Justice for Oakland Students Graphic regarding School closures from 2004 to 2017
OUSD has a long history of school closures in Black communities that have accelerated gentrification and resulted in disproportionate harm to Black students.
Oakland Unified School District (“OUSD”) has closed many schools over the past twenty years, following a pattern of using so called “Sustainability” metrics: utilization and enrollment data. In a 2004 discussion about school closures, former school board member Gary Yee articulated that “[t]he primary concern for any school site reutilization was that the school is effective and relatively inexpensive to run.”1 That philosophy reinforced racist and ableist patterns and behaviors and resulted in the devastation of the Black student population in OUSD over time.
In February of 2022, the OUSD board voted to close schools over two years, again using the same kind of “Sustainability” metrics as the selection criteria, and once again disproportionately harming Black, low-income and Disabled students.
AB 1912 and the AG investigation grew out of the February 2022 closure decision, and led to the currently proposed Equity Impact Metrics to be presented to the board this week for adoption.
In response to the closure decision, the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) filed a complaint2 with the California Attorney General (“AG”) alleging that the school closures violated the constitutional and statutory civil rights of Black students in OUSD. The AG opened an investigation into the closures sometime in 2022, and Assemblymember Mia Bonta authored a law (“AB 1912”) requiring an equitable process before deciding to close schools.3 In January, 2023, a newly elected OUSD Board majority rescinded the closure decision for those schools set to be closed in June, 2023 and then voted to “merge” 10+ schools at the end of the 2023-24 school year as part of their budget development, which triggered the need for the AB 1912 equitable process.
OUSD staff presented the Equity Impact Metrics to the Board January 10, 2024 including the same racist and discriminatory “Sustainability” metrics that have been used since 2004, which resulted in a letter from the AG’s office dated January 29, 20244 outlining the AG’s concerns with those metrics. After failing to adopt the identical metrics on March 27, 2024, the OUSD State appointed Trustee warned the board that because they failed to take the steps necessary to “merge” 10+ schools as promised in the 2023 budget resolution, the Trustee would not allow them to negotiate compensation increases for OUSD union employees. In response, Board President Sam Davis has scheduled a vote on a revised set of metrics this Wednesday, April 10th.
What guidance did the AG provide to OUSD? We summarized it so you don’t have to.
So what does the AG have to say about the SPECIFIC metrics that OUSD is proposing?
We are grateful to staff and the Board for removing the four “Sustainability” metrics from the proposal that the AG made clear would repeat the same disproportionate harm as in past years. But the proposed metrics also include other metrics that the AG found problematic or incomplete. The Board should heed the following advice from the AG.
The AG will continue to monitor OUSD as they plan for mergers next year, and any closures or consolidations in the future. OUSD MUST ensure that they take actions that are constitutional, legally compliant, and repair harm to Black and Disabled students rather than replicate it.
We urge the board to make additional changes to the metrics necessary to ensure that they comply with the constitution, the law and the guidance of the California Attorney General. We also urge them to mandate a robust and transparent community input process throughout any decision-making or implementation process.
Charter Schools must serve all students in a way that is reflective of the population of the district as a whole
Under California law1 charter schools must serve a representative population of students, and the plan to do that is a required element of its charter petition as described here: “The means by which the charter school will achieve a balance of racial and ethnic pupils, special education pupils, and English learner pupils, including redesignated fluent English proficient pupils, as defined by the evaluation rubrics in Section 52064.5, that is reflective of the general population residing within the territorial jurisdiction of the school district to which the charter petition is submitted.”2. Although OUSD has not historically used this as a ground for denying a charter renewal or material revision, former Executive Director of the OUSD Charter Office Sonali Murarka made clear in June, 20203 that OUSD would expect charter schools to fulfill that promise moving forward, and that the failure to increase enrollment of identified groups could in fact result in the denial of renewal petitions, and by extension, material revisions, based on the fact that the plan identified in the charter hasn’t resulted in a balance of students and that therefore “the plan is not reasonably comprehensive” under Ed Code section 47605(c)(5). A charter school that is subject to denial on this basis is also subject to denial under section 47605(c)(2) because the charter school is “demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program set forth in the petition” given that the plan to balance student groups is a required element of the charter petition. If the plan is not reasonably comprehensive, the required element is not met. Each of these sections could therefore be the basis of the denial of a renewal petition or material revision.
