Amid Protests and Hunger Strikes against Oakland School Closures, Community Voices Concerns of Racism and Classism

By Kimberly Bajarias

OAKLAND, CA ​​– On Feb. 9, the Oakland Board of Education made a disheartening decision to close seven schools over the next two years due to alleged low enrollment and budget issues. Alongside protests and hunger strikes, community members organized in front of the California State Building on Feb. 17 to demand that the schools stay open, raising concerns for the endangerment and educational impacts of Black and Brown communities.

 

Natalie Gallegos Chavez, student board director for the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), encouraged community solidarity and youth advocacy, proudly calling the children speaking up “little leaders.” In speaking about her Oakland community at large, she said “those are my people, that’s my community, and it’s who I represent.”

 

During the Board of Education’s meeting to vote on the school closure plan, Gallegos Chavez recognized that the board was voting to close predominantly Black and Brown schools during February–Black History Month. Many of the schools have a majority of Black students, and voting against the education of Black communities furthered a tension in race and class relations.

 

“We have two teachers who are on a hunger strike right now for our students, and they’re putting their lives on the line for us,” noted Gallegos Chavez, referring to Westlake Middle School teachers Maurice André San-Chez and Moses Olanrewaju Omolade.

 

As of Feb. 19, the teachers will be entering day 19 of their hunger strike, despite Omolade’s recent hospitalization. At the Board of Education’s special meeting on Feb. 18, the directors decided against postponing the school closures, prompting community members, teachers, and even students to go on their own hunger strikes.

 

Board Directors VanCedric Williams and Mike Hutchinson, who voted against the school closure plan, are allies to the community protests. According to Gallegos Chavez, “they have always been there to fight for us, and they always listen to us.” 

 

When asked about the future of school closures in the Oakland community, Gallegos Chavez said that “it’s a history that keeps repeating, unfortunately.” Last year, the Board of Education tried to close schools down, but granted an extension due to COVID-19 recovery. Her elementary school was merged in 2007.

 

“Our youth and community, they always fight for each other,” stated Gallegos Chavez about the strength of Oakland.

 

Community members like Sarah Wheels, a fifth-grade teacher at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School, do just that. Her school is not affected by the closures, but she protested in solidarity on Feb. 17.

 

“This is not the first time that they have tried to close schools since I’ve been working in the district, and I haven’t worked here that long,” said Wheels.

 

Like other community members, Wheels noted that “it’s really racist and classist,” referencing the institutionalized racism and gentrification of closing predominantly Black and Brown schools. One of the goals of the community protests is to center Black and Brown communities in the fight to keep schools open. Many students from these communities come from underprivileged backgrounds, and the closures raised concerns about finances, transportation, and the search for new schools.

 

Although Wheels acknowledges that “being a teacher right now in Oakland is really hard,” she notes that the teachers “went on strike a few years ago. It looks like we might be going out again.”

 

Many people who are not from Oakland also protested on Feb. 17, like Aidan ByrneSarno and Eden Sharma. Both expressed disappointment in the Board of Education, the victimization of Black and Brown communities, and the privatization of public resources.

 

“It was a very common thing for governments to close down or take funding from public schools and put them into either charter schools or private schools,” said Sharma.

 

ByrneSarno added: “Nationwide, there have just been so many attacks, and I think that’s fundamentally a result of trying to privatize education from billionaires trying to get profits.”

 

Many of the speakers at the Feb. 17 protest addressed the idea that the Oakland Board of Education has provided little to no feedback, transparency, or explanation. The board directors who voted to close the schools attributed their decision to declining enrollment and financial concerns; however, opposing board directors claim these as lies.

 

As of the writing of this article, parents are threatening to take their children out of the school district, and community members are starting petitions to recall the board directors who voted in favor of the closures.

Kimberly Bajarias is a second-year student at the University of California, Berkeley.

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  1. Five years ago, there were 37,049 students enrolled in Oakland, Calif., public schools. Today that number is down nearly 11%, and after a marathon debate that stretched eight hours, the city’s school board on Wednesday did what others may soon have to consider and voted to close or merge nearly a dozen schools.

    Oakland schools have lost 15,000 students in the past 20 years, according to the district. 

    https://time.com/6146541/oakland-schools-closing-enrollment/#:~:text=Five%20years%20ago%2C%20there,merge%20nearly%20a%20dozen%20schools.

