Why is OEA on strike right now?

We are on strike for a number of reasons. One of the big ones is compensation; we want to get to the median compensation for this area. We’re not asking to be the highest-paid district — we’re asking to get us out of the bottom.

Our district just does not spend money on teacher salaries, and if you look around at all the best public school districts, what goes hand in hand with them is the best teacher salaries. That would allow us to not just hire good teachers, but retain good teachers. There’s so many teachers that are leaving the district, because they just can’t afford to keep working here — really good, committed, hardworking teachers.

There’s also what we’re calling “common good demands,” which are trying to work on some of the institutional injustices that our students are up against. Things like school closures, which are racist: they affect mostly black and brown working-class kids more than anyone else. And they are not proven to save any money. [The district] keeps saying that the closures are being done in the name of fiscal responsibility, but when we ask it to show how it saves money, it can’t.

Other common good demands are things like getting more nurses in our schools, more counselors, and more social workers, so that our students have a bigger safety net. Right now, when a school isn’t able to hire a counselor, so much of that winds up falling on teachers; we’re not trained in that. We work very hard to take those things into account in our curricula and make sure that we are having socially and culturally responsive education for our students, and being empathetic about the challenges that they’re facing. But we’re not trained to help kids work through those feelings and those challenges. They need supports beyond the classroom; they need supports beyond just learning how to read.

But far and away, the biggest demand is compensation. So many teachers are affected by it, from brand-new teachers who are just getting started and trying to pay their rent, to teachers who are working toward retiring and thinking, “I’ve been in this district for twenty years; my salary has been stagnant. I need to go to another higher-paying district if I’m ever going to be able to retire.” It affects us on both ends of the teacher spectrum.

I feel very strongly about common good demands. I feel very strongly about compensation and working conditions, and also just making sure that students have enough caring adults on campus and enough resources. It’s all about, really, the conditions for learning, and making sure that students have what they need to learn — but also our conditions for teaching, making it so that we can teach. I think everything in the contract is super important. But that’s what’s top of mind right now.

What has bargaining been like?

It has been really frustrating and really tiring. We just got out of our bargaining meeting. We were willing and hopeful and excited to bargain after everybody came from the picket lines and was super energized. Then it was really disappointing and frustrating, because right now, the district does not have authority to bargain with us, because it needs to get authority from the school board. And the board has not granted it the authority to do that. So now, it becomes a push to get the board to allow the district to bargain with us. It’s very frustrating that we can’t make any movement until we hear back from the board.

Speaking from my personal experience of having been on the bargaining team during COVID: when we’re bargaining with the district, we’re sending proposals back and forth and editing those proposals with each other. I was asking the bargaining representative from my school, Kasondra, we’re not adding documents back and forth? [She said] no, what the district has sent is the same thing that they’ve sent to the parents on ParentSquare (a social network for school parents), these fun little graphics that are cute and say, “Oh, look at how much money we’re promising the teachers.”

But until that’s in an official proposal, words are wind. It doesn’t mean anything, right? And they’re not doing that. I just keep being in shock. They spend all this time sending these messages . . . and I’m an OUSD parent. So I get that message. I get very frustrated and annoyed, because I know what they’re presenting to the public. Then what my colleagues are telling me is the actual reality.

This is the basis that our strike was started on — the unfair labor practice of the district trying to publicly bargain and not bargain with us at the table. It just keeps on doubling down on it.

It’s not just the district that’s publicly bargaining. It’s the board too, which is sending out messaging that’s just completely untrue. One of the messages on ParentSquare was saying that we were bargaining for seven days and nights with the district. We were doing internal work, and we were waiting for them, but we never had the back and forth, the editing process. That hasn’t happened because we haven’t gotten things in writing.

When they presented the proposal, what we saw on ParentSquare with the rest of the community, they left things out. They said they had a package, and it wasn’t a package; it wasn’t the complete proposal, and we’re not leaving anybody out of our bargaining. It’s just been bad-faith negotiations this whole time.