Lighthouse Charter School has consistently failed to enroll Black students over the last several charter terms. That finding is sufficient to deny the material revision sought here
According to the OUSD Staff presentation on the board’s agenda tomorrow night, Lighthouse Charter School K-8 (“Lighthouse”) serves the following student populations:
Shockingly, although OUSD as a whole serves nearly 3 times more Black students (as a percentage of overall enrollment) than Lighthouse, OUSD staff did not even note this discrepancy in its findings, focusing instead on low-income students, English Learners and students with disabilities:
This failure to even mention Lighthouse’s underenrollment of Black students is particularly problematic given the acknowledgment in 2020 by Lighthouse staff that OUSD had pushed them “to increase their enrollment of Black students” over the last several charter terms and asserted that their new enrollment priorities would address this disparity. Lighthouse staff stated that they were “certain” that their plan to achieve that balance would result in an increase in Black student enrollment during their charter term.4 That has not happened. In fact, enrollment of Black students, who have been consistently underrepresented at Lighthouse, has continue to decrease since the last renewal. The plan that Lighthouse identified in its renewal charter has not resulted in the required balance of students, and therefore the plan is not reasonably comprehensive under the charter law. That finding alone is sufficient for OUSD to deny the material revision.
OUSD should not reward Lighthouse with additional opportunities to NOT enroll Black students
There has been much discussion about whether Lighthouse needs to seek this material revision to add Transitional kindergarten (“TK”) classes, but that is not relevant. TK is not a separate grade level from kindergarten, and so Lighthouse does not need a material revision to add TK classes. Lighthouse must seek a material revision because they are seeking to increase enrollment by 65 students over the maximum enrollment set forth in their charter petition. Language in that petition makes clear that any enrollment exceeding either 5% or 20 students above the maximum enrollment requires this action:
OUSD previously denied a Material Revision to add enrollment filed by Aspire ERES in 2021, choosing there to use Ed Code sections 47605(c)(7) and (c)(8)5, but for some reason the OUSD staff failed to do this analysis here. It should have, and staff should explain why they failed to use those sections of the charter law in considering this material revision.6 But the OUSD board can still deny this material revision based on sections 47605(c)(2) and 47605(c)(5)(G) as set forth above.
Lighthouse, by its own admission, is not serving Black students in a way that is reflective of the community as a whole. OUSD has made a commitment to ensure that OUSD authorized charter schools serve all student groups in the community. If OUSD were to grant this increase in enrollment for Lighthouse, with the same inadequate plan to balance student groups in place, we can expect more of the inequitable exclusion by Lighthouse of Black students. The OUSD board must not reward Lighthouse for bad enrollment behavior by giving them the opportunity to further fail to enroll Black students. The OUSD board must be consistent in its commitment to ensuring that charter schools are serving a representative population of Oakland. We call on the OUSD board to deny the Lighthouse Material Revision and require that Lighthouse return to its maximum enrollment of 515 in the fall.
These two sections were added in 2020 as part of newly passed AB 1505 and provide additional reasons to deny new petitions and material revisions (but not charter renewals). 47605(c)(7) would be a finding that the “charter school is demonstrably unlikely to serve the interests of the entire community in which the school is proposing to locate” and 47605(c)(8) relates to the fiscal impact on OUSD: “The school district is not positioned to absorb the fiscal impact of the proposed charter school.” ↩︎
There has been some discussion that OUSD has been threatened with a lawsuit by the charter industry if OUSD denies this material revision on this basis. We should not be blackmailed into approvals, and it is unlikely that the threat would be carried out. Aspire is a large charter chain, and they chose not to sue OUSD when OUSD used C7 and C8 to deny in 2021. It is highly unlikely that if OUSD denies this material revision based on the failure of Lighthouse to serve Black students as required by their charter and the law that any entity would argue that they should not be held accountable for that discriminatory action. ↩︎
Yesterday we reported concerns that veteran candidate Jorge Lerma, running again for the vacant OUSD District 5 seat, has failed to disclose who is funding his campaign, despite seemingly having reached the $2,000 requirement to do so. Well, now it is clear that Mr Lerma has reached the threshold. Yesterday, district 5 voters received a two page mailer from the candidate through the US Postal Service, which clearly cost more than $2,000 to send. All doubt is now removed – Mr Lerma has reached the threshold to file campaign donor and expenditure disclosure reports and has failed to do so in violation of law.
This is not just the error of a first-time candidate, Mr Lerma has previously run for this same seat and properly filed the same forms in question. In his unsuccessful 2020 campaign, Mr Lerma properly disclosed in his final 2020 Form 460 an expenditure of $4,217.10 for a mailer to district 5 voters – we would expect that this current mailer which was sent on or before October 14, 2023 had a similar cost, well over the $2,000 floor.
This is also not just a technical compliance issue – these disclosures are absolutely critical to ensure transparency, fairness and integrity in our electoral system. As stated on the City of Oakland Elections website: “Campaign finance statements can help answer questions about who is contributing money to Oakland candidates and political campaigns as well as how that money is being spent.1” This is critical information to allow voters to freely exercise their fundamental right to vote for candidates who represent their views.