    Demographic projections from the California Department of Finance (DOF) suggest that California’s public K-12 school system is entering a long period of declining enrollment. By 2027-28, statewide enrollment is projected to fall nearly 7 percent (compared to 1.5% over the past decade). Enrollment is projected to shrink in about half of all counties, and declines are expected in more of the state’s larger counties.

    https://www.ppic.org/publication/declining-enrollment-in-california-schools-fiscal-challenges-and-opportunities-in-the-coming-decade/

    This trend will also further decrease the demand for college.

    1. This trend will also further decrease the demand for college.

      Not if we grow our college enrollment by increasing full-tuition international and national students from outside California.  All of whom will need housing!  Another of the ‘privileges’  of living in a college town 😐

    2. This trend will also further decrease the demand for college.

      It might decrease the demand for some colleges in some places. Expecting UC enrollment to drop anytime in the next couple of decades is probably not wise.

      UC could add 20,000 seats for students by 2030 to meet surging enrollment demand

      Oct 1, 2021
      The University of California is seeking to add 20,000 seats for students by 2030, the equivalent of a new campus, to help meet surging demand for a UC education and college graduates to fill the state’s growing need for highly skilled employees.

      UC Board of Regents Chair Cecilia Estolano, who has marked enrollment expansion as one of her top priorities, emphasized, along with UC President Michael V. Drake, that UC must grow without sacrificing its renowned quality in teaching and research and increase numbers of both undergraduates and graduate students, faculty and staff.

      The system’s nine undergraduate campuses face a looming capacity crisis that could deprive as many as 144,000 qualified California students a seat at a four-year campus by the end of the decade.

      “The demand for, and the value of a UC education has only grown over the years,” Drake said. “Record-breaking application numbers speak for themselves, as do the stories we’ve all heard over the years about the challenges students face in achieving acceptance to the university’s campuses. It’s clear that enrollment growth is essential to the future of the university and the state.”

      Last year, UC received an all-time record 250,000 applications for fall 2021 — 203,700 aspiring freshman and 46,155 transfer students — from the most diverse student pool ever. But the system was not able to fully accommodate the increased demand. Admission rates fell, particularly at the most popular campuses, causing widespread angst among families and political pressure to increase enrollment for Californians.

      State lawmakers have pledged funding to add 6,200 more UC seats for fall 2022 and to reduce nonresident students at UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego over five years to make room for 4,500 more Californians. How UC would fund the 20,000-student enrollment increase was not discussed Thursday.

      Pamela Brown, UC vice president for institutional research and academic planning, said despite projections of a demographic decline in the number of high school students, demand for UC seats continues to rise because more of them are graduating and completing the sequence of college preparatory courses required for UC admission. She added that growth is particularly strong among Latinos, who make up more than half of the state’s high school students.

      But boosting enrollment is a complicated task for campuses with limited space, resources and conflicting political pressures.

      Student regent Alexis Atsilvsgi Zaragoza, for instance, noted that current students are struggling to find affordable housing, access to courses needed to graduate on time and financial aid for summer courses to expedite progress toward a degree. Some campuses, such as UC Santa Barbara and UC Merced, ran so short of housing this fall they are temporarily putting up students in hotels — which Zaragoza called a “huge red flag.”

      “We don’t even have capacity to take care of our current students,” Zaragoza said. “We really need to fix the current problems that are directly in front of us.”

      Campuses also are caught between pressure to boost enrollment and community objections to sprawling growth and impacts on local traffic, housing and resources.

      UC Santa Cruz, for instance, won the regents’ approval Thursday for a long-range development plan that envisions a 44% increase in enrollment by 2040, from 19,000 to 28,000 students. Local opponents say that growth will worsen the area’s housing crunch. Yet a UC Santa Cruz plan to add 3,000 beds has been blocked by litigation over environmental concerns.

      UC Berkeley agreed to limit campus growth of undergraduates to 1% annually under its long-range development plan after the city and neighbors voiced opposition to the impact on the community of more students.

      As a result, the Berkeley campus has begun exploring unconventional ways to increase enrollment without adding more students to the physical campus. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ presented some of those plans to the regents, including a satellite campus at Moffett Field owned by NASA that would focus on aerospace science and engineering. She said satellite campuses were most effective if they offered a specialized focus.

