Sanchez chosen President of San Francisco Board of Education

For the first time ever, a Green is president of the San Francisco Board of Education. By unanimous vote of his colleagues, Mark Sanchez was chosen board president in January. With more than 60,000 students and a 2006-2007 budget of $629 million, the San Francisco Unified School District is the largest K-12 district in the nation where a Green is board president.

Sanchez said he was "humbled and happy" to be chosen president. A resident of the Mission District, the city's most diverse, he hopes to focus the board's attention on "the district's neediest students" including black and Latino students, whose academic achievements often lag behind their white and Asian peers. 

An openly gay middle school teacher, Sanchez was first elected to the Board in 2000, then was re-elected in 2004. He registered Green soon after being elected his first time, after being inspired by friend Matt Gonzalez's successful run for the San Francisco board of supervisors, who registered Green during that same fall electoral campaign.

	Mark Sanchez, moments after being chosen President of the San Francisco Board of Education. To see Sanchez's whole acceptance speech, go to the 'video/audio' link on www.greens.org/media/ and look for January 9th, 2007.

Sanchez's election followed the election in November of a new 4 to 3 board progressive majority - the result of Green Jane Kim being elected along with fellow progressive Kim-Shree Maufus.

"I feel really good," said Sanchez after assuming his new role. "It's a very diverse board that is reflective more than ever of the students and the families we serve. It's the first time in recent memory that we have a real solid progressive majority. I think that it's a great start to a new year."

According to San Francisco Green Board of Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi (who succeeded Gonzalez in District 5) "this progressive shift was an endorsement of the stand that previous Board progressives Sanchez, Eric Mar and outgoing Green Board member Sarah Lipson took against the previous autocratic former superintendent and her downtown backers."

Finding a new superintendent will be one of the Board's most important tasks and Sanchez is advocating a comprehensive process that will help update the superintendent's position and expectations.

Among other achievements together, Lipson and Sanchez were successful in getting the board to phase the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) program out of San Francisco public schools. It is believed that this is the first time any school district has eliminated an existing JROTC program. 

Looking ahead, in order to address issues of equity in the district, Sanchez said he planned to keep things small at both the primary and secondary level and increase integration through the student assignment system. 

"I promote the re-introduction of ethnicity and race as factors in school enrollment," said Sanchez. "We also need to work with the city to expand more affordable housing opportunities for working families with children throughout San Francisco, so that our neighborhoods become more integrated ethnically and along economic lines."

Signaling his style of leadership, Sanchez proposed earlier school board meetings to make meetings more accessible by eliminating late night sessions. He also supports extending San Francisco's landmark open-government Sunshine Ordinance to the school district so that the mechanics of bond-funded capital projects, conducted by the SFUSD, is transparent to parents, teachers and interested members of the public.

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