Something I’ve also been really frustrated about: the first time we met with [OUSD superintendent] Kyla Johnson-Trammell was Sunday night. She came in, met with her team at around 10:00 p.m., but met with the bargaining team after 11:00. It was super frustrating. It just tells me that they’re not taking it seriously, and they didn’t take it seriously. Or they didn’t take it seriously until the strike authorization vote — and now our strike — pushed them.

Hilaria, you said the school board hasn’t allowed the district to negotiate. Why do you think that is?

Yeah, the board has to give power to the OUSD bargaining team to continue bargaining and make decisions around proposals. I think that there’s a power struggle. I think that there are folks on the board who understand what students need and understand what teachers need in order to teach effectively. And in my own personal opinion, there are people on the board who . . . for me, it feels like a power trip. They just know that they have this power, and they know that they can withhold it.

From what I understand, it’s a split vote right down the middle. It’s boggling my mind that some board members are trying as hard as possible to keep absolutely everything in their hands. Allow the district and the union to negotiate with one another!

OEA went on strike in 2019 too, and opposition to school closures was a centerpiece of that strike. Last year, the board voted to consolidate and close eleven schools; but then reversed that in January. How do school closures fit into the strike?

In our common good demands, we have put in language around no school closures.

That was a major piece of the 2019 strike. Even though, in 2019, we weren’t able to stop the school closures that were happening at that time, we were able to get language around a process before closing schools that helped us curb that process in the following year. So that was a big win. It wasn’t enough of a win, but it was a step in the right direction.

That comes to mind for me a lot, because there’s so much wrong with our district right now. It’s not going to get fixed in the next contract. We’re working a long struggle. We’re working a long game, where we need to not just be thinking what’s best for us right now, but also how we set ourselves up for what’s best for us and our working-class community in the years to come. It’s going to continue to be a struggle, because our current district leadership still really wants to close and consolidate schools. We need to keep on fighting and keep on getting every little bit of language to protect those schools that we can.

Right now, all of California is getting money to expand community schools. Oakland in particular is getting the most out of any district in the state. It’s really important for us to put community schools language into our contract, so that people who are on the ground — teachers, students, educators, families — get to make the decision of how to use that money toward authentic community schools. Because we know that if we leave it up to the district, it will just be a bunch of buzzwords.

So we have language in our common good proposal around community schools and shared governance and decision-making. And we want to protect community schools from closures.

What is a community school, exactly?

A community school is a school that engages the whole child. OEA has our own community schools pillars, which include strong, culturally relevant curriculum; high-quality teaching; inclusive, shared leadership; community support services; restorative school culture; family, student, and community engagement; equitable schools; and an effective, accountable school board. I think that the community school money can go toward all of those things.

For OUSD, $66 million was designated for community schools. I’m sure the district would love to spend that money on school consultants — you know, a community schools director with a nice big fat salary at the central offices. That money would not wind up going in the classroom, because that’s their MO; that’s how they operate.

I know OEA has a slogan, “Chop From the Top”; I read that Oakland spends $20 million more on administration than nearby Santa Ana Unified, and Santa Ana has ten thousand more students.

We’re very top-heavy in OUSD.

That’s specifically central admin costs. That does not include principals and secretaries who are at the schools; that admin is centralized office administration. We have a slide from our presentation for parents with a nice little comparison between the Oakland, Santa Ana, and West Contra Costa school districts, and it shows how grossly inflated OUSD’s central administrative offices costs are. We should not have three times as much allotted to that compared to a district with ten thousand more students than us.

It sounds like Oakland teachers get paid the lowest in Alameda County, and Oakland is not cheap to live in; it’s one of the more expensive places in the Bay Area. How does that affect you all?

Yes, and if it’s not the lowest pay in all of the Bay Area, it’s got to be close to it. I see it affect teacher retention. Not paying people an adequate amount impedes our ability to keep teachers at our schools. That creates really unsettled situations at a lot of our highest-needs schools. For example, the school I was at before, was considered a really good school, but has had a lot of turnover in staff recently, and it has been a challenge.