      Christ also suggested that UC explore potential mergers with colleges that may be struggling with under-enrollment and financial distress. She noted that Stanford University announced this week that it intended to buy the Belmont campus of Notre Dame de Namur University, a small Catholic institution founded in 1851. The deal will give Stanford space to expand its educational programs while aiding the struggling Notre Dame campus.

      Earlier this year, Mills College — a private women’s liberal arts college in East Oakland — agreed to merge with Northeastern University in Boston to jointly develop new academic programs.

      Christ added that Berkeley was also working on ways to help students graduate faster, offer more summer sessions and take some classes abroad or online.

      Enrollment growth is central to our strategic planning, but the constraints we have both in the physical footprint of our campus and our agreements with the city of Berkeley mean that we have to look at other ways of growing capacity,” she said.

      UC Riverside Chancellor Kim Wilcox said his campus has grown by 24%, from 21,000 to 26,000, since he arrived in 2013 but he would like to see it reach the level of at least 40,000 — the range of UCLA and UC Berkeley. He said increasing tenure-track faculty has been a top priority, which has helped the campus double its research funding and provide students with access to top scholars.

      But Riverside is “woefully behind” in adding more staff, he said. The campus, which educates a high share of underserved students, lacks many essential services at the same level of its peers, such as transfer student support, counseling and academic advising.

      Unlike UCLA and UC Berkeley, which lack space to expand their physical footprint, UC Riverside still has room to grow and is adding housing complexes and classrooms.

      “We’ll grow as fast as resources allow us to grow,” Wilcox said.

      One key focus is the pressing need to add more graduate students, who serve as teaching assistants, future faculty and researchers that help drive UC’s global research prowess.

      Among the system’s campuses, only UCLA and UC Berkeley enroll graduate students at rough parity to public peers of comparable size. But they fall behind private institutions — at USC, for instance, graduate students make up 58.4% of total enrollment compared to 28.9% at UCLA.

      Several regents stressed the need to grow enrollment in an equitable way, drawing students who are representative of not only the state’s diverse racial and ethnic groups but also geographical regions such as the Central Valley and Inland Empire.

      Drake, who has convened a working group of chancellors and other UC leaders to develop an enrollment growth plan, said he shared that goal.

      “There’s no greater priority for the University of California than our responsibility to build a bridge toward a future where opportunity, like talent, is distributed more fairly across the ZIP Codes,” he said.

      https://artsdesign.berkeley.edu/plus/news/uc-could-add-20000-seats-for-students-by-2030-to-meet-surging-enrollment-demand

      1. It might decrease the demand for some colleges in some places.

        Demand is dropping overall (and nationwide), and has been for years.

        And this year isn’t the first time this has happened. Over the past eight years, college enrollment nationwide has fallen about 11%. Every sector — public state schools, community colleges, for-profits and private liberal arts schools — has felt the decline, though it has been especially painful for small private colleges, where, in some cases, institutions have been forced to close.

        As you noted, the UC system is attempting to take a bigger piece of an overall smaller pie.  Your citation regarding the following is interesting:

        Christ also suggested that UC explore potential mergers with colleges that may be struggling with under-enrollment and financial distress. She noted that Stanford University announced this week that it intended to buy the Belmont campus of Notre Dame de Namur University, a small Catholic institution founded in 1851. The deal will give Stanford space to expand its educational programs while aiding the struggling Notre Dame campus.

        Earlier this year, Mills College — a private women’s liberal arts college in East Oakland — agreed to merge with Northeastern University in Boston to jointly develop new academic programs.

        Fewer Students Mean Big Trouble For Higher Education : NPR

        Mergers often occur in industries which are declining, as well. (Again, an example of a “bigger piece of a smaller pie”.)

        The increased percentage of college graduates from a “UC” will likely decrease its comparative value.

        Pretty soon, the question won’t be “which college did you attend”? Instead, it will be “which UC did you attend”?

        They’ve already done-away with SATs.

        1. Demand is dropping overall (and nationwide), and has been for years.

          Irrelevant to UC overall and irrelevant to UCD specifically, therefore not a useful data point for the city of Davis or our region with respect to growth and planning issues.

        2. Perhaps, if you support the goal of the UC system as you quoted:

          The University of California is seeking to add 20,000 seats for students by 2030, the equivalent of a new campus, to help meet surging demand for a UC education and college graduates to fill the state’s growing need for highly skilled employees.