As voters in District 5 have already received their ballots in the mail and voting is underway, this is a truly shocking failure by Mr Lerma to follow the law and disclose who is contributing to his campaign and how he is spending those funds. We know he knows better, because he has done this before, and managed to file the appropriate disclosures (with the same treasurer in 2020 as in 2023). So what will the disclosures, assuming they are finally filed, tell us about who is behind his campaign? We know he has close ties with some current and former members of the school board, including Dr Gary Yee and Jumoke Hinton, as well as the former mayor (who we know is a big charter school proponent). We also know that he is supported by charter industry leaders (both publicly and behind the scenes), and based on several messages received by Parents United leadership yesterday, those charter leaders are close enough to the campaign to have insider information about whether/when Mr Lerma will file his disclosures and to intervene on his behalf.2 We believe it is also very clear that Mr Lerma has not demonstrated the integrity, transparency and accountability that would qualify him for a seat on the Oakland Unified School Board. We need OUSD board members committed to following the law and interacting transparently with and accountably to the students, families and staff of OUSD. Mr Lerma has demonstrated that he is not that candidate.
Parents United leaders received messages yesterday stating that the leader of an Oakland charter school chain had “heard” that Mr Lerma had filed his disclosures “late” and that as of last night “his forms are up” which was and is not true. Mr Lerma did file his form 410 on October 12, 2023 (as laid out in our previous post) in which he said he “qualified” by having raised/spent $2000 as of 8/11/2023. That Form 410 should have been filed much earlier, and it then triggered the need to file a form 460 on September 28, 2023 identifying donors and expenditures. That has not been filed as of 10/17/2023 at 9:27am.
Every candidate for office in Oakland, including the School Board, is required to comply with various transparency and ethical reporting requirements in order to ensure “fairness, openness, honesty and integrity in Oakland City government.”1 At a time when even local school board elections have become a magnet for out-of-town billionaire spending to push privatization agendas – see this article for more information: https://time.com/5792383/michael-bloomberg-charter-schools-donations/ – these reporting requirements have become critical to allow voters to make informed decisions about which candidates reflect their values. So it is extremely concerning that District 5 school board candidate Jorge Lerma (who ran in 2020 and so should know better) failed to file his form 460 identifying his campaign contributors and expenditures by the September 30 deadline.
Now, more than two weeks later, Mr Lerma still hasn’t filed his form 460 as required by law, but even more concerning is that he only recently filed his form 410 which must be filed within 10 days of reaching $2,000 in campaign activity (contributions or expenditures).2 According to the City of Oakland Public Ethics Commission website, filing the form 410 is one of the very first steps that should be taken when running for public office (https://www.oaklandca.gov/services/candidate-checklist-starting-a-campaign-2) and the website contains detailed instructions on how to do it. A candidate is unable to comply with other reporting requirements (like filing the form 460) until that is done, and candidates are not allowed to raise money or make expenditures (over that $2,000 minimum) until it happens, which is no doubt why Mr Lerma did not file a form 460 by EITHER of the filing deadlines of July 31st or September 30th (unlike his opponent first time candidate Sasha Ritzie-Hernandez who has met all of those filing deadlines).
But it is not just about filing, a candidate CANNOT RAISE OR SPEND MONEY for the campaign until that form 410 is on file, something that it seems very clear that Mr Lerma has continued to do in flagrant violation of Federal, state and local campaign law. Since at least early August (per public social media postings) Mr Lerma has created window signs, t-shirts and lawn signs, he tabled at Oktoberfest and hosted a campaign mixer, all of which are significant expenditures. We also know that former Mayor Libby Schaaf held at least one fundraiser for Mr Lerma which was attended by a variety of politicos and charter school industry supporters, including former school board member including Gary Yee and the CEO of a local charter chain.
If Mr Lerma has a combined $2,000 in campaign activity, his failure to file his 410 AND his form 460 listing the expenditures is a serious violation. Even if Mr Lerma has loaned his own campaign the funds (as he did in his 2020 campaign) he is required to file those disclosures. His failure to do so should be a red flag for all of us.
Every single elected school board member is required to comply with Federal, state and local election laws, and their failure to do so subjects them to penalties and even legal action3. Mistakes can happen, but should be quickly remedied, and the fact that Mr Lerma previously ran for school board and previously filed the required disclosures suggests that this is not just a simple mistake. We hope that Mr Lerma will finally file his form 460 to accurately disclose his contributors and expenditures so that we know who is behind his campaign. But even without that disclosure, Oakland should think twice before electing a candidate who ignores electoral transparency requirements and apparently raises and spends funds in violation of federal, state and local laws.
