In an election night selfie video taken in her car, San Francisco public school math teacher Ainye Long joyfully announced to her more than 2,400 Instagram followers: “It’s still so early, but we are officially in second place!”
Her run for office was so grassroots that she said she spent just over $500 and campaigned by carpooling with a former sorority sister. Years of tension over school board politics, controversial classroom lessons, teacher turnover, student well-being and school closures have led Golden State voters to spread more than 50% of the vote among six challengers to Thurmond.
She credits her inspiration to run to one of her math students. “‘You are the reason I’m running,’” she told him one day in class. “Because he asks such great questions like ‘Why are we taking math so late in the day?’”“In short, the pandemic has given us the opportunity to seize new opportunities and there’s never going to be an opportunity like it,” she said. “In the pandemic I was thinking about where we are. We’ve got to stop everything and reimagine what schooling is going to look like.