OAKLAND — School board leaders here are moving forward with nearly 100 layoffs in a last-ditch effort to keep the Oakland Unified School District’s finances from spiraling out of control.
The district, long strapped for cash and facing a fiscal cliff, will slash positions filled by teachers, support staff, school-site managers and a range of other employees in a broad restructuring of its workforce.
Several hundred additional positions will be scrapped but replaced with new jobs, part of an overhaul in how Oakland Unified funds positions across its 80 K-12 schools, which last year enrolled roughly 45,000 students.
The school board has been politically split for years over whether it faced a post-pandemic fiscal cliff, but the current structural budget deficit of $95 million removed any doubt.
Without layoffs, Oakland Unified could run out of money by next year, Alameda County Superintendent of Education Alysse Castro warned in a recent letter.
“If the Board does not make decisions now, it will rapidly lose the ability to make them at all,” Castro wrote, alluding to the threat of the state taking control of the district’s finances.
Even board members whose campaigns were financially supported by the district’s teacher’s union joined a 6-1 vote on Wednesday to start the layoff process. VanCedric Williams, a labor-backed board member, cast the lone dissenting vote.
“I want to make sure that cuts come as far away from the classroom as possible,” said Valarie Bachelor, a professional union organizer who joined the board in 2022. “We are so far into the budget process at this moment, though, that we need to take this step in order to continue to meet our goals and the metrics set before us.”
Oakland Unified School District Student Director Maximus Simmons speaks during the OUSD board meeting at the La Escuelita Education Center in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
Bachelor and Board President Jennifer Brouhard, a pro-labor ally, co-authored a resolution introduced Wednesday to cap spending on outside contracts and travel for work conferences — an effort to eventually restore the district’s eliminated teaching positions.
The school board, divided for years on issues of spending and teacher contracts, has been hesitant to broach the subject of layoffs. But they have been united in their determination not to close its smaller, community-based schools after an effort in 2021 to shutter 11 campuses led to widespread protests and even some hunger strikes.
In December, the board held off taking a vote on the possible merger of 10 schools into five larger ones — a proposal supported on financial grounds by Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell.
The layoff process begun Wednesday stoked anger among the district’s various labor unions. Lee Thomas, who until last June led the United Administrators of Oakland Schools — which represents site administrators, assistant principals and coaches, among other officials — accused the board of seeking to violate the union’s collective bargaining agreement.
Special education teacher Olivia Michelson, center, along with fellow Oakland Unified School District teachers, students and parents rally outside La Escuelita Elementary School where a school board meeting was supposed to take place during their fifth day on strike in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, May 10, 2023. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
“Make sure you educate yourself,” Thomas said at the meeting, “and don’t just look at the numbers.”
Still, the path to longterm fiscal stability is anything but clear for Oakland Unified, which went into state receivership two decades ago, restored local control in 2009 and in recent years has faced warnings from state and county officials that its finances were in perilous shape.
Mike Hutchinson, a board director who has often publicly quarreled with the faculty union and its endorsed candidates, said it was “disingenuous” to propose alternatives on the day layoffs were considered rather than in the fall when budget talks began.
“We need to be in the room — this is work we need to do,” Hutchinson said. “People chose to not engage. So once we make these votes tonight, we are back on track to actually be able to approve a balanced budget in June.”
The layoffs initiated Wednesday did not go without pleas from employees, including teachers, for the board to instead cut staff in the Oakland Unified superintendent’s office, a common alternative sought by the unions in the district’s longstanding financial debates.
“When I hear OUSD is adding top managers and holding money in their books, but it is so willing to cut essential positions, it is an injustice to our students,” Rachel Martin, a first-grade teacher at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, said.
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.