Chief Governance Officer Joshua Daniels is leaving OUSD in August, 2023, and OUSD is “planning” to do a central office reorganization this year as well. OUSD should use this opportunity to eliminate the Chief Governance Officer position and reimagine our legal strategy as a District to ensure we are using our student dollars efficiently and in alignment with their needs.
OUSD needs to eliminate the “Chief Governance Officer” position
Oakland Unified School District is the only California school district that has a “Chief Governance Officer” (or anything like it)1. The Board created the position for Josh Daniels in 2021 and extended his contract with a 17% raise in 2022. This Chief Governance Officer position puts Mr Daniels at the center of all policy making and district/board operations, and then uses the “attorney-client privilege” to shield it all from public view. The first thing that the OUSD board needs to do is eliminate this position.
The Board will be voting on an “interim general counsel” contract this week at the final board meeting of the academic year, and they are offering the position to OUSD Executive Director of Labor Relations & Alternative Dispute Resolution Jenine Lindsey, who was OUSD’s chief negotiator during BOTH of the recent OUSD teachers’ strikes. Ms Lindsey has been in the OUSD Labor Relations department since 2013, became the Executive Director in 2018 but was admitted to the California State Bar (i.e. became an attorney) in September 2022, just nine months ago. The salary plus benefits for the agreement total $294,686.
Most California School Districts do not have an in-house General Counsel
A few months ago as part of our review of Central Office Salaries, we discovered that most California School Districts do not have a General Counsel at all, instead relying on outside legal counsel on contract.
Of the 939 k-12 school districts in California,2 we could only find 13 (or 1.38%) that had a “General Counsel” or “Legal Counsel” on staff3. The two largest school districts have a legal department, as does San Francisco Unified, but the vast majority of other districts, including every district in Alameda County, chooses not to use an in house general/legal counsel.
These in-house General Counsel are responsible for the wide variety of legal issues that confront a school district, from contracts and policy, government and ed code, construction, facilities, special Education, safety and of course Labor relations. As a result, General Counsel are generally, and in fact must be, seasoned attorneys with a broad expertise and understanding of the complicated legal issues they must address. Of those 13 districts with in house legal counsel, the lead attorney has between 10 and 41 years of legal experience4.
While Ms Lindsey clearly has experience in the Labor Relations department, as an attorney of less than a year, she has not had the time needed to gain the broad expertise that the General Counsel position requires to do their job. Ms Lindsey is not the right person for this role at this time.
Instead of hiring a new general counsel right now, OUSD should take the time to do a deep dive into how we manage the legal needs of OUSD. Right now, we have about 5 attorneys in our legal office5 and we also have retention agreements with 28 different law firms at an astonishing “not to exceed” amount of $5,088,500 in possible legal costs for this year alone6.
OUSD needs to use this opportunity to examine exactly how much we are spending in legal costs, and whether our current “General Counsel along with large outside counsel contracts” model is the best way to serve our students, families and staff. In the meantime, we can use some of those outside counsel to provide legal advice as needed. Ask the board to vote “NO” to the interim general counsel contract and instead push for an in depth assessment of alternatives that serve students and staff while efficiently using the tax dollars generated by our students.
1 Review of Transparent California 2021 data using the search term “Governance”
The Oakland Unified School District (“OUSD”) Superintendent and Board of Education President introduced a series of “Budget Adjustments” in a joint letter on 2/27/2023 that they claim are needed to fund badly needed compensation increases for our educators and other union staff. The Attachment A list of “Adjustments” includes (as best as we could make sense of it) the following categories of adjustments:
While the OUSD Board had been talking about reprioritizing the budget since the beginning of the year, it was the first time that the public and perhaps some members of the board had seen some of the “Budget Adjustments” including the plan to lay off nearly a hundred of our lowest paid employees, most of whom work directly with students as special education paraprofessionals, restorative justice facilitators, case managers, early literacy tutors and a safety position created during the implementation of the George Floyd Resolution. Also a huge surprise (given the board’s decision just a month before to overturn planned school closures and mergers) was the plan to merge “at least ten schools” to save $2.5 million. Directors VanCedric Williams, Valarie Bachelor and Jennifer Brouhard have been clear during their campaigns and since that they will not balance the budget by laying off our lowest paid union workers or by closing or merging schools, especially without any prior community agreement. So it was no surprise that these three board members did not support the package of cuts and voted no. For more on that vote check out our blog post from earlier this week.
