District sticks with school closure plan despite emotional meeting
OAKLAND >> For about 24 hours, all signs pointed to the possibility that 11 schools on the Oakland Unified School District's list for closure, merger or conversion might be spared for at least another year.
An emergency meeting of the school board was hurriedly scheduled for Friday evening and the two hunger strikers who had declared they wouldn't eat again unless the district relents were cited as the reason for the session.
But then, at the end of a three-hour Zoom meeting high on emotions and drama, the school board voted 3-2-1 to stay the course. As they had before, school board directors VanCedric Williams and Mike Hutchinson voted to postpone the school closures while Gary Yee, Aimee Eng and Clifford Thompson voted to move ahead with the plan. Sam Davis abstained and Shanthi Gonzales was absent.
When it was all over, Parker K-8 and Community Day School were still set to be closed at the end of this academic year and La Escuelita to be converted from a K-8 school to K-5. Rise Community Elementary and New Highland Academy will merge into one school, although they already share a campus.
And at the end of the 2022-23 academic year, Brookfield Elementary, Carl B. Munck Elementary, Grass Valley Elementary, Horace Mann Elementary and Korematsu Discovery Academy are still set to be closed. At that time, Hillcrest K-8 will be converted to a K-5 school.
The two people who have been on a hunger strike since Feb. 1 — Westlake Middle School choir director Maurice André San-Chez and community schools program manager and Westlake teacher Mo- ses Olanrewaju Omolade — urged the board to reconsider.
They said the emergency meeting was called to get them to end their strike, which Davis confirmed.
“The hope I had for tonight had dwindled,” Omolade acknowledged at the beginning of his presentation,
He said he planned to end the strike, which was a condition of the meeting, although it was unclear by the end of the night whether he and San-Chez would do so.
“I knew that I would probably die for this cause and the greed, in the name of saving money,” SanChez said, echoing Omolade's disappointment. “Should I end my hunger strike, or will you join me in defending our schools and children with your bodies?” he asked the gathering.
Several speakers — teachers, students, community members and district staff — said they would launch hunger strikes of their own if the board did not delay the school closures.
“I am disgusted that none of you have come to our school site to see how it's impacting students or their families,” said one Parker school educator before vowing to also go on a hunger strike. “You are infuriating the community and igniting activists in us all.”
Others simply pled with the board to postpone the plan, as did Williams and Hutchinson again.
“We know (this process) has been rushed, we know it's been forced down the community's throat. It's not how you treat people,” Williams said, referring to the roughly two-week period between the district's school closures announcement and the board vote. “We need to take another year out to actually engage the community and listen. We know there is no hurry. There is no timetable. The only (deadline) is for enrollment purposes to have to move to a different school. There is no penalty — we're misleading the community.”
But Yee, Eng and Thompson stressed the need to close schools with declining enrollments so the money saved could be invested in strengthening the other schools and giving teachers pay raises.
“The Oakland public schools changed the trajectory of my life, and I owe future generations no less,” board president Yee said after describing his own route through Oakland elementary, middle and high schools as the son of immigrant parents. “But this cannot happen unless we focus our resources to hire and retain experienced teachers. They deserve nothing less than professionally respectful pay and working conditions, whether they work in the hills or in the flatlands, and I have worked in both places.
“This cannot happen unless we can permanently fund high achieving, fullservice, responsive community schools our families have been asking for and need,” Yee continued. “This cannot happen unless we consolidate our limited financial resources and human resources and commit to supporting every student's college and career and community success.”
The vote earlier this month to approve the closures angered many parents and teachers who blasted the district for disrupting the education of mostly Black and Brown students in the affected schools to save what they described as just a fraction of the district's budget. The district has not yet said how much money would be saved by the move, although a previous proposal to close, merge or convert 16 schools was estimated to save between $4 million and $15 million.
School families and opponents of the closures have rallied, marched or walked out of classes in protest since learning of the district's plan in January.
And the Oakland Education Association, which represents teachers and other district staff, had announced it would file a legal complaint with the Public Employment Relations Board to challenge the school board's action. Union president Keith Brown said he was prepared to ask educators to go on strike if necessary.
Meanwhile, Assembly members Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, and Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland co-authored Assembly Bill 1912, which if passed could give the school district another year to decide whether to consolidate schools.
The state has made about $10 million available to Oakland Unified on the condition it closes schools and submits an audit and financial plan. But AB 1912 would buy the district an extra year to decide.
It's unclear how many people would follow through with a hunger strike, but the promise by several speakers to do so prompted Davis to abstain from the vote.
“I know people are in pain right now, but I'm very disturbed,” Davis said. “This meeting came around to my understanding as a process to end the hunger strikes, but instead we're hearing plans for more of them. … It's impossible to have an authentic discussion about the issues at stake while we hear people are threatening to harm themselves.”