This year, I’m at a new school, Emerson Elementary, in North Oakland. One of the things that shocked me the most when I started there was that almost every classroom teacher there had been there for several years. There was one brand-new kindergarten teacher who had been a maternity sub the year before; everyone else had been there for several years, some for nine or ten years.

You see the impact that that has on the students. You see how everyone knows each other, how they’re able to share knowledge about the students and community in a way that you can’t when there’s constant turnover. You also see what a huge impact that has on student achievement, as much as I hate the standardized tests. Emerson Elementary has performed fairly well in standardized testing, even though the demographics represent groups that typically score much lower.

In the opinion of my colleagues, that is very much related to the fact that their teachers have been consistently there working with each other. They know how to work together and know how to support one another. What’s typical in OUSD is 20 to 30 percent yearly teacher turnover.

There are some schools that have very little loss, like Emerson, bringing that average up, but then there’s schools that have the entire staff changing over from year to year. That includes the principals, because the principals are getting burnt out like crazy too. And when that is happening . . . Quite frankly, a school like that is not a safe place.

It’s going to be hard for a kid to build a relationship with somebody who then has to leave midyear to go to a different job because they can’t afford to live in the Bay Area anymore. I know that this has happened at at least a few different sites, where people couldn’t finish the year. And students have to do relationship-building again. If students are having a hard time outside of school, and in school they’re having to do this relationship-building again, that’s going to be difficult.

I think it also contributes to a lack of feeling of safety when we don’t have all our positions hired. There are vacancies throughout the year. There might be a class covered by a revolving door of subs, or there’s vacancies so we aren’t fully staffed. For example, as a PE teacher, the kids come to me a little rowdy; there’s sometimes fights that happen. And at my previous school, which had several vacancies, if I had an emergency and needed someone to come right away, that wasn’t guaranteed.

It definitely feels a lot safer for me as a teacher and for my students knowing that, when a student who’s struggling with something is having a moment, having an outburst — maybe it’s directed toward another student, maybe it’s not, but they need some sort of support — knowing that someone will actually come when I pick up the radio and say, “I need support,” that is huge. And that’s not guaranteed. There are so many teachers who are like, “I could be on the radio all day saying, ‘There’s a fight over here,’ and no one’s coming.”

That speaks to the need for mental health support and mental health services for students. And that’s part of the common good demands: making sure that students have enough restorative justice coordinators, enough mental health providers, enough counselors.

We had our students making their ideal schools in conversations around the strike — asking, “What’s your ideal school like?” And it’s simple things, like “We need AC in this classroom”; like “I can’t focus when it’s too hot,” or “We need shade. There’s no shade on our playground, and we’re struggling out there.” The Bay Area, once it gets eighty degrees out, they’re melting.

What was it like getting organized for the strike?

On the bargaining end, we know that striking is such a big ask, and we know that it’s not something that anybody takes lightly — people are not getting paid right now. Once we win our salary proposal, we can get retro pay, and hopefully that will help. But still, it’s a hard time, and students can’t go to the classroom, and it’s not something we take lightly at all.

At my site, I feel very lucky that we have folks who have been there for a while, so this is not their first strike. They know how to do this, because they know the district’s antics. They’re like, “We have our strike captain,” different people are signing up for different roles, people are reaching out to non-OEA members on campus and talking to them. We’re communicating with families and sending out messages, trying to connect people with resources that they need, like if they need food, or if certain families can take care of other families’ kids . . . just doing a lot of connecting. It’s a lot of work at the site-by-site level.

The 2019 strike had a much bigger windup period. But for this strike, there are way more veteran strikers who are familiar with what needed to happen, and we were able to do it on a much quicker turnaround. People were concerned about having less time to plan and organize it, but you don’t need a perfect strike. You just need an impactful strike.

There had been a general buzz of, “Do you think we’ll need to go on strike?” Also, once those offers from the district were coming out, 3.5 percent raises that were actually pay cuts because they were tied to more work — people might not have wanted to strike, but everyone was ready to strike. We did our outreach, we were doing temperature checks, and folks were just like, “We’re down. We’re ready for this.” And once everyone is committed, it’s going to happen, and it’s going to be effective.