OUSD has a historic opportunity to fundamentally transform our district in service of students by “chopping from the top”
“Chop from the top” doesn’t mean letting a few folks go, it means reorganizing departments (fewer people) and restructuring senior central office salaries to bring us in line with neighboring districts, and now is the time to get started. We have historic reserves and one time Covid dollars that can be used to free up funds to give teachers and other union workers raises (because they are vastly underpaid) while we work on restructuring the central office to run more efficiently with fewer dollars. We are very pleased to have read in the presentation that some of that work has begun. For instance, the enrollment department is reorganizing both the way it is funded and help it deliver services more efficiently:
According to the presentation, OUSD is also planning to eliminate the entire Chief of Staff office at the end of the 2024-25 school year, and to collapse the Business and Operations offices together (which is how we have functioned in the past) over the next few years. While we applaud these changes, and we are looking forward to full implementation, the Chief of Staff’s office is not paid with General Fund revenues (and is therefore those funds are not available to push to school sites), nor is the Chief Business Officer (who is paid from AB1840 funds), so we need to do more.
OUSD has too many supervisors who are paid too much
Every district in California reports data to the state, and for expenditures, every district reports them in the same way – by using “Object Codes” to identify the type of expenditure. That data is all publicly available on the http://www.ed-data.org/ website, and much of the data we use comes from that site. Object Code 2300 is defined as “Classified Supervisors’ and Administrators’ Salaries – Full-time, part-time, and prorated portions of salaries of supervisory personnel who are business managers, controllers, directors, chief accountants, accounting supervisors, purchasing agents, site administrators, assistant superintendents, and superintendents. Include stipends for governing board members and personnel commission members.” This does not include Principals (who are “certificated”) but can include Community School Managers. For the most part, however, it represents central supervisory staff.
The statewide average for the cost to a district for Object Code 2300 Supervisory staff is $172 per Average Daily Attendance (“ADA”) which is the number of students attending on a given day (so essentially $172 per regularly attending student). For OUSD, that cost is $1000 per student, or 591% above average of all districts.
This 591% number is not an anomaly, although it is down slightly from our high of 675% in 2016-17 under previous Superintendent Antwan Wilson. It reflects both the NUMBER of employees (high) and the COST of those employees’ salary and benefits (also high).
What do some other districts look like in terms of both the number of upper admin and their salaries? We compared West Contra Costa Unified (Richmond area) and Santa Ana Unified in Southern California that OUSD has used for the “number of schools” comparison) to see what it looks like and found that if we staffed similar to those districts, with fewer employees making less money, we could save $20 million per year.
But what about OUSD itself over time. We know that the percentage of statewide average was always high (438% in 2012) but what has changed to cause our growth to jump to 591%? The cost of OUSD’s central staffing in 2012 was $12,609,196 (which is $16,683,075.46 if you adjust for inflation), whereas today it is more than $30 million (twice as much) while the number of staffers has grown 60%. So the number of people we employ in central office supervisory positions has grown by 60% while the amount that we pay them has grown by 100%.
It’s expensive in the Bay Area, so let’s look at our neighbor’s spending on Object Code 2300.
We spend more than twice as much of our Unrestricted General Fund on Object Code 2300 (Supervisory Classified) as neighboring districts (and four times the state average). And what about our spending on teachers?
We pay significantly less of our budget to teachers than other districts do, and according to the Oakland Education Association (“OEA”) Oakland teacher salaries are almost 23% below the median in Alameda County.
The “We have more central administrators than other districts because we operate more schools” excuse doesn’t work
Board members and staff often say that we have more schools per ADA than other school districts and that is why we have so many central supervisors. So we looked at districts with similar numbers or more of schools, and we still have far more administrative costs than those districts which serve more students than we do.
While operating more schools can result in some additional expenses, it is clearly not what is driving this huge overspend gap. .
OUSD staff and board members also use the excuse of Community Schools to explain the disparities in Object Code 2300, saying we spend so much more because we have 50 some community school managers in Object Code 2300, and it is true that if we did not have Community School Managers we would reduce our overall spending in this category. The bad news is that we still would be at three times the state average of spending, and we would still be spending a minimum of twice as much as our neighbors on this object code. And now, other districts will be adding their own community school managers since the state is making additional money available for them (and for ours).
All of this data leads to one conclusion that we have known for some time: we are top heavy, and compared to other districts we short change our students by investing too much in central office and not enough in the classroom. OUSD is the only district we could find that spend more on Central Office supervisors (2300) than on school administrators (1300). That needs to change.
Tell the Board to adopt “Budget Adjustments” that prioritize our classrooms. No Cuts to Schools. No Layoffs of Staff at Sites. And no surprise mergers.
It’s time to stop making excuses for why we are so top heavy and do something about it. Tell your OUSD Board Directors to “Chop from the Top” by reorganizing and restructuring departments and salaries to downsize both the number of people and their overall cost to our kids. It’s time to get real about bringing compensation for our educators and other represented staff up to at least the county average so we can recruit and retain great teachers and site staff who can afford to live in Oakland. And tell them we are not going to fund raises on the backs of our lowest paid workers or our kids.
