Due to a work commitment I was an hour late to tonight’s meeting so I was not present for the annual report of the Quality Teacher and Education Act (QTEA) oversight committee this evening. I’ll have to watch a recording of the meeting to fully absorb their report, but I gather that members have raised questions about the district’s carryover of at least some of the annual revenues from this fund.
For review: the QTEA is the district’s parcel tax, passed by voters in June 2008. In 2016-17, property owners will be assessed $238.68 per parcel, generating about $40 million in revenue to support teacher compensation, professional development, technology and innovation in the school district. The QTEA sunsets June 30, 2028.
On the carryover issue, I have to do more research because I missed the opportunity to ask some key questions tonight. The contention is that the district should be putting more of the annual revenues into teacher compensation now; the rejoinder is that the carryover has been set aside to pay for negotiated salary increases. Given that the district and UESF have just agreed to accelerate salary increases, both these arguments could be moot. I’ve asked for an additional discussion of the QTEA at the budget committee, either May 4 or June 1 depending on scheduling. And as someone who walked a lot of precincts to pass QTEA (before I was elected to the Board), it’s very important to me that we live up to what we promised.
We also had a report on the Our Children, Our Families (OCOF) initiative established by the reauthorization of the Public Education Enrichment Fund and the Children’s Fund in 2014. Some very good work has been done in establishing a steering committee (the OCOF Council) chaired jointly by the Superintendent and Mayor Lee. The group has established a detailed framework (caution, big PDF download) and is working on their first 5-year plan.
After a recess for closed session, we convened a Special Meeting to consider a resolution authored by Commissioners Fewer and Mendoza urging the state to include curriculum about the “comfort women” in the state’s history curriculum standards. (Last fall, the Board unanimously passed a resolution to incorporate information about the comfort women in SFUSD’s history curriculum.)
The “comfort women” were prostitutes who serviced the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. Most people agree that the women — Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Indonesian nationals — were forced either by economic or other means into sex slavery, even if the women did at times receive payment. But there the agreement ends. In recent years, activists have sought to compel the Japanese government to issue apologies and reparations to former comfort women. In late 2015, the Japanese government did issue an apology of sorts to Korean comfort women, because the Korean government has been most vocal and forceful in demanding acknowledgement of the Korean women who were enslaved as comfort women. Still, activists argue that other nations deserve the same treatment. For their part, Japan’s supporters (most notably, tonight, Commissioner Murase, who is Japanese-American and has deep ties to Japan) argue that the tone of the comfort women debate is uncomfortably anti-Japanese.
That’s the geopolitics in a nutshell. For myself, the argument that facing historical atrocities is necessary but painful really resonates. Like many innocent Japanese-Americans, Commissioner Murase’s father was interned in a concentration camp in the 1940s, a shameful chapter in United States history. Tonight Commissioner Mendoza recounted her 90-year-old mother’s memory of being hidden in a rice cannister as a young girl in the Philippines during WWII, to make sure she wasn’t kidnapped by Japanese soldiers. My mother remembers being taught to be afraid of “Japs” in 1940s Berkeley, of all places. War makes people do, say and think terrible things. I think our children deserve to know that, and (if we do our jobs well) know better.
Rachel Norton 
Maybe there should be a class devoted to historical atrocities to make sure everyone is covered.
I recall the prejudice against Japanese. Chinese merchants in the Richmond District put signs in their windows saying “we are not Japanese.” I recall that Japanese were referred to as “Dirty Japs.” As a child, my first exposure to Japanese children after the War were the children of diplomats and business people. They came to school wearing clean white starched shirts; they were excessively clean, so I was not clear on the concept. But one kid managed to roll around in the dirt and get dirty by the end of the day, so I was able to find one. That was the kid I chose to befriend.