Oakland Teachers Stage One-Day Strike Protesting School Closures

By Katie Nielsen

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    OAKLAND, California (KPIX) — There were no classes at any of the Oakland Unified schools Friday as teachers participated in a one-day strike and district administrators asked students to stay home.

It all has to do with planned school closures. At the end of the current school year, Community Day and Parker K-8 will close and La Escuelita will lose its middle school.

In the 2022-2023 school year, Brookfield Elementary, Carl B. Munck Elementary, Grass Valley Elementary, Horace Mann Elementary and Korematsu Discovery Academy will close. Hillcrest K-8 would close its middle school grades. Rise Community Elementary and New Highland Academy will merge this year into one school.

The Oakland Education Association, the teachers’ union, is calling Friday’s event an unfair labor practices strike. The union says the district has, on its own, set aside an earlier agreement with the union to talk to families when considering a school closure plan.

“Let’s be clear – educators don’t want to strike, but we are because OUSD has forced us to fight to protect the schools our Black and Brown students deserve,” union President Keith Brown said in a statement.

Brown said that on Thursday the California Public Employment Relations Board denied the district’s request to stop the strike. District officials previously called the strike illegal.

“Rather than putting their resources towards unilaterally closing schools, OUSD should be acting as a respected governing body of learning and walking the walk to support the future of Oakland’s families,” Brown added.

We don’t want the schools too close. We don’t want Parker to close. I definitely don’t want Carl Munck to close,” said special education teacher Liana Nelson-Smith. “I don’t want any of our schools to close, Community Day, none of them.”

The father of a 4th grader at La Escuelita says parents are the ones who asked the teachers to strike.

“We asked the union to help us because the school board is not helping us at all,” Max Orozco told KPIX. He says he felt parents didn’t have much recourse after the board’s decision in February to close or consolidate the schools so that’s when he turned to the teachers.

“Thanks to the teachers, we were able to get more unions involved on this since they’re more knowledgeable on how to do the strikes and protests,” Orozco said.

Parents say the closures will not only disrupt their children’s education, but also put their kids in harm’s way.

“This is our neighborhood school. Just like every other parent who sends their child here. We all live in this area,” said Parker Elementary School parent Selina Tambo. “Most of our children walk to school.. With the closure being listed immediately, trying to find another school where there are not many schools in our area has been difficult.”

She added, “Expecting our children to walk from this small and safe street to crossing a street like MacArthur, 25 blocks away to Elmhurst, is absolutely absurd and it’s violent.”

Westlake Middle School choir teacher and Oakland resident Maurice Andre San-Chez, 33, who earlier went on a hunger strike to raise awareness about opposition to the closures, said the divestment from Black and Hispanic communities “is unacceptable.”

Physically, he has recovered from the hunger strike. Mentally though, he said he is still recovering because leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, were saying one thing and doing another.

He said he feels empowered and excited that teachers are building a coalition with other workers including the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Service Employees International Union.

The ILWU has joined the teachers to protest the school district’s plan. Longshore and warehouse workers are also voicing their opposition to a proposal for a new Oakland A’s baseball stadium at Charles P. Howard Terminal at the Port of Oakland.

Port officials have said Howard Terminal is not needed for the port to operate well, and the dock workers disagree.

“It is a nexus between the port cargo area, ILWU training area, and ship turn-around,” Trent Willis, past president of the ILWU Local 10, said in a statement. “It is critical to keeping trucks off of the streets of West Oakland and is next to a fully functioning industrial railroad.”

Approximately 2,000 teachers were expected to participate in the strike. Quinn Ranahan is one of them. She teaches middle school math at Montera but she used to teach at Roots which closed in 2019.

“I went through a school closure personally and it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Ranahan told KPIX.

She says the closures are happening in underserved communities that need more resources not fewer.

“These school closures are disproportionately impacting our Black and Brown students in Oakland. For instance, Community Day School is a restorative justice school for students that are typically expelled. Closing that school is impacting the highest needs schools in our community, students that traditional school doesn’t work for.”

Friday’s planned strike got so contentious, OUSD went to the California Public Employment Relations Board to ask for an order to stop the teachers from striking. That request was denied late Thursday afternoon.

OUSD released a statement earlier this week saying “This action impacts our entire OUSD community, especially our students who should be in school learning.”

While all Friday classes are canceled, the district has also announced all interscholastic sports scheduled for the day are being rescheduled or canceled.

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