Oakland parents rally to get classrooms reopened
After seven months of watching her kindergartner try to figure out the difference between school and home and her dyslexic secondgrader try to learn to read by Zoom, Megan Bacigalupi was moved to action Sunday afternoon.
She stood behind a rented podium near the shores of Lake Merritt and leaned into the public address system. “Inperson education is essential,” said Bacigalupi, who was not just one mad mom acting on her own. On the other side of the podium, facing into the sun, stood 200 signcarrying adults and their kids, united as OUSD Parents for Safe Reopening.
“Schools Not Screens” was the rallying cry as this grassroots organization stood on the grass to insert parents’ voices into the negotiation between the Oakland Unified School District board and the teachers union, as to how and when 86 public schools will bring 36,000 students back into the K12 classrooms.
“It’s time we get our kids back to school, or as we say in Oakland ‘hella time,’ ” said Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who rocked her Skyline High School Class of 1983 street cred when her time came at the podium. “Us adults have to get our stuff out of the way so we can put our children first.”
Last week, the Board of Education sent out a letter detailing a plan to bring students in kindergarten through fifth grade back to school by mid to lateMarch. But the Oakland Education Association has not agreed to the timeline. “They’re close,” Schaaf said after her speech, “but they haven’t come together yet.”
The OUSD Parents are hopeful but still gathering signatures on a petition that calls for all grades to have an inperson option, with families also allowed to choose continued remote schooling. They have 715 signatories so far. The
petition and Sunday’s noon rally in Astro Park were intended to help move the negotiations along.
“We are becoming an island in a sea of open or soontoopen school districts,” said Bacigalupi, counting off Piedmont and Orinda among the neighboring districts that have reopened, while Berkeley has reached an agreement to reopen.
A stenciled sign carried by Kim Desai, who has two kids at Crocker Highlands Elementary School, gave the big picture.
“NYC DC CHI ATL SCHOOL Open,” it read. “Oakland? 350 Days Closed.”
Etched in Desai’s memory is March 13, 2020, the day her kids were sent home, an anniversary she is not eager to celebrate.
“They aren’t driving me nuts,” she said, “but I can see the social and emotional toll of them being at home for a year.”
The fear is that negotiations will drag on and will lead to a hybrid between inperson and virtual school next year. That worry compelled Laura Powell of East Oakland to pack up her two kids and come to the rally. Her secondgrader contributed a handmade sign that read “I Miss Recess,” and then proved it by spending most of the rally on the adjacent playground.
“He’s not doing much at school,” she said of her son’s Zoom classroom. “He just seems disengaged.”
Powell, an attorney, mentioned the social media shaming of OUSD Parents as gentrifiers. One counterprotester stood at the back yelling, “Where were y’all at when the schools truly needed support?”
But Powell, for one, was right here. She grew up in the OUSD.
“We get comments like, ‘Go back to the suburbs,’ ” Powell said.
“That always rubs me the wrong way. I’m invested here.”
Bacigalupi, also an attorney, is so invested that she is leaving her job at a San Francisco nonprofit to volunteer full time for OUSD Parents and the statewide advocacy organization Open Schools CA.
“My son has never been inside a classroom, and that’s bizarre,” she said. “He has one friend, and he knew him from preschool.”
Even if the teachers union accepts the district’s proposed plan, that plan doesn’t include inperson education for grades six through 12 or specify schools reopening full time and at full capacity.
“To get our kids back in school five days a week is still in jeopardy,” she said.