Last night at a special board meeting, the Oakland Unified School District (“OUSD”) Board of Education considered a series of “budget adjustments” that Board President Mike Hutchinson and Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell stated in a letter were necessary to fund ongoing investments in alignment with district priorities. We learned for the first time that President Hutchinson and Superintendent Johnson-Trammell intended to “merge at least ten schools” in order to achieve a purported $2.5 million in staffing costs (by eliminating 5 principals, 1 teachers and about 11 site staff.) In addition, the plan included laying off a net 98.88 “FTE” (full time employee equivalents), nearly all of them our lowest paid workers who work directly with students, such as case managers, literacy tutors, restorative justice facilitators and special education staff. Just 4 employees are “confidential” or unrepresented employees who generally cost far more in wages and benefits to the district and usually are not directly interacting with students. You can see the entire presentation on OUSD’s website.
Although OUSD did not assign numbers to the staff layoffs it appears to be somewhere in the $8 million range and includes the School Security Coordinator that was added by the George Floyd Resolution implementation. The total reductions total about $21 million (including $2.5 million achieved by merging schools) plus “funding shifts” to either restricted funds ($15 million) or one-time funds ($11 million – which will eventually go away and so cannot be used to pay ongoing expenses like key salaries) for a total of about $39 million in proposed general fund savings. There were some small changes to central staffing, but absolutely not the kind of systemic reform needed.
Directors Brouhard, Bachelor and Williams stood firmly with the community and our critical classified staff who support students every day.
The two new board directors Jennifer Brouhard (district 2) and Valarie Bachelor (district 6) were elected because they promised to stand with students, educators and community against school closures and with our most vulnerable children, teachers and staff. Director Williams (district 3) was elected in 2020 on that same platform, as was now Board President Mike Hutchinson (district 5). So it should not have been a surprise to district staff that this Board would demand a different kind of budget balancing, one that looked for creative ways to restructure spending, especially at central office, to keep any adjustments as far from children and the people that work with them every day as possible. After overturning school mergers and closures in January, it should have been crystal clear that unexpected school mergers or closures of “at least” ten schools would not fly. Yet the budget adjustments that Superintendent Johnson-Trammell and Board President Hutchinson co-sponsored (according to the joint letter issued 24 hours before the vote was scheduled) were from the same draconian cuts and closure playbook that has been used over and over again in OUSD and has resulted in a district that values high paid administrators and outsourcing to consultants over classrooms and kids. The Board did not pass the “reduction” package presented, with President Hutchinson and Vice President Thompson voting in favor of the cuts and unidentified school mergers, Director Davis abstaining and Directors Brouhard, Bachelor and Williams voting no.
Just last year, President Hutchinson voted against a similar budget reduction scenario that involved school closures and mergers, plus more than 100 classified staff reductions.
We all know that OUSD must balance its budget and also that OUSD cannot use one time money to fund ongoing raises for its staff. But as this video from March 9th, 2022 shows, there are many ways to balance a budget in accordance with your values, and President Hutchinson was clear on those values just a year ago. At that time, faced with “budget reductions” that included school closures and the elimination of classified staff, then Director Hutchinson pulled the same “budget and staff reduction” item last year as they did last night, and made clear that he stood AGAINST school closures and voting to cut employees and staff:
“I expect everyone who’s watching in the community to know, to pay attention and to remember, because people aren’t allowed to say they’re friends of … labor [while cutting staff]. We’re sitting school board directors, all that matters is our votes. And you won’t ever be able to escape your voting record. Nobody is going to forget these votes … to close our schools, to cut employees, at a time when we see we’re running a budget surplus.”
We know that President Hutchinson has a great deal of responsibility as the President of the Board, but he must exercise his power in accordance with the values he has always espoused, and upon which he was elected. We therefore ask President Hutchinson to work with Directors Williams, Brouhard and Bachelor to find the funds necessary to meet our District priorities, including providing raises to all represented staff, in alignment with the values that we know that they all have in common, without closing or merging schools (especially without deep community participation beforehand) and without eliminating key health, safety, special Education and other positions that serve our students directly and are among the lowest paid employees in this district. We are counting on you all working together to revamp and reorganize our district to align with our shared student centered vision.
The entire discussion and vote from March 9, 2022 can be found at the link below.
Brookfield students showed up for the vote to keep their school open! Photo credit to Corrin Haskell
On Wednesday night, in the first official act of the new progressive majority, the Oakland Unified School District (“OUSD”) Board of Directors voted to rescind planned closures of 5 elementary schools and 1 middle school program at the end of this school year. Students, parents, educators and community were on hand to witness newly elected board members Jennifer Brouhard and Valarie Bachelor join with sitting directors VanCedric Williams and Mike Hutchinson to fulfill the mandate of the 67% of voters who supported their platform of ending school closures which target schools in Black and Brown neighborhoods and destroy communities while fueling the gentrification of Oakland.
