Oakland teachers are returning to the classroom on Tuesday, marking the end of a strike that kept 34,000 students out of school for eight days — and as of Monday afternoon there were no plans to make up for the lost learning.
That return comes after weeks of daily negotiations between the Oakland Unified School District and the teachers’ union, the Oakland Education Association. Teachers won big on compensation and lauded their gains on important proposals aimed to improve students’ learning conditions. But the final deal seems to have fallen short of the union’s initial list of demands centered around societal issues.
Now the district must figure out how to pay for the agreement.
“We all know that at the end of the day, the math needs to make sense. We need to stay solvent,” said Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell. “There are a number of different avenues that I think we’re going to have to explore to maintain ongoing solvency.”
The tentative 2 1/2-year agreement includes a 15.5% raise for most teachers and an 18.5% larger raise for starting teachers. Under this new agreement, first-year teachers will make — at a minimum — $62,696 a year, a jump from $52,905.
Teachers at the top of the pay scale will make $109,878 a year, excluding health and pension benefits, and bilingual teachers will be given an additional stipend of $3,000. Some teachers could see their salaries jump by $20,000 next year, Armendariz said. Union members also will receive a $5,000 one-time bonus and a 10% retroactive raise to Nov. 1, 2022.
Johnson-Trammell called the compensation package — which has a price tag of $70 million — “historic,” especially for a district that has grappled with shaky finances for the last two decades.
Other provisions include a boost in the number of librarians, counselors and nurses over the life of the contract, along with the creation of new task forces to handle campus facility issues, art and music programs, and early childhood education. Class sizes also were reduced, with a steady decline for special education in particular: Next year, the number of students in special education classes will be capped to 13; by 2025, that number will go down to 11.
Since negotiations began, the union’s “common good” demands — which ranged from environmental justice to repurposing vacant buildings to housing homeless students — had been a sticking point for the district. Until this past weekend, Oakland Unified had repeatedly claimed those demands were outside the scope of what teachers could bargain for.
But on Saturday night, the two sides announced they had come to an agreement on four of those proposals: Shared governance of community schools, support for Black Thriving Community Schools, extra steps related to school closures, and improvements to housing and transportation.
“The tide turned when the district knew that we weren’t backing down,” said Ismael Armendariz, the vice president of the Oakland Education Association.
Beginning next year, a “newcomer committee” embedded into the teachers’ contract for the first time will strengthen the support services provided to immigrant students. There will also be five full-time teachers specifically assigned to support the district’s Black Thriving Community Schools — those that are made up of 40% or more Black students. And there will be a committee of parents, teachers, students and staff formed to share governance of the district’s $66 million community schools grant, a statewide initiative to transform schools into hubs of wraparound support.
“We are incredibly proud to be able to announce that we have come to an agreement today and that we are able to bring students back into schools better than we left them,” said Kampala Taiz-Rancifer, union vice president.
Despite optimism from the union, it seems the common good agreements were less sizable than the union’s huge gains in compensation. Aside from the hiring of five full time teachers for Black majority schools — which will cost the district between $1.5 and $1.8 million — many of the agreements are relegated to creating task forces and “working together” until they expire in 2025.
Mike Hutchinson, president of the Oakland Unified School board, said many of those task forces were in place well before these negotiations began. But according to Taiz-Rancifer, those existing committees didn’t have “proper voting rights,” while the new task forces would ensure parents, students and families had a seat at the decision-making table.
“A lot of times, the bodies that existed were performative,” she said. “This allows us to be able to ensure there is real, true shared governance.”
Beatriz Alvarez, a first-grade teacher at Oakland’s Melrose Leadership Academy, also counted the common good agreements as a win. On Monday afternoon, she said she felt proud of the work she and her colleagues had accomplished.
“It feels amazing to be a part of history and to have made a real difference for students, especially when it comes to the common good demands,” she said.
Union members will gather to vote on the tentative agreement over the next few days. If a simple majority is reached, the agreement will first go to Alameda County office of education for approval, then back to the school board for final approval. Both Hutchinson and Jennifer Brouhard, the school board member representing Oakland’s district two, said they did not expect any issues once the agreement reaches their desks.
The same sentiment was shared by Armendariz — though he did note that, ultimately, it will be up to the union’s 3,000 members to decide. By Monday afternoon a small faction of teachers were calling for the strike to continue until all demands were met.
“The road is still long to fully achieve the kinds of schools that we really want to see, but we are getting there — and we’ve made significant progress,” said Vilma Serrano, one of the union’s bargaining chairs.