The Friends of Lowell Foundation (FOLF) sent a formal demand letter to the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to immediately postpone the adoption of the “Voices” ethnic studies curriculum for two mandated semesters, citing clear violations of California’s open-meetings law, the Brown Act, along with inadequate public notice.
The vote on implementing the “Voices” curriculum had been set for Tuesday, April 28. FOLF previously sued SFUSD in 2021 and prevailed on nearly identical grounds when the District adopted Resolution 212-2A1 to eliminate merit-based admissions at Lowell High School.
FOLF characterizes its demands as lawful process, transparency, and evidence-based decision-making rather than rushed adoption. Specifically, they include:
- Full public release of the complete Voices textbook, teacher materials, lesson plans, and all supplementary resources for the legally required 30-day review period.
- A genuine comparative review of multiple ethnic studies curricula, consistent with the District’s own past practice for K–12 social studies adoptions.
- Immediate publication of the full WestEd audit of the prior homegrown curriculum.
- Complete disclosure of the EdLoC committee’s methodology, scoring data, contracts, and findings.
Frank Cheung of FOLF states, “San Francisco families are not asking for perfection — they are asking for a process worthy of their trust. If the District chooses transparency over theater and participation over pre-determined outcomes, this moment can mark a turning point toward lawful, inclusive governance; if not, it will simply confirm a pattern the courts have already found the District ‘plainly failed’ to escape.”
In their letter, FOLF cites charges made in August 2024 by then-former SFUSD Board President Lainie Motamedi that district leadership had misled the board, misappropriated funds, and weaponized the ethnic studies mandate. Commissioner Supriya Ray has also publicly confirmed that she was denied the opportunity to review the Voices textbook before voting.
The group also charges that to fast-track adoption, SFUSD manufactured an “emergency” by abruptly discarding its own homegrown curriculum. The district then broke its 2025 public commitment to conduct an independent WestEd audit and year-long pilot review. Instead, it paid an advocacy group $147,000 to rush the process. In recent coverage, the evaluation was widely criticized for score manipulation, clear bias, and heavy-handed moderation that silenced parental objections.
The full Voices curriculum was never made available for the legally required 30-day public review. Meanwhile, the two-semester mandate creates a disproportionate burden unique to SFUSD: every ninth grader is stripped of a full year-long elective that could have been used for Advancement Placement (AP) courses, a second language, science and technology pathways, or the arts.
The Voice of San Francisco’s coverage of SFUSD was also cited in the letter:
Compounding the harm, SFUSD is eliminating University of California (U.C.) approved curriculum for entering freshmen, such as Advanced Placement European history, while imposing Voices, which lacks U.C. approval. Most troubling is the curriculum’s “identity wheel” exercises, which compel students to publicly disclose personal details of race, ethnicity, gender, and family background, then classify themselves within an oppressor/oppressed ideological framework, raising serious civil rights concerns around compelled speech and viewpoint discrimination.
A copy of the demand letter was also sent to the Department of Education for Civil Rights, The Department of Justice for Civil Rights and San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.
