The Oakland Unified School District board approved a proposal Wednesday to lay off roughly 400 workers in an effort to cope with a massive budget shortfall and declining enrollment.
The layoffs will hit both the central office administration as well as the district’s 80 or so schools and are projected to save about $11 million in the next fiscal year.
The need for dramatic cost-cutting is driven by declining enrollment, the expiration of one-time funding the district received to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a roughly $100 million structural deficit that threatens OUSD’s financial solvency, according to a report from interim Superintendent Denise Saddler’s office.
Saddler said that the district’s student population has shrunk from 54,000 students to 34,000 students — but the smaller number of kids still attend the same number of school campuses and the board made an earlier decision to tackle the deficit without closing schools.
“We have to reorganize based on the amount of money we receive from the state and federal government and right now there’s not enough money that we are receiving to maintain our current staff. That’s the real deal, to maintain the current buildings that we have and to pay the utilities,” Saddler said.
“This is a very difficult moment for this community,” she said. “It is very emotional. There are real people involved.”
‘This is chaos’
During the roughly five-hour meeting, dozens of parents, students, teachers and staff addressed the board and implored them to reject the layoff proposal.
Many lamented the loss of half of the elementary schools’ elective programs, the reduction of an already stretched-thin school nursing staff and the elimination of food service, counselor, tutor and attendance staff, among other cuts.
Cary Kaufman, president of the United Administrators of Oakland union, said the cuts were made from the “the top down without true meaningful engagement” and appear to be an attempt to retain local control of the district “at any cost.”
“This is not stability,” Kaufman said. “This is chaos.”
Swaicha Chanduri, principal of Joaquin Miller Elementary School, said the district’s principals were largely left out of the planning process that led to the layoffs despite being the people primarily responsible for managing the effects of the decision.
“Please do not ask us to lead schools stripped to the point where we cannot fulfill the very purpose we claim to stand for,” Chanduri said. “This is not resistance to change, this is resistance to inequity.”
Chanduri and more than 20 other elementary school principals sent a letter to the board urging them to take another approach.
“We are writing because there appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding embedded in the current approach to school funding and the definition of high quality: the notion that the ‘bare minimum’ required to operate a school is a teacher in each classroom, a principal, and an administrative assistant — and that anything beyond that is optional, extra, or ‘nice to have,’” according to the letter. “As principals doing this work every day, we need to be very clear: this assumption is incorrect.”
School board directors Mike Hutchinson and Patrice Berry voted against the layoffs, saying the board wasn’t given enough time and information to thoughtfully consider the proposal.
Director Rachel Latta agreed that “there has been less communication than we have been used to” and worried about what school will look like in the next school year.
Still, she voted for the proposal based on what she sees as the fiscal reality that the district is faced with.
“I would love to live in a place where we could predict how many students are going to be enrolled and, if we consolidated programs, that they would stay in our district,” Latta said. “But we don’t live in that environment. We unfortunately live in a district where we’ve created a policy of school choice, where we’ve created a significant number of charter schools over the decades and we have other districts that are very happy to enroll our kids.”
Wednesday’s vote took place with a teachers’ strike looming and as the district continues to try to hammer out a new contract agreement with the Oakland Education Association teachers’ union.
Union members voted to authorize a strike as early as next week if they can’t reach a deal with district negotiators.
OEA officials said Thursday that the union is opposed to the cuts.
“Our fight to make OUSD stabilize classrooms and address its chronic staffing shortage is also a fight to preserve jobs,” according to a union statement. “These shortsighted cuts will have long-term impacts on the academic futures of Oakland students for generations to come.”