The fight is not over. No sooner was the vote complete than the Alameda County trustee Luz Cazares, appointed to oversee OUSD’s finances, informed OUSD that they reserved the right to stay and rescind the board’s action to end school closures, because OUSD did not provide a Fiscal Impact Analysis as required by its own board bylaws prior to the vote.
District staff should have prepared that Analysis as soon as the matter was introduced by Director (now President) Hutchinson on November 30th, but failed to do so, and it appears that both Director Sam Davis and Director Hutchinson, who had each declared their intention to become board President, allowed staff to delay the Fiscal Impact Analysis until January 25th. This was done despite the urgency of needing to fix the enrollment system immediately to include the targeted schools and begin the budget development for school sites. That willingness to delay and worsen the harm to students led to Director Williams being elected president and immediately calling a special meeting for Wednesday, January 11th for a vote on the rescission resolution, which passed. President Williams’ decision to act immediately to help the targeted school communities jump start planning their futures was also a rebuke against the deliberate slow rolling by staff and politicking by board members. We are grateful for his leadership and for putting students first.
It is now up to District staff to prepare the necessary analysis so that we can avoid action by the County trustee and move on with the planning for how we support the targeted schools to repair the harm done by years of uncertainty and underinvestment. We must also rethink our solvency strategies to ensure we are no longer balancing our budget on the backs of our most vulnerable students. We must restructure our district from a top heavy, consultant-dependent “business model” to a district built from the bottom up, where we prioritize students and classrooms in true Community Schools. We must push our city, county and state leaders to support us in creating a district that serves the whole child, addressing community needs so that students are prepared to learn and excel in life. It is possible to educate students in equitably funded neighborhood public schools with staff who are valued and paid a living wage.
OUSD receives more money per student than almost any other large school district. It is time we invested those funds in the classrooms where they belong. Let’s get to work.
There is a lot of talk right now in Oakland School Board Electoral Politics about what it means to be a “charter candidate”. Both Nick Resnick and Kyra Mungia proclaim that they are not “charter candidates” because they don’t support adding new charter schools, but despite that, they are supported by Charter School Leaders, Charter School Supporters, Charter School Funders, Charter Supporting PACs and, for Nick Resnick, out of town billionaires who support Charter Schools. And GO Public Schools donors. Not only are they directly funded by Charter School Supporters, they also are being supported by a new Political Action Committee (“PAC”) entirely funded by former Mayor/Governor Jerry Brown who started two high profile charter schools in Oakland and still sits as the Chairman of one of those charter schools (Oakland Military Institute “OMI”).
This PAC has not a single Oakland teacher associated with it, yet it is misnamed “United Teachers of Oakland supporting Resnick and Mungia” in hopes of tricking Oakland voters into thinking that these candidates are supported by Oakland’s beloved teachers, which they most certainly are not.
If your campaign is being pushed by all of these folks, you MUST be the charter candidate…
Don’t be tricked, choose the candidates who are ACTUALLY endorsed by Oakland’s Teachers. Make sure your vote counts by ranking BOTH of your chosen candidates #1 and #2, and not voting for Resnick and Mungia.
UPDATE: 8/10/2022 – OUSD has failed to respond to our concerns and tonight will vote, again without discussion, on a new data sharing agreement without concern for the safety and security of that data and the privacy of our students and families. Read the letter that we sent OUSD school board members today:
Dear Directors,
We are concerned about your continued silence on the issue we raised in our below letter, and about the presence of yet another data sharing agreement on the agenda for this evening (item V1.1, 22-1792, Agreement with the Education Superhighway) in the second consent agenda, which you no doubt expect to pass without discussion tonight. We once again urge you to halt the approval of all data sharing agreements immediately until such time as you have an up to date policy which protects student data from monetization, marketing and/or theft, and we have a comprehensive review of existing data sharing agreements to determine if they are necessary, secure and whether the contract underlying the data sharing agreement is effectively forwarding legitimate and necessary district goals. As you know, the use of data sharing agreements has exploded over the last few years in OUSD, and nationally the number of data breaches increased by 68% (Data breaches break record in 2021 – CNET).
We look forward to this item being pulled from consent and tabled until such time as you have done the due diligence to ensure we are doing all we can to protect our children. Now is the time for this board to take action to safeguard our children and families.
ORIGINAL POST: We all know how important it is to safeguard our personal and financial data, and to monitor our children’s safety when they use the internet, but can we be sure that our childrens’ privacy is being protected while they are learning at school and that our democratically elected school board is taking all steps necessary to understand what data is being shared and why, and whether the recipients are trusted? Turns out, maybe not, because the Oakland Unified School District (“OUSD”) Board doesn’t usually take the time to discuss and understand the many data sharing agreements that they approve. From 2005 through 2020, the OUSD Board approved an average of 2 data sharing agreements per year, but in 2021 that number soared to 23, and this year we have already approved 14 agreements and we are just halfway through the year.
