Facing pressure from Alameda County officials and the threat of a strike while contract negotiations are ongoing with its labor unions, the Oakland school board on Wednesday began a process that could lead to school closures beginning in the 2025-2026 school year.
The board voted at its regular meeting to establish a set of metrics that will guide the district in future decisions to close schools. The purpose is to ensure closures and mergers that result in school closures don’t disproportionately harm vulnerable groups of students.
The board’s decision was preceded by a complicated string of developments involving state law, contract negotiations, the attorney general, the county superintendent, and OUSD’s fiscal oversight trustee, who urged the board to take steps towards closing schools or else she would prevent them from continuing negotiations.
The need for OUSD to come up with metrics to guide school closures is a new one, spurred by Assembly Bill 1912, which was sponsored by Assemblymember Mia Bonta following OUSD’s attempt to close schools in 2022. Among the metrics OUSD is required to consider are school demographics, special programs like dual language and special education, transportation needs, and enrollment and attendance patterns.
School board members who advanced the metrics plan felt that it was necessary to avoid a strike or further reprimand from county officials who are worried about OUSD’s budget shortfalls.
“Our principals are having to do two to three times the amount of work,” said District 6 Director Valarie Bachelor. “Those are the people I want to keep in this district. We will lose them if we don’t. We don’t have enough resources to do anything at any of our schools if we don’t act right now to put together metrics for our community.”
OUSD is in negotiations with several of its unions and wants to provide raises to its workers. In order to do that, the board must reduce its spending in other areas. In previous budget adjustment discussions, the board approved packages that included the possibility of merging up to 10 schools that share a campus. By merging schools, OUSD officials hope to save money because they could consolidate staff and resources and incur fewer expenses.
During its last several meetings, the school board discussed how it would comply with AB 1912, including metrics it would use. But on March 27 the board postponed voting on metrics until June 5 in order to get more feedback from the public.
On March 29, following the postponement and a closed-session vote by the board to authorize the district bargaining team to offer more money, OUSD’s fiscal oversight trustee Luz Cazares, who works in the Alameda County Office of Education, wrote to the board that she was preventing that closed-session decision from taking effect until the board voted on AB1912 metrics, and preventing OUSD from moving forward in negotiations with its unions.
“In essence, the board took action to increase the district’s structural deficit and delayed action to address the structural deficit. This is irresponsible and inconsistent with your fiduciary duty to the Oakland Unified School District,” Cazares wrote.
OUSD’s labor unions have been warning the district they’re ready to strike if negotiations don’t go their way. Lee Thomas, the president of United Administrators of Oakland Schools, addressed the board at its last several meetings, expressing his frustrations over the slow pace of talks.
“What you do this month will direct our actions this month, this week, and the next 31 days. We are not afraid to go on strike at UAOS. If we have to make that move in order to pull back our labor, in order to get movement, I will direct our board to do that,” Thomas said to the school board on Wednesday. “I am disappointed in the trustee’s actions; the trustee should’ve been having those conversations earlier. Maybe negotiations should not have happened with us until that was squared away. You are the elected officials and need to make the move.”
Alameda County Superintendent Alysse Castro, who reviews on all labor agreements for Alameda County school districts, has continued to push OUSD to make budget cuts to avoid insolvency. In an April 5 letter to district leadership, Castro noted that the raise offered last year to AFSCME Local 257, which represents custodians, nurses, paraeducators, nutrition service workers, and special education aides, would cost about $1.6 million over three years, and the total cost including other negotiated contracts is more than $80 million.
“If the board wishes to prioritize compensation increases for all staff, there are many possible paths to doing so in a balanced budget, but all involve following through on making hard tradeoffs and reductions in other areas,” she wrote. “The ball is in the board’s court—where it belongs. It will stay there so long as the board continues to make tradeoffs and reductions that keep pace with new investments and expenditures. This requires the board to avoid the ever-present temptation to take action on new expenditures—however valuable—before making progress toward restructuring—however unpleasant.”
State requirements that originated from concerns about OUSD’s last round of school closures
Assembly Bill 1912 states that districts in financial distress that are planning to close or consolidate schools must evaluate the equity impacts of those closures through measures like student demographics, transportation needs, facilities conditions, number of underutilized classrooms, and enrollment patterns. The bill was directly in response to OUSD’s 2022 closure plan, which targeted schools that were under-enrolled. Those opposed to the plan felt that it would continue a pattern whereby schools that serve disproportionate numbers of Black students and students with disabilities are shut down—an assessment Attorney General Rob Bonta agreed with.
OUDS Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammel told the board and public on Wednesday that the vote is simply to establish criteria.
“It’s not necessarily just about consolidations, it’s about, what are the schools that we want to create for the next 20 years?” Johnson-Trammell said. “It may mean we need a few less schools, but it’s not about that. It’s about creating better opportunities, particularly in West Oakland and East Oakland where we are not educating our kids well.”
Board president Sam Davis told The Oaklandside on Wednesday that the lack of community engagement on the topic is because the equity metrics can be wonky and alienating to people. Most parents, staff, and community members simply want to know whether their school will be closing or not.
“Once you get that list out, you will see a lot of engagement.”
The resolution the board approved on Wednesday establishes a committee composed of student, family, and community member representatives, as well as an individual from each labor union, and staff, who will propose additional metrics for the board to include.
“I’ll apologize for the fact that we got to the point where the county is intervening in this way,” Davis said during Wednesday’s meeting. “But I do think that if we continue to act the way we’ve been acting, the county will be intervening more and more, and more strenuously.”
All school board directors except Mike Hutchinson and VanCedric Williams voted to approve the metrics.
Director Hutchinson blasted the board for failing to follow through on its initial decision to postpone any decision on metrics, criticized other directors for changing their minds about the importance of needing community engagement on the measures, and called out what he saw as capitulating to the appointed trustee.
“I’m shocked people who were elected to serve on this board are backing the trustee’s action. Everyone seems hellbent to put these metrics forward. That’s because there’s a real effort to trigger a school closure plan,” Hutchinson said during the meeting. “The metrics are racist. The days of oversight and an appointed trustee telling us what we have to do over the recommendations of our own staff are over.”
Director Williams, who represents District 3, also took issue with the board president putting an item back on the agenda after the board had voted to postpone it.
“If we’re setting a precedent to start moving in a way to bring back an item when it hasn’t been noticed to the public and then voting on it, then we can do it all the time now,” Williams said.
In an interview with The Oaklandside, Hutchinson said he felt the trustee was overstepping her authority in trying to hold up negotiations, and that the board should be united in pushing back against her. He recalled in 2021 when then-county Superintendent L.K. Monroe issued a letter threatening to withhold compensation from the OUSD superintendent and board if they did not make major budget adjustments. In response, the board had its general counsel write to State Superintendent Tony Thurmond to ask him to intervene.
Hutchinson and community members are also concerned that the approved metrics could draw scrutiny from the attorney general’s office, which reprimanded the district for its previous closure plan.
“If the attorney general and trustee force this on us, we’ll end up with a list [of schools to close] that look like previous lists. It’s going to be the schools in the poorest neighborhoods that struggle with enrollment, that have been deemed as failures for a long time because they’ve been under-resourced and neglected,” he told The Oaklandside.
The board is expected to vote on any additional metrics by June 5, so that an equity impact analysis can be conducted. In the fall, staff are expected to present the analysis to the board, as well as a list of school changes that will take place beginning in 2025.
