How SF’s most powerful mom became a political force
“We’re accountable to no one but kids and parents,” says Meredith Dodson. | Source: Morgan Ellis/The Standard
Everyone in San Francisco education politics says they’re focused on what’s best for the kids. Not everyone agrees on what that means.
That disagreement came to a head after March 2020, when parents watched schools in big cities like Atlanta, Miami, and Nashville reopen while San Francisco’s stayed shut. They watched the school board in SF debate renaming campuses but not reopening them, and watched as their children disengaged from Zoom lessons. Some believed it was a health hazard to reopen schools; others felt that students could suffer irreparable harm — educational and psychological — from keeping them closed.
Meredith Dodson was part of a group that believed keeping SF schools closed was harming students. She and other parents messaged on Facebook, trading stories about kids who wouldn’t turn on their cameras or could barely get out of bed, who just wanted to return to some semblance of a normal childhood.
Dodson was an unlikely public figure to emerge from the chaos that descended on the San Francisco Unified School District during that period. Raised by a public school teacher in New York, she came to the Bay Area in 2007 for a graduate degree in education policy from UC Berkeley and built a career in public policy and nonprofit consulting focused on early education for low-income families. She describes herself as an “introvert who’s learned how to be an extrovert in an extroverted world.”
She says she once told her husband, back when they were dating, that they’d have to break up if he ever ran for office.
Six years later, Dodson is leaving her post as the salaried executive director of what began as a single-issue coalition called Decreasing the Distance and grew into a political force known as SF Parents.
When The Standard visited the group’s modest office on Page Street, near Hayes Valley, last week, the walls were covered with flyers and maps of the city. Most of the desks were empty. The workers, Dodson explained, were out in the field.
Dodson looked back on six years spent fighting over school closures, recalls, elections, and the direction of the district as relentlessly “nasty, stressful and anxiety-provoking.” “We’re accountable to no one but kids and parents. That’s why it’s tolerable,” she said. “Otherwise there’s no way I would deal with that.”