2022 Data through July, remaining years are January through December
In light of the approval by OUSD’s board of a data sharing agreement with Illuminate Education, which had a massive data breach earlier in the year, we have some serious questions about whether student data privacy is being adequately protected by our district. Given the explosion of ed tech use during the pandemic, now is the time for the OUSD board to take a hard look at who we are sharing data with, how effective those programs are in improving outcomes for kids and if that information is transparent so that parents can decide if they are comfortable having their child participate. Illuminate has not been forthcoming with information about the breach, so we don’t know that OUSD was impacted, but a serious data breach can cause financial and personal headaches for years to come. Now is the time to figure this all out, so Parents United sent the below letter to our school board members demanding that they act now to safeguard our children’s privacy.
Dear Directors,
Parents United for Public Schools has repeatedly raised concerns about the number, scope and recipients of data sharing agreements that Oakland Unified enters into and have requested that this Board demand a comprehensive audit of those agreements to ensure transparency and the safety of our student data. Director Williams has also requested information about these agreements. Yet this Board continues to approve these agreements without discussion and without any real understanding of what is contained within them. After years of approving an average of 2 data sharing agreements per year, this Board approved 23 agreements in 2021 and has already approved 14 agreements in 2022 with half of the year to go. OUSD has a responsibility to students and families to evaluate these agreements in a comprehensive way, and so we raise this issue once again.
On June 29, 2022, this Board renewed a contract with Illuminate Education which includes a data sharing agreement going back a number of years allowing the sharing (without notice to families and caregivers) of some or all of the following:
Name, address, email and phone number
Testing results
student attendance
behavioral data
course schedules
disability information and IEP/504 plan information
State identification numbers
medical information and
data about whether student is unhoused or in foster care
This is sensitive data that parents/caregivers are not informed is being shared, and which must be protected carefully and shared sparingly.
Yet at the time that OUSD renewed the Illuminate Education contract there was easily available information about a “massive” data breach in January, 2022 of Illuminate data sources, impacting hundreds of thousands of students nationally, something that has been written about, reported on television and has resulted in multiple class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of students. Chalkbeat published an article March 29th, 2022 informing caregivers what steps to take to protect their child, and their own, privacy. ( NYC student data breach: How to protect your family online – Chalkbeat New York). The New York Department of Education in May, 2022 banned its schools from using any Illuminate products as a result of the breach (NYC schools ban use of Illuminate Education products after massive data breach (nypost.com), saying that it was not a decision that they made lightly and that “DOE made this decision after extensive investigation and deliberation, and based on our deep commitment to protecting the privacy of our families and students.” OUSD should not value its students any less. Students should not be forced to give up their privacy in order to learn, and by entering into this and all of the other data sharing agreements currently in place, without review or discussion, OUSD is not being responsible stewards of student privacy. You are not doing even a basic due diligence dive into the need for and safety of these contracts. This Board approved the Illuminate contract as part of the Consent Agenda, without discussion, on June 29, 2022 when a very simple google search could have identified these significant privacy concerns. This is unconscionable.
Therefore, we are renewing our call for an audit of all data sharing agreements, with an analysis of the necessity and security of the agreement, as well as whether the contract underlying the data sharing agreement is effectively forwarding legitimate and necessary district goals. In addition, we call for this board to review and revise all Board Policies (and attendant Administrative Regulations) relating to data sharing agreements and student data privacy, including but not limited to Board policy 5022 (“Student and Family Privacy Rights” amended 2005), Board Policy 5125 (“Student records” amended 2018) and Board Policy 5125.1 (“Release of Directory Information” amended 2005) to ensure that the policies are up to date given the huge increase in ed-tech use since the pandemic. According to a July, 2022 report issued by the Human Rights Watch, 89% of all ed tech products they reviewed allowed companies to surveil students in class and at home. “We think our kids are safe in school online. But many of them are being surveilled, and parents have often been kept in the dark. Kids are priceless, not products. Children, parents, and teachers were largely kept in the dark about the data surveillance practices we uncovered in children’s online classrooms,” said Hye Jung Han, a children’s rights and technology researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “By understanding how these online learning tools handled their child’s privacy, people can more effectively demand protection for children online.” Online Learning Products Enabled Surveillance of Children | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org)
According to the legislative information center, you already have a data sharing agreement on the schedule for August (EducationSuperHighway, funded by the Walton and Gates foundations, among others) and so this matter cannot wait. We look forward to your immediate action on this important issue prior to approving another potentially harmful data sharing agreement.
Parents United for Public Schools 