The San Francisco school board member under intense scrutiny over a series of racist tweets from 2016 has been stripped of her position Thursday as vice president of the Board of Education.
Board members voted 5-2 on a resolution calling for Alison Collins to resign from the body altogether. However, Collins was removed from her rank when she refused to step down. She will remain on the board.
"Commissioner Collins’ statements were not only hurtful, but racist, and i am calling it for what it is," said Commissioner Faauuga Moliga.
The resolution was drafted by Moliga and Commissioner Jenny Lam, both of whom spoke out against Collins’ rhetoric and called for her to resign in a tense meeting on Tuesday.
"This continues to harm and divide our communities and it undermines our ability to do the work of the school board," Lam said on Thursday. "Our school board has lost its focus. We must rebuild trust with our school communities and the public to move forward."
Board President Gabriela Lopez and Collins voted against the resolution.
"To see this happening now and to not say this is political, to me, this is a ridiculous display of that," Lopez said of the controversy, which stems from a group targeting specific members of the Board of Education for recall.
Per the language in the reading, Collins will also be removed from all committees of the San Francisco Board of Education for the remainder of her term, which expires in January 2023. She was first elected in 2018.
"I reject the attempts to mischaracterize me as a person and as a member of this board," Collins said after the vote. She later added that the "resolution does nothing to enhance our team nor our chances for success."
Collins, who has claimed her posts were "taken out of context," has refused a growing number of calls to step aside from the public and elected officials after the racially-charged Twitter thread came to light last Friday.
Many in the Asian American community found the tweets offensive and hurtful. The thread in question used several racial epithets, accusing Asian American parents at her kids’ school of using "white supremacist thinking," among other statements.
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