a kind of love/hate relationship with Warren Hellman (they nearly bought Lehman Brothers together this week while I ate popcorn and drank whiskey and watched). I’m alert to that kind of shit.

Wicoff has the kind of severe anorexic good looks done best by our hostess, Carmen Chu. They’re both razor blades growing to carefully honed scythes. I admire competence and, dude, they are competent.

James Calloway

Dr. James Calloway

I’m gonna give this guy a pass cause no one should be able to work 3 decades in the cesspool of the SFUSD administration without becoming a whistleblower and going into witness protection.

Marigrace Cohen

Pretty much the same story as Calloway. Several decades in the belly of the corrupt beast and proud as hell of it. Defiant even.

Emily Murase

I wouldn’t want her holding my mortgage. Another entry from the Mayor’s office. There’s a real touch of Rose Pak and Julie Lee in this lady and she has a doctorate. In communications. You won’t be able to read the order that sends you walking the plank but it will all be legal.

Omar Khalif

Genuinely nice guy. Happy guy. Put 4 kids through the system if I heard him right. But, he said that he’d ask Jill Wynns how to vote if he wasn’t certain and … oooh, that’s bad.

Jill Wynns

Incumbent school board member Jill Wynns

She did everything she could to drive Mark Sanchez from the School Board, plays the kids on the inflammatory JROTC issue and gave Arlene Ackerman around a half million bucks. Here’s your gold pin, Jill. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

Jaynry Mak

The embodiment of entitlement. This is the lady whose family ‘laundered’ (?) dozens of $100 donations into her account from every employee in their eatery when she ran for supe in D-4 last year. Frankly, I don’t believe a word she says.

Rachel Norton

I’m undecided. She’s solidly for JROTC but she has real credentials working on behalf her children (one in Special Ed) and is a driving force in several parents organizations. I’ll keep digging.

Bobbi Lopez

Barbara “Bobbi” Lopez

A great late entry. She’s gay, young, smart as hell and listens more than she talks. Everything I’m not. And, none of the machine hack organizations endorsed her. Huh? She has my most enthusiastic vote in 6 weeks.

Norman Yee

Not present. He and Lopez and Sandra Fewer did an event in the Richmond earlier.

h. brown

If you don’t love yourself, don’t expect anyone else to. I’m the best candidate by far and I can certainly use the health insurance that goes with the position.

Comments

The Mayor’s people want to control every dime in town and the School Board looks at something like a half billion in contracts each year. Feinstein’s hubbie, Dick Blum, was ‘lucky’ enough to win the contract to broker the sale of 8 SFUSD properties for $100 million this year. This is the same guy who, as head of Calpers, lost $350 million dollars of workers retirement funds in bad Lennar corporation land deals in San Diego. Also, this year.

I think that Murase and Wicoff are running to join Wynns and Hydra Mendoza. This would create a voting block that would be able to declare a raft of schools and other SFUSD property as ‘surplus’ and allow the district to sell them (thru Blum) to their surrogates. Wynns was already referring to increasing class sizes and closing schools last night.

The Fisher family is worth many billions and they have a foothold in not just the SFUSD (their KIPP charters) but also in Rec and Park through their ‘Fields’ foundation. The SFUSD property chief  came from Wells Fargo and is a union buster. They just bought every redwood tree north of Antarctica and are one of the biggest employers of child slave labor in the world.

My primary value to the School Board would be to lead the fight to save district property from privatization by the Blums and Fishers and the like. We need every square inch of land we can to put in housing for teachers and cops and firefighters and paramedics and …

Harold Brown

h. brown is a 62 year-old keeper of sfbulldog.com, an eclectic site featuring a half dozen City Hall denizens. h is a former sailor, firefighter, teacher, nightclub owner, and a hard-living satirical muckraker. His other FCJ articles can be found here. here.

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