Avi Ehrlich stands with a striped pink baseball bat within his store on Valencia Street.
Avi Ehrlich said he has enjoyed cutting his own hair during the pandemic by putting a rubber band around his head and cutting under it with clippers. Photo by Juan Carlos Lara.

Hello Readers:

The school board is in the news again, this time approving a third condition of Superintendent Matthews staying.

It’s gorgeous out there. Enjoy it.

And if you insist on staying indoors, think about supporting Mission Local. I’ve been in this business more than four decades – from the Albuquerque Tribune to the New York Times and Mission Local. And I can tell you that it is extraordinary to have a site like Mission Local in your city. These places don’t endure without you.

— Lydia

Stories for today

School Superintendent Dr. Vincent Matthews’ conditions for return required his contract to be updated. Here are the terms.

In March, San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Vincent Matthews abruptly announced his retirement. This week he added another stipulation on returning.

People We Meet: Avi Ehrlich

Avi Ehrlich, 38, the owner of the Silver Sprocket comics store, first moved into 1038 Valencia Street on the eve of the pandemic.

Covid Tracker: 35,694 cases, 517 deaths

New cases, positivity rates, and hospitalizations remain essentially flat and relatively low.

She was loved

A snap.

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.