Members follow District 6 candidates in San Francisco on Election Day
It wasn’t a scene most students expect to find as they attend class on a Tuesday morning. Jane Kim and Debra Walker supporters were yelling in support of their election candidate at a San Francisco BART station, and Gov Team students were there to watch politics play out first-hand. Seniors Gayathri Srinivasan and Katherine Gawlas, the GovTeam President, recall the moment.
“There was a gaggle of Latino women with Jane Kim fliers and there was a Debra Walker dude, a huge supporter,” Srinivasan began.
“He had a sign that was this big with her head on it,” Gawlas continued, as she spread her arms to show the size of the sign.
“He was like, ‘Let’s go Walker!’ [The women] were like, ‘Yay, Jane Kim!'” Srinivasan said. “They were doing it together, and it was really cute, actually.”
“It also showed the whole race. [Kim won] and [Walker] was second,” Gawlas added. “That corner of the street showed that they were really fighting for it.”
Kim and Walker were two of the 13 candidates running for supervisor to represent District 6 on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. On Nov. 2, the last day of the elections, the 32 MVHS Gov Team members traveled to the city to film a documentary about the campaigns.
The idea for a documentary came from Gov Team teacher Christopher Chiang, who decided on making the film as the project for the class’ unit. The district was close by, the election was unique for its large number of candidates, and the community had a distinct nature. District 6 is one of the poorest and most liberal sections of San Francisco, and the election represents the diversity with candidates including a Stanford graduate, a businesswoman, and a drag queen.
For almost seven hours in one day, the class was in San Francisco with black Gov Team sweatshirts and Flip Video camcorders. The students were not involved in the actual campaigning process; their role was to film, ask questions, and collect information.
Gov Team member senior Michelle Yang said, “Basically we just followed [our candidate] around, acting as a documentary crew, and recorded what would happen in an election day and what a candidate would do in a campaign. Basically capturing democracy in action.”
While Gov Team found traditional issues the candidates advocated—helping schools, creating jobs, improving poor housing—there were some ideas that were particular to District 6. One of the candidates, transvestite Glendon “Anna Conda” Hyde believed in preserving the night life of San Francisco and creating more safe-injection sites with clean needles for addicts.
Another Gov Team member, senior Rafal Wojciak, took note of how different San Francisco’s District 6 was compared to Cupertino.
“Cupertino is a really well-off area,” he said. “And when you start talking to the people and they’re saying, “I’m homeless.” They were speaking of it like it’s a day-to-day thing because for them it is. It’s really eye-opening because you see how fortunate you are comparatively.”
Homelessness and housing are some major issues. Walker had been forced to move in and out of San Francisco due to the cost of rent and in her campaign, Walker was against Proposition L, which bans sitting or lying down on sidewalks, as it would leave many of the homeless with no place to stay.
“We got to follow [Walker’s campaign] as they walked around and they would shake hands with people who had clearly slept on the street,” Gawlas said. “They still care and they still know that that’s just the way their community is.”
The project’s intent was to allow Gov Team to observe the election process first-hand, and while it might not have made members politically active, many students stated their views changed on how a campaign is run.
“[Politics] seemed more personal, where people are actually going up to people and like, ‘Hey, have you voted yet?'” Srinivasan said. “Not even ‘Who are you going to vote for,’ but ‘Have you voted? You should vote. Make use of the fact that you can.'”
