OAKLAND — Teachers, parents, students and school staff headed to the picket lines Friday for the seventh day of the Oakland Education Association’s strike against the Oakland Unified School District as both sides remained far apart on key issues, such as their wildly different price tags for the union’s “common good” proposals.
In a firm and aggressive statement against the intricacies of the union’s common good measures on Wednesday evening, the district said the measures would cost more than $1 billion to fully implement.
“The remaining issue is how best to work on the common good proposal, which seeks to assign the school district with addressing such broad societal issues as housing for homeless and drought-tolerant landscaping,” Superintendent Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell said in a video posted Wednesday night. “While the district agrees that these issues should be addressed, and we are already working on many of them, the issues cannot be tackled by school district budgets alone.”
The union issued a statement Friday morning rebutting the district’s comments and calling the $1 billion estimate “ridiculous” and not based on fact.
“Our Common Good goals are largely about ensuring educators, parents, students and other stakeholders have a voice in the decision-making process,” said union Vice President Kampala Taiz-Rancifer. “We also have proposed the addition of a small number of additional staff to support our most impacted community schools. We have no idea how OUSD came up with that ridiculous number.”
A union source told the Bay Area News Group on Friday morning that their estimate was closer to $500,000 annually to “fund additional positions for community schools.”
In a statement Friday afternoon, the district urged the union to “end the strike, get our students back in school and our seniors ready for graduation. and then, we can work on the common good together.”
The district said 1.4 million hours of instruction have been lost since the walkout started.
The strike is threatening capstone senior projects, finals, credit recovery, graduations, college admissions and financial aid, the district said. Just nine days remain in the school year and the first high school graduation is scheduled for May 22.
“The bottom line is that our students need to be back in school, our seniors more than anyone because so much of their immediate future is dependent on having their final grades completed on time so they are ready to take the next step in their education and careers,” the district said.
The union planned a march Friday beginning at 12:30 p.m. at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater, moving between 12th Street and 1st Avenue.
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