Anger at OUSD | East Bay Express
Anger at OUSD
The school district says Oakland has far too many schools for a city of its size. But efforts to redirect some resources into other priorities are drawing fire.
A small group of angry parents, students, and teachers gathered outside Oakland Technical High School last Thursday to denounce the closing and merging of schools, and to publicize a signature-gathering campaign to recall city school board President Jody London.
Never mind the fact that London is already stepping down at the end of the year after 11 years in office, or that a special election could cost the Oakland Unified School District, which already faces a $21.5 million deficit, between $785,000 and $1 million, according to the city clerk's office.
The activists, who call themselves "Oakland Not For Sale" and have won the backing of the city teachers union, were looking for blood — or accountability, as the case may be. Their efforts were largely in response to the Board of Education's ongoing efforts to reduce the city's relatively high number of schools and redeploy those resources elsewhere.
Their discontent and distrust of district administrators is also rooted in the district's long history of financial troubles, including annual deficits that have prompted cuts and audit findings in recent years that have found fiscal mismanagement by district officials.
"We are doing the recall because it is time for accountability," said Saru Jayaraman, a district parent and veteran political organizer leading the recall effort against London. "Not just for Jody London but every Oakland school board president to realize their actions will not go without consequences, that there will no longer be school closed, after school closed, after school closed and charters put in their place without consequences."
In particular, recall advocates were outraged by the impending closure of the Henry J. Kaiser Elementary School campus in the tony Hiller Highlands neighborhood and the planned merger of Kaiser's well-performing program into the under-performing and under-enrolled Sankofa Academy in the flatlands of North Oakland.
