Oakland board’s ‘symbolic’ raises send wrong sign

I wasn’t the best math student, but I know the Oakland school board’s approval of a $39 per month raise for each of its members is a gross miscalculation.

“It is very small, and it is symbolic,” board member Roseann Torres said at the Jan. 8 meeting. Symbolic? How’s this for symbolism: Last month, the board approved $9 million in midyear cuts to this year’s budget to help solve a $15.1 million deficit. The vote on Dec. 13 was met with loud “boos” from livid parents, teachers and students.

The crisis was caused by years of overspend-

ing and lax accounting oversight.

Still, while top-level administrators have voluntarily given back part of their paychecks, in addition to administrative staff taking unpaid furlough days, the board voted 5-2 to increase the pay of each of its seven members to $826 a month, which amounts to a 5 percent raise.

That’s an extra $468 per person per year — or $3,276 total per year.

Torres is right, the raise is symbolic — of the greater problem ailing the school district: It spends money it doesn’t have.

That’s why the financial problems in the school district keep multiplying like gremlins.

In 2003, the district ran up a $37 million deficit and had to take a $100 million bailout from the state. The state took control of the district for six years, and the district remains on the hook for $40 million of the bailout loan, which should be fully repaid in 2026.

Gaining control of Oakland’s perpetual financial dilemma is hard, demanding work, and board members take a lot of heat from teachers and parents. But it’s work the board members chose to do when they sought election.

At the meeting where they gave themselves raises, some board members said managing a dysfunctional school district sometimes requires full-time hours. The raise, they said, recognizes the sacrifice and time they put in.

Shanthi Gonzales, who said she often works more than 20 hours a week, said she didn’t know about the monthly stipend when she decided to run for school board.

“This really is a role that is not about the money,” she said during the meeting. “However, I did lose my job last year. And so even though I never planned for this to become part of the income that my family relies on, it is.”

I feel her pain. I believe people should be fairly compensated for the work they do, and this is the first raise for board members since 2010. It was for $37.50 that year.

But the school board hasn’t been doing an adequate job of checking the central office and holding administrators accountable. For example, the most recent budget crisis is a result of funny accounting tricks that equaled nothing but trouble.

Because of years of poor leadership, the district’s 36,900 students are now losing out. In 2016, the district planned to spend $20.1 million on books and supplies, but spent less than half of that — $6.8 million, according to the district’s budget.

Schools can’t afford supplies like toilet paper. Teachers are digging into their pockets to buy pencils, pens and paper, and are struggling to afford housing in the Bay Area.

Instead of diminishing the district’s financial burden, the board is growing it. It’s a bad look. Board members Jody London and Nina Senn voted against the raise.

“We’re asking a lot of our employees to make sacrifices, and I think we should also be making sacrifices,” Senn told me. “We do work extremely hard and put in a lot of thought and hours, and we’re away from our families and other responsibilities.

“Sometimes, you just have to consider the timing of whether something is the right time or not given what’s going on.”

On Friday, London told me she’s inquired about turning down the raise.

“If it is not overly costly for staff to process, I would like to turn it down,” she said in an email. “If it does create a lot of additional cost then I can make a donation myself of the difference to schools in my district.”

As I wrote earlier, if the district is intent on spending money, it should only be for critical positions, like a chief financial officer and an internal auditor, two positions that are essential for financial oversight.