OAKLAND — Teachers and families who just a year ago found themselves powerless to stop the closure of several Oakland schools — despite protests, sit-ins and hunger strikes — won a major victory on Wednesday when the newly revamped school board voted to rescind the shuttering of five district schools.
Last February, the previous Oakland Unified School District board had approved the closure of Brookfield, Carl B. Munck, Grass Valley and Horace Mann elementary schools and Korematsu Discovery Academy, plus the removal of middle school courses from the Hillcrest Elementary K-8.
The new board’s reversal in a 4-2-1 vote could place the financially strapped district in a sticky situation with state legislators who had promised to provide $10 million in annual bailout funds if it closed a number of campuses and sold the properties. The yearly bailouts were rolled out by the state in 2017 after the district nearly went bankrupt.
Board director Mike Hutchinson, who led the board’s vote Wednesday, said he is confident the district will emerge unscathed.
“If the state wants to come and audit us to take money back — that is not very likely, and I don’t think that applies here,” Hutchinson said in an interview. “The decision was vetted and passed legal muster.”
Directors Cliff Thompson and Sam Davis voted no, and newly elected District 4 Director Nick Resnick abstained. He is currently in the midst of a legal battle to hold onto his seat after Alameda County officials determined he actually lost his race to Hutchinson, who currently occupies the District 5 seat.
Two other seats in the November election flipped to union leader Valarie Bachelor and retired teacher Jennifer Brouhard, both of whom vehemently opposed the school closures and questioned whether the move would actually save the district much money.
The political fallout from the board’s decision to close or reduce instruction at 11 campuses was enormous. Within months, one director resigned, and two others said they would not seek re-election.
“A lot of these closures were rubber-stamped,” Brouhard said in an interview. “The fact that our budget was not more transparent, and people couldn’t ask questions more directly — that’s where the new board can fill in the gaps.”
Most of the schools slated to close had a majority Black student population, sparking anger from both local and national advocates since the plan was launched last year.
Last April, the ACLU of Northern California filed a complaint with the California Department of Justice pushing for an investigation into the school closures, alleging they were disproportionately impacting Black students and their families.
Wednesday’s vote is a major victory for the teachers’ union, which last year fought bitterly against the closures but ultimately failed to prevent Parker and La Escuelita elementary schools from shutting their doors.
“This is deeply personal for me,” said Keith Brown, president of the Oakland Education Association and a former Oakland public school student himself. “And not just for me but for hundreds and thousands of people in the city of Oakland who have been a part of this fight.”
Now the district must navigate an uncertain financial future as one-time state funding during the pandemic begins to disappear, though Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal this week did not include cuts to education spending.
The more urgent concern, Brouhard said, is ensuring that the schools spared from closure have adequate enrollment levels — an area where Oakland Unified has lagged behind other districts in the state. This past school year, the district’s student body declined for the fifth year in a row.
In 2021, the county Office of Education warned that the district was not on pace to meet its financial obligations over the next half-decade, blaming both the enrollment drop and a lack of urgency from leadership.
And last year, the state’s Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team advised the school board not to continue limping along on one-time funds, predicting that it would only delay the inevitable, stating in its report that “the longer the district takes to address the issue, the more cuts will be necessary.” The agency estimated the shortfall at $60 million.
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