Public-school teacher Gabriela López, 27, says that some people discouraged her from running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Education, even though she had 10 years of experience in education. But she says she lacked the connections, the money, and the political experience that, in her view, afforded other candidates a certain amount of respectability.
However, with the help of two essential team members — a 23-year old organizer and a fellow public-school teacher — López canvassed her way into the history books. She is now the youngest person ever elected to the San Francisco Board of Education and the youngest elected official in San Francisco, and she tells Teen Vogue that she wants to encourage more people like her to run for office and bring to the school district the accessibility she has been fighting for her entire life.
López grew up in South Los Angeles but went to schools on the Westside. López’s mother did what many working-class parents do: She enrolled her kids in better schools using a different residential address.
“I would get up at, like, five in the morning every day to go to school. And that was just a regular thing,” she tells Teen Vogue. “I was always afraid of getting in trouble and getting caught. So when field trips came around, I always had to remember … ‘don’t forget your address,’ or whatever it was, ‘don’t get bad grades,’ which would just take away from the actual experience of being a kid.”
López’s parents are not fluent in English, as they came to the United States from Mexico 30 years ago. “There were hardly any Latino educators, so I was constantly the translator,” she says.
Over time, she pursued her schooling, obtaining a master’s degree and teaching credential, which eventually settled her in a bilingual fourth-grade classroom in San Francisco. In late 2017, Jeremiah Jeffries, the co-founder of a local teachers group called Teachers 4 Social Justice, sat her down and asked her to run for a seat on the school board.
Jeffries, a first-grade teacher, has been organizing since 2002 to get more teachers and educators on the board, which sets policies for teachers and administrators to implement, impacting kindergarten through 12th grade. According to a 2010 study from San Francisco State University, “Latinos constitute a relatively small percentage, approximately 14 to 15 percent, of the school board membership in California, despite the fact that nearly 50 percent of the state’s public school children are Latino.”
Accessibility, and a lack thereof, had colored López’s life from grade school to graduate school. Her strength and passion in the classroom has been making the material accessible to students of all backgrounds — students who are new to the English language, have disabilities, are new to this country, carry trauma to class, or are unhoused.
“You figure out your ways to survive in this system,” she says. “If you’re someone who has sway or has power, how do you set it up so that people don’t have to navigate it in their own ways? When we talk about schools, there’s not enough emphasis on how connected it is to everything else — homelessness, health care, transportation, all these things that affect children, that affect schools, that affect the outcome of their success.”
With these understandings in mind, she decided she would run, but with her students’ needs at the top of her priorities. That meant showing up for her class every day, despite whatever challenges the campaign would bring.
Her platform promised to decrease the language barriers for parents to be involved in their children’s education, give teachers a living wage, support and better train educators of students with trauma and other learning needs, connect families of unhoused students and teachers with housing justice organizations, and support the socioemotional health of students by expanding access to arts and technology education.
Eighteen other candidates vied for one of three seats available on the Board of Education. López’s grassroots platform did not tug at the heartstrings of some San Francisco political elite; she says she felt some of them cared more about who she knew and how much money she had raised.
“People wouldn’t sit down with me because I didn’t have $50,000,” López says. When it came to fundraising, López’s campaign ultimately raised much less than those of other top candidates.
Her platform did, however, magnetize Gabriela Alemán, a San Francisco–born and –raised Nicaraguan and Salvadoran artist and organizer, and the co-president of Latin@ Young Democrats of San Francisco. Alemán tells Teen Vogue that she and her family got evicted from their home in the Mission — San Francisco’s historic Latinx neighborhood — in the early dot-com boom. In Alemán’s view, the most recent tech wave has intensified gentrification and is tied to massive displacement and homelessness, something López had witnessed in working with her students.
Alemán became López’s part-time campaign manager. “I was constantly [told], ‘Oh, but you’ve never done this before,’ or ‘Oh, you’re 23.’ My age was always coming up,” Alemán says.
Caroline Varner, a fellow public school teacher in Teachers 4 Social Justice, completed the rookie trifecta as the campaign treasurer.
With just three months to canvass, and without the help of some big Democratic clubs or a thick budget, the small team had to get López’s name out to some 500,000 registered voters. What the trio lacked in money and fancy tech, they certainly made up for in Spanish-speaking abilities, organizing skills, heart, and community. They decided to cover areas that other campaigns did not prioritize.
However, since this was a citywide race, they needed to reach more than just the Latinx communities that comprise 15% of San Francisco’s population. “We were a team of volunteer teachers, too, which I think also helps in this organizing aspect of it,” López says. It turned into an all-hands-on-deck effort, with a total of 85 canvassers and dozens more pitching in throughout the campaign.
López spent her last 30 minutes before polls closed helping one voter, a monolingual Spanish speaker, find her polling place. López helped her find it, walked her there, and translated for her. Afterward, López walked home alone. There was nothing left to do but take in all of the work over the past year and wait for the first round of results.
The first round of election results was to be posted online, in multiple languages. The top three vote-getters would likely become the next school board members. López won a seat.
“People really underestimated what it meant to have an educator on the ballot,” Alemán says.
Supporters started flowing into the small team’s election party, and Team López has been showered in congratulations and invitations to events ever since. Even the naysayers commended López on a powerful campaign, her team says.
But, as commissioner-elect, López will receive only about $6,000 per year. Board members are also restricted from working in the school district, to prevent any conflicts of interest. That is why López has to resign from her teaching job with her beloved students, midway through the school year.
“It’s so inaccessible for educators, for organizers, and for activists of color to run for commissioner spots, and that’s why it’s become the system that it is now, which is a stepping stone to higher office, which is not okay, especially when it’s on the backs of Black and Brown, undocumented, and queer students,” Alemán says.
In January, López will start teaching in a different district, one that is a 120-minute commute from her home in San Francisco. She says she’s thinking of ways to make politics more accessible to younger people and to people of underrepresented backgrounds. To this end, she plans to document her journey on Instagram (@lopez4schools), which included her swearing-in ceremony on January 7.
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