The favorite room for most of the student body of Dr. Charles R. Drew College Preparatory Academy is called “the Drew Store.” Students at the small public elementary school in the Bayview earn “Drew Dollars” for good behavior and trade them in for the Stanley cups, footballs, Mr. Potato Heads, board games, and Play-Doh that line the shelves.

Teachers and parents say the store has played a large role in the school’s sharply improving test scores and increasing enrollment. It was the brainchild of principal Vidrale Franklin — known to the community as “Dr. Franklin” — who came to the school in 2018.

But the store has also played a role in a district investigation into the school leader that led to Franklin’s resignation May 22, after she was notified she would be terminated in the coming days. She’s still at the school, greeting students in the hallway and coordinating end-of-year logistics. But as it stands, she’ll be out of her job at the end of June, with the opportunity for reassignment at a nearby school as an English-language development teacher.

More than a dispute over administrative bookkeeping, the forced resignation is a microcosm of a larger battle over race, equity, and educational reform in the Bayview. The district’s decision to push out a beloved, homegrown principal over procedural shortcomings has left families and staff furious — arguing that SFUSD is actively undermining a rare neighborhood success story under the guise of bureaucratic protocol.

In response to queries about Franklin’s termination, the district said in a statement that it is “committed to supporting the Drew community” through the “uncertainty” of a change in leadership. It said the investigation is both “confidential and ongoing,” so it cannot share any details. The district said it is “committed to following a fair and consistent process in these matters.”

Franklin argues that what she did was come up with creative solutions to support an under-resourced school. She admits there were procedural shortcomings but said she repeatedly asked for help from the district in correcting them. “I wasn’t trying to do this in secret,” she said.

The investigation led to the district confiscating more than $7,000 in cash raised by parents and held at the school, according to internal SFUSD emails reviewed by The Standard, which sparked the cancellation of an annual field trip. It has also resulted in parents and staff wondering what will happen to the school after their highly regarded principal leaves. One teacher has already resigned, citing Franklin’s unfair treatment.

At a May 26 town hall held in the cafeteria, dozens of parents, teachers, and students expressed support for Franklin. A fifth-grader named Mario took the microphone briefly. “If Mrs. Franklin gets taken,” he said, “the other students won’t get the same treatment that we did.”

Franklin believes the investigation has less to do with how she handled money than with who she is and where she works. It’s par for the course, she said, for a district that talks about racial equity but in practice fails to champion Black leaders. Regardless of her degrees or accomplishments, Franklin said, “this district reminds me that I am just a Black woman from the Bayview. I could be a crackhead on the street.”

The district investigation into Franklin began in earnest two months into the school year. According to correspondence reviewed by The Standard, Stephanie Bealby, SFUSD’s director of employee relations, emailed Franklin on Oct. 8, saying she was being investigated for “allegations of unprofessional conduct,” including “misuse of public funds.”

District investigators, according to contemporaneous notes from the Oct. 15 investigative interview reviewed by The Standard, focused on several concerns: Amazon purchases for the school stored at Franklin’s home and mother’s house; parent-raised cash kept on campus, outside any formal account; and her use of a personal Venmo account to collect donations.

Franklin said packages were being stolen from outside the school, so she had Amazon orders shipped to her home two blocks away. She told The Standard that every Amazon purchase was paid for out of Drew’s allocated district budget. The $330 in outdoor heaters the district allegedly flagged ended up at her mother’s house, which had become the venue for 11 staff events over several years — for free, versus the roughly $1,000 it would have cost to rent a space. The heaters were too heavy to move repeatedly, she said, so they stayed in the yard between events.

The district also accused Franklin of giving her daughters, who used to attend Drew, items from the school store. Franklin said she was “absolutely” offended that the district suggested she gave anything to relatives using school funds.

She was unapologetic about spending on staff, including snacks in the lounge. “They’re professionals. I want to treat my staff like Google and Salesforce treat their staff.”