          UC Board of Regents Chair Cecilia Estolano, who has marked enrollment expansion as one of her top priorities,

          But at least they’re also looking to possibly expand into the college (facilities) which are failing, as you noted.  Makes sense, given the goal.

          But one might question if they’re doing that primarily for their own survival, in a declining enrollment environment. (Essentially, the same form of “poaching” of students that school districts such as Davis’ and Piedmont’s are attempting. Which seems primarily driven out of self-interest.)

          Of course, like Piedmont, they can attempt to use the “diversity” argument, rather than acknowledge any self-interested goal.

          It all goes back to a bigger piece of a smaller pie.

        3. Of course, they use the “quality of education” argument in their defense, as well.

          But sometimes, folks use that to denigrate particular campuses within the UC system itself, which causes their entire argument to start unraveling.  Again, this seems to be driven by other motives (or perhaps underlying elitism).

          For sure, you don’t want to tell a college town (or university system) that their industry is declining. You’ll get all kinds of pushback, sometimes rather aggressive in nature. (Same with school districts, and those associated with them.)

      2. In my parents’ time, college graduates were comparatively rare.  But it wasn’t required, to get a good job.  (More so for white males, no doubt. Women were needed at home, to take care of unreasonably large families.)

        Today, everyone is expected to go to college.

        In the future, everyone and their grandma will have a degree from a UC. Despite reduced overall demand for college, and decreasing value of said degree. (Particularly in fields in which there isn’t much demand in the working world.)

  2. Wheels noted that “it’s really racist and classist,” referencing the institutionalized racism and gentrification of closing predominantly Black and Brown schools.“

     

  3. Wow, hunger strikes and little leaders.  Good luck with all this he says doubtingly.  My early school days were filled with fights to keep schools open due to declining enrollment.  Every school I went to as a child is closed — four total — and two the land doesn’t even exist anymore, they are housing developments.

    The board directors who voted to close the schools attributed their decision to declining enrollment and financial concerns; however, opposing board directors claim these as lies.

    How exactly do you ‘lie’ about enrollment numbers?  I’d thought that’s one statistic that is pretty easy to confirm.

  4. The article I posted includes an interactive map, which shows where further declines are expected to occur over the next 10 years.  The decline appears to be concentrated in counties that are primarily “white”.

    Enrollments in Yolo county are projected to decline by 6%.

    Overall, statewide enrollment is projected to fall by an additional 7%.

    https://www.ppic.org/interactive/changes-in-k-12-enrollment-across-californias-counties/

     

  5. Community members like Sarah Wheels, a fifth-grade teacher at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School, do just that. Her school is not affected by the closures, but she protested in solidarity on Feb. 17.

    Piedmont is now encouraging enrollments by students from Oakland, due to Piedmont’s own declining enrollment.  They claim that the reason they’re doing so is to increase diversity, but there appears to be a more self-interested reason for their action:

    But the call for students illustrates how declining enrollment in public schools across the state has hurt districts’ bottom lines. School officials are desperate to bring in students to fill seats and bring state money with them, even if that means pulling families from districts in the same situation.

    The tiny district, which had 2,464 students last year, even has a marketing plan to get the word out.

    https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/Why-Piedmont-s-academically-elite-schools-are-16843048.php

     

      1. Perhaps Scott Wiener can champion that issue?

        It does hurt those “left behind” (in their normally-assigned districts), who are probably disproportionately students of color.

  6.  
    From Vanguard article, above:

    “We have two teachers who are on a hunger strike right now for our students, and they’re putting their lives on the line for us,” noted Gallegos Chavez, referring to Westlake Middle School teachers Maurice André San-Chez and Moses Olanrewaju Omolade.

    From the link provided:

    On February 1st, 2022, Maurice André San-Chez (shay) and Moses Olanrewaju Omolade of Westlake Middle School will begin a hunger strike to end all school closures. During this hunger strike, both San-Chez and Omolade will not consume any food or nutritional sustenance at the expense of their health until either OUSD ends all school closures and meets to honor our developing community demands OR their internal organs fail and they die

    Wow – that, my friends is one heck of a commitment to a job.  (I see that Westlake is one of the schools scheduled for closure, so apparently these two would lose theirs.)

    Let’s see if they go through with the hunger strike until the “end”.  (I hope not.)

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