Vidrale Franklin, the former longtime principal of Dr. Charles R. Drew College Preparatory Academy, used last Monday’s graduation ceremony at the Bayview elementary school to openly challenge the school district for forcing her to resign after a lengthy investigation into how she managed school funds.
“The world needs to know how you don’t value us, how you under-resource us,” she said in reference to the district. “And then when we start to do well. How you shut us down. Yeah. The world needs to know. Yeah. The world needs to know that in this progressive city we call San Francisco. How racist this city is,” Franklin said to roughly 120 parents gathered at Drew for the graduation ceremony. Drew has a majority Black student body.
Five of those in attendance spoke to Mission Local about the speech and two offered video. The quotes come from those videos.
As the short speech continued, Franklin invoked God, saying she conferred with him. “I said, God, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to do? And he said, fight. And he started putting people in my path that will help me do that because I was alone, y’all. And I don’t feel bad about anything I’m saying about the district or who I’m exposing.”
Parents applauded and whistled as Franklin spoke.
Franklin’s remarks followed what she described as a forced resignation on May 22. Since then, Franklin and her supporters have raised questions on whether she has been unfairly punished for practices that failed to follow protocol, but ones that she alleges are common in under-resourced schools.
Drew staff, families, and members of Parents for Public Schools — a nonprofit that promotes public education and helps guide families through the public school system — are planning to protest Franklin’s resignation and the investigation that led up to it at the forthcoming June 9 board of education meeting.
Eight month investigation begins
Franklin’s stand-off with the school district began with an Oct. 8 email from Stephanie Bealby, director of employee relations, saying that the principal’s financial practices were under investigation. Specifically, the district was looking into how she managed federal Title 1 funds distributed to schools that serve low-income families, and how she managed funds raised through fundraising events.
Over the next eight months, Franklin turned over multiple records and receipts of all financial transactions dating back to January 2023, according to an email Franklin provided to Mission Local. The district stopped asking her about Title 1 funds early on but persisted in its investigation of how she used funds raised from parents and other events.
While no report from the investigation has been issued, Franklin said she was told in a one-on-one meeting with her union legal counsel Dino Velez on March 13 that all the money had been accounted for, according to Franklin.
In recounting their discussion, Franklin quoted from the notes she took of their meeting. Velez declined to talk about the meeting, citing client-privilege restrictions, though he did agree to answer other questions.
Franklin said that Velez told her that while she failed to follow the district’s protocol, it was a case of “good intentions, bad execution.”
Nevertheless, on May 13, the district sent Franklin an email stating that “consistent with direction from the Board, this letter shall serve as formal notice that you will indeed be released from your current administrative position, effective June 30, 2026.”
Her union representative, JoLynn Washington, subsequently told her that if she “did not turn in [her] resignation, they were going to terminate [her] Monday, [May 25].”
“They forced me to resign,” said Franklin, “and I did because I was scared.”
Franklin said the San Francisco Unified School District assigned her to a teaching position at another elementary school one week after she resigned as Drew’s principal.
“I have asked for reasons [for my termination] in writing and they have refused,” she wrote in an email to Mission Local. “I’m confused because I was forced to resign from the district completely … but was assigned to Carver as a teacher.”
Mission Local reached out to Superintendent Maria Su, but was told that she “couldn’t comment on district personnel or investigations.”
The San Francisco Standard was the first to report the investigation.
Franklin said in an interview after the graduation that she is gathering the documentation necessary to file a claim with the state civil rights department, including filing public records requests concerning the district’s history of what she called “forcing out Black principals.”
She added, “The district has a history of removing Black principals in the Bayview, and not supporting us at the same level, especially given the challenges of working in this community … The district purports to be this anti-racist, equitable organization and it’s just not that.”
How Franklin managed funds raised through events and campaigns
Franklin acknowledges that she failed to follow protocol. But she alleges that her forced resignation is a result of district practices that unfairly punish Black principals for what she referred to as “prohibited but necessary” methods to create safe and successful environments in otherwise under-supported schools.
She said she plans to sue the district to bring attention to the struggle Black and brown academic leaders experience within the SFUSD.
The district alleges that Franklin stored and spent fundraised sums in her personal Venmo, Amazon and Square accounts; had school packages delivered to her house during off-school hours; and hired a handyman from 826 Valencia to install a classroom projector instead of filing a work order with the district amongst other similar allegations. They made 15 charges in total.
The district also questioned Franklin’s decision to use an on-campus safe to keep some $7,000 raised over two years from parents and supporters. Once the district learned of the funds being held in a safe, Bealby, the employee relations director, “literally walked right in, took it, and walked right out,” said third grade teacher Erin Lang, who witnessed the event.