The cash came from a series of small fundraisers where parents sent donations via Venmo to Franklin’s personal account because Drew, lacking a PTA, had no other way to accept digital payments, she said. Franklin shared records with The Standard, including a fund tracking log that she said was shared with two other Drew staff members. Franklin said funds were either passed in cash to the school’s community liaison for school expenses or deposited into Franklin’s bank account and then routed by check to Drew’s district discretionary account.

Parents had tried repeatedly to form a PTA, Franklin said, but always stopped short of signing the paperwork to open a bank account, wary of the legal commitment. “It’s always been, ‘You do it, Dr. Franklin,’” she said, referring to parents encouraging her to take on logistical and administrative duties. The school’s biggest fundraisers clear only a couple thousand dollars, a fraction of what wealthier schools in the city raise in a single evening. “Being resourceful is not valued in this district,” Franklin said.

Franklin said district investigators told her the issue was transparency, not theft. She needed a PTA, and the district would help her set one up. “We don’t think you’re stealing,” she recalls being told by a district official at the October meeting. The help, she said, never came.

“Tell me the process, and I’ll start following it,” Franklin said. “But I’m not going to stop serving my community.”

Franklin and members of her staff believe the formal complaint came last summer, before the school year began, and that it originated with Flavio Prieto, a longtime school secretary, pointing to the fact that investigators asked her during an October interview about something only Prieto could have known. The Standard could not independently verify that the complaint originated with Prieto.

Prieto told The Standard he did not file a complaint against Franklin. He said that he was questioned by district staff, but declined to discuss his role in the investigation.

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“I value constructive feedback and would never engage in retaliation or inappropriate conduct in response to professional criticism,” Prieto wrote in an email. “I have actually enjoyed working with Dr. Franklin. She has always been fun to work with and fair.”

The investigation escalated into the winter. In an Oct. 23 email reviewed by The Standard, Bealby asked Franklin for Drew’s fundraising tracking records and employment documents with outside contractors. An email Jan. 16 went much further: Bealby demanded all of Franklin’s Square and Venmo statements going back to January 2023, all bank statements connected to Drew fundraising, three years of school spending plans, gift card records, and every receipt for cash spent on site.

On March 7, a mail carrier handed Franklin a certified letter outside her home, notifying her that she was to be removed from her post as principal.

A second letter came May 13, reviewed by The Standard, formally removing her from her administrative role and suggesting she would be reassigned. It was signed by SFUSD’s associate superintendent of human resources, listed no specific allegations, and thanked her for her “dedication, resilience, and perseverance.” She signed her resignation May 22.

Why she’s being pushed out remains a mystery to Franklin. “I’m just baffled,” she said.

Before Franklin was principal of Drew, she was a student there. Born and raised in the Bayview, she attended the neighborhood’s public schools — Drew, then Martin Luther King Middle School, then Philip and Sala Burton Academic High School. She attended UC Berkeley and earned a doctorate from San Francisco State University’s College of Education.

She started teaching at SFUSD in 1997, rising to principal at Bret Harte Elementary School, across the street from the Alice Griffith housing project in the Bayview. Over her seven years as principal, she managed the school through suicides, shootings, and a police raid during which suspects fled through the building during the school day.

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She spent the next few years away from SFUSD and had two daughters. In 2018, she returned to SFUSD as principal of Drew. The school she inherited was — by her own account — chaotic. She was often berated by students and staff and at times wanted to quit. But she had a job to do.

She restructured the school in stages: first the teachers, then the paraeducators, then the contractors and community-based organizations that worked on site. She launched the Drew Store, built a science room, a wellness center where students practice yoga and meditation, and started an annual camping trip.

According to school performance data Drew staff shared with The Standard, Drew’s Star Early Literacy proficiency rate improved from 61% to nearly 86% this school year. On the state SBAC English test, students meeting or exceeding standards more than doubled — from 10% to 23% — between 2022-23 and 2024-25, with Black students rising from 9% to 26% and Latino students from 17% to 24%. Enrollment has climbed from 152 to 210 since 2020-21.

Drew’s growth runs counter to a long-term trend in the southeast corner of the city. According to a data analysis by The Standard, three ZIP Codes — 94112 (Excelsior, Crocker-Amazon, Oceanview), 94124 (the Bayview), and 94134 (Visitacion Valley, Portola) — house six of the 10 elementary schools with the steepest enrollment declines in SFUSD since the 2011-12 school year, despite containing just one-fifth of all elementary schools.

