Back-to-school week is turning into back-to-court week for San Francisco Superintendent of Schools Maria Su and the school board. On Tuesday, a diverse group of public school graduates and supporters, taxpayers, and local organizations sued the school district in Superior Court seeking to block the district’s attempt to control the membership, meetings, and authorities of the independent public watchdog committee that oversees how the district spends $1.5 billion in school bonds.
The lawsuit, filed by attorney Gregory Chopskie, follows a series of concerns raised by Quincy Yu that were not answered by school district officials while and following her service as chair of the Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee (CBOC). Included among the petitioners joining Yu in the lawsuit are Laurance Lee, a school board candidate and CBOC member; former judge and state senator Quentin Kopp; leaders of the George Washington High School Alumni community; the San Francisco Taxpayers Association, and the California Association of Bond Oversight Committees, a statewide organization composed of bond oversight committee members from across the state with expertise in best practices to comply with state law bond oversight requirements.
As previously reported in The Voice of San Francisco, the Yu petitioners challenge the school district staff’s unilateral decision made last December, after the final school board meeting of the year, to issue new rules that shifted control over CBOC to the staff. The rules, known as Administrative Regulation 1225, eliminate CBOC’s traditional authority over its agenda and ability to provide input into school board nominations and appointments of its members. At the beginning of 2025, the school board voted to direct staff to provide recommendations to it about CBOC’s procedures. The staff failed to do so and, according to the lawsuit, unlawfully compromised the independent review of decisions about $1.5 billion in school bond expenditures that were approved by San Francisco voters in 2016 and 2024…