Franklin vehemently denies misusing funds and asserts that her actions were always strictly for the benefit of her students and staff.
The $7,000 raised on behalf of the school would normally have been in a bank account controlled by the Parent Teacher Association, according to district protocol. Without one, Franklin said she told the district that she had no choice but to let school employees use her personal accounts for school purchases and donations — a decision that flouted official district regulations.
However, a former longtime SFUSD principal said the practice of using informal and even personal cash-related apps for storing school funds is hardly confined to Drew.
“It is common practice all across schools in SFUSD, and frankly all across the country,” said the former principal, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “The school district provides no alternative, there’s no way to raise money and access it.”
The former principal said the method is most commonly seen in schools that are under-resourced and under-supported, and have difficulties establishing a PTA. Drew is all three.
“What happens is, in wealthier schools they can set up their own PTA, and have their own PTA accounts,” they explained, negating the necessity of using cash-exchange apps, “but if you don’t have that, then some random teacher or principal or even parent sets up a GoFundMe or a Venmo.”
Mission Local reached out to Bealby for comment, but has so far received no reply.
Franklin’s tenure
Her roots in the school and surrounding community run deep. Franklin grew up in the neighborhood and now lives only two blocks away from the school. Her family has generational history with Drew — both Franklin and her father attended and graduated from the school, and her two daughters are currently enrolled.
Regarded as a pillar of the community, she is beloved by parents, teachers, and students. It appears that the school has flourished during the eight years she has sat in the principal’s office.
Test scores rose by 10 points, and pre-K and kindergarten classes increased from fewer than 15 students in each grade to three full pre-K, and two full first grade classes.
The regularly rising test scores and literacy rates, and a staff retention rate of 98 percent earned plaudits from SFUSD leaders, including representatives from the district Department of Professional Learning and Coaching, and the Community Schools & Partnerships Office asking about her methods. Superintendent Su, who toured the school and, according to Franklin, told her that she was “doing excellent work here,” even while Franklin was under investigation.
This won her allies among parents. She also made fundraisers accessible and relevant to the families’ households — prizes for school auctions and raffles, for instance, included laundry detergent, bleach, and other cleaning supplies. On campus, she established “the Drew store” to reward good behavior at the school where students could earn and use “Drew dollars” to buy toys, trophies, and other small prizes.
That mattered little as the inquiry progressed, Franklin said.
Little communication with SFUSD
Instead, she said, complete lack of communication was the defining characteristic of the investigation. “I reached out so many times to my supervisors, but they will not speak to me,” she said, “Maria Su won’t speak to me. The only time I heard from anyone was when Michelle [Chang] reached out after I resigned, offering to help me write a letter communicating to the community.”
The district has yet to issue a formal report of the investigation’s findings. Velez, who worked in the SFUSD legal department for many years, said that the timetable for releasing reports varies, but that in his opinion “some of it should be done by now.”
In regards to the manner of the district’s demands, Franklin said that by immediately calling for her resignation the district had potentially violated article 18 of the administrator union’s contract. The clause outlines the steps of “progressive discipline,” a common stipulation in unionized workplaces that requires performance-improvement steps before resorting to reassignment or termination.
“I didn’t get a warning, didn’t get a counseling memo, didn’t get the progressive discipline,” Franklin said. “I’ve been asking for something in writing so I can know what I’m being fired for, and they refuse to do that.”
In spite of multiple attempts to contact her supervisors at the district, she said she has still not learned the exact reasons why the district demanded her resignation.
For Franklin, negotiations for her resignation were tantamount to blackmail. According to documents provided to Mission Local, the district informed her that, regardless of the investigation’s findings, it would have no choice but to report her to the Commission of Teaching Credentials should she try to find a job in another school district.
Velez confirmed that the district regularly uses this threat as a way to ensure smooth negotiations for resignations and reassignments.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t stop crying,” Franklin said, attributing her 30-pound weight loss to stress. “It impacts our entire community, they have no idea the harm they’re causing.”
Her confusion only deepened when she received an email “out of the blue” on May 28, nearly a week after her resignation, reassigning her as an English Language teacher to Dr. George Washington Carver Elementary School.
Franklin said she will not be taking the position at Carver, as she wants to remain at Drew. She did, however, confirm that she would consider dropping any civil rights claim on the conditions that the district allow her to continue as Drew’s principal and “create meaningful changes that support women of color and principals in the Bayview.”
“I would love to continue to serve my school, because I still have ideas for how to make us better,” she said, “I’m committed to this community … and I know what happens when there’s a turnover in leadership, you go back to zero, and our kids can’t afford that.”