According to SFUSD enrollment data (opens in new tab), the Bayview ZIP Code had the largest net outflow of transitional kindergarten to fifth-grade students this year: 1,895 more elementary age students live there than attend school there.

Other principals across SFUSD have visited to see how Drew is succeeding. Superintendent Maria Su visited May 4 and, according to staff present, praised the school’s progress. That same week, the district was finalizing the paperwork to push Franklin out.

Every May, the fifth-grade class visits Boomers, an amusement park in Livermore. This year, the trip did not happen. Parents had raised $7,696 in cash over two years to pay for such events, according to an internal email from Bealby to district staff, but the district seized those funds.

In January, two district employees arrived at Drew and took the money — telling staff that cash could not be held on a school campus, according to community liaison Mesepa Kaulave’s account at a May 26 town hall.

According to an April 13 email from Kaulave to Christie Herrera, an SFUSD administrator overseeing elementary schools, Herrera had earlier told Drew staff the funds “remain available” but had not explained how to access them.

During her May 4 meeting at Drew, Su told staff the district would not let end-of-year events be canceled, according to attendees. Staff say Su, who appeared surprised that Drew’s fundraising money had not been returned, offered to charge the Boomers trip to her own credit card before being told by Herrera it would violate district protocol. The moment underscored the confusion surrounding the funds.

But the funding never came through. “What did you guys want with our little bit of money from our Black and brown school?” Kaulave said at the town hall this week.

During the event, children ran around the edges of the room, but the mood was fraught as Drew staff laid out the timeline of the investigation publicly for the first time. Parents reacted with gasps at each new detail. “That was our money,” one called out.

Tiana Kaulave, the after-school program director at Drew, said she had been Franklin’s fourth-grade student at Bret Harte. “She raised me on her leadership,” Kaulave said.

LaTonya Carpenter, the school’s social worker of eight years, warned that losing Franklin would dismantle the behavioral systems that had reshaped Drew’s culture. “The loss of an administrator responsible for leading and sustaining these systems will significantly disrupt student support,” she said.

Parents spoke through tears. A mother said her son had been one of just a handful of Black students at Miraloma Elementary School, and enrolling him at Drew under Franklin had been “the best decision I’ve made.”

She noted that Miraloma’s PTA raised hundreds of thousands of dollars that the school got to keep. “Nobody takes their $250,000,” she said. “But they come here, they bully us, and now we lost somebody amazing.”

SFUSD told The Standard it will convene a panel of Drew community members to help identify candidates to take over Franklin’s post. “Once a final candidate is selected, the appointment will be submitted to the Board of Education for approval,” the district said.

Franklin says she has lost 30 pounds this school year from the stress. A week after resigning, she sat with The Standard for two hours after school and tried to make sense of it all. When she got to the parts of the story that bewildered her, she opened her eyes wide and threw up her hands. “I just don’t understand,” she said. “I really don’t.”

Franklin feels like her treatment is part of a pattern of behavior in a school district that continues to pressure people like her to leave, while ostensibly championing them.

She cited a district meeting with central office staff and school site administrators in February. Black staff members were asked to stand while the rest of the room applauded them. They were singled out by race, in front of their colleagues, as though it were a tribute. “It was so bizarre, and we were so offended,” Franklin said.

Afterward, Su sent an apologetic email to attendees, obtained by The Standard, about what the district called a “Black Excellence Acknowledgement” and said she understood that the experience was “hurtful, isolating, and dehumanizing.”

“When Black leaders are harmed, our entire leadership community at SFUSD is diminished,” she added. “Repair requires more than words.”

Still, Franklin said she’s seen what amounts to a revolving door of Black school leaders in neighborhoods like hers.

“When I come here, I don’t come here as a human being. I come here as an oppressed Black person,” Franklin said. “That triggers me to put on my armor and grab my shield. Let me just tell you how taxing that is. I’m in battle mode, and the people that I’m trying to serve are also in battle mode.”