The Oakland school district has posted an ad on Craigslist, offering $300 a day for “emergency temporary teachers” in the event of an Oakland teacher strike. The district will conduct interviews next week in the hopes of finding enough subs willing to cross the picket line.

As of now, a one-day strike over the yet-unsettled teacher contract is planned for April 22. District Spokesman Troy Flint said the district administration hadn’t decided whether to close schools that day, but that “we didn’t want to be caught flat-footed.”

“We’re still holding out some hope that we will resolve this, but we’re trying to be realistic and have a fallback plan,” Flint said.

Want to see more pictures of local March 4 demonstrations? We have a whopping 77 posted on our Web site, along with Matt Krupnick’s story. You can find the Oakland schools-focused piece I wrote here, which should soon have photos posted of Allendale Elementary’s short march.

For those of you who took part in the Day of Action, tell us how it went.

I hear that quite a few kids and teachers plan to skip school tomorrow and join a huge noon to 4 p.m. rally in front of Oakland City Hall to protest the level of education funding in California.

But those who show up to class will take part in the March 4 Day of Action to Defend Public Education, too. At 9:15 a.m., public schools across Oakland will hold a short fire drill to symbolize the severity of the funding crisis. Later in the day, you or your child might be writing an essay on which spending cuts in OUSD would do “less harm” to students,  or reading about women who created social change through non-violent protest —  two of the lesson plans posted on the OUSD Web site.

[The district's plans for March 4 are listed here. A letter urging the public to contact the governor is posted here.]

Craig Gordon, a Paul Robeson teacher and union leader, has created a supplemental lesson plan that focuses more on issues between the union and the school district than between California schools and state government. OUSD’s curriculum director has declined to post it along with the other lesson plans. Maybe it was the prompt:

Read the rest of this entry »

If things continue in the next three weeks as they have for the last two years, Oakland teachers will hold a one-day strike on Wednesday, March 24.

The union can’t legally strike yet; it has to wait until a fact-finding panel (which heard evidence from both sides last week) releases a report with recommendations – probably sometime next week, or the week after that.

In January, the union’s membership authorized its leaders to call a one-day strike, so this is another big step in that direction. You can find the Tribune story about it here.

The Bellevue Club on Lake Merritt has an old school, old Oakland sort of feel. But tonight, the future of the city’s schools — the city’s young residents, really — was discussed in its ornate rooms.

The event opened with a reception fundraiser for the Oakland Schools Foundation and remarks about the organization’s changes: its new name, its planned expansion, and its new director, Dan Quigley, former PG&E director of charitable giving.

Holly Babe Faust, the outgoing director of OSF, said the organization was optimistic about its relationship with the school district, which she predicted would become “broader, deeper, more interesting.”  She might be right; OUSD Superintendent Tony Smith made the keynote speech, after all.

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Update: If your software is stuck in the early 2000s, as mine is, and you had trouble opening the budget proposal, try this version. (It takes longer than usual to load; I almost gave up when testing it out.)

Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith’s proposal to cut next school year’s budget by $39 million includes deep cuts to central services — 74 positions eliminated out of 734 — and several one-time budget plugs totalling $8 million.

As promised, about two-thirds of the reductions would come from the central office and sources other than K-12 school budgets.

I should note, however, that some of those “central” cuts aren’t that far removed from the students. Read the rest of this entry »

Hundreds of Oakland teachers union members who turned out to a meeting tonight voted to authorize its leadership to call a strike, once it’s legal.

The vote: 726 yes, 45 no.

The Oakland Education Association represents about 2,800 employees, including teachers, counselors and librarians, according to its Web site. If you round up to 800 participants (and if the 2,800 figure is accurate), voter participation comes to about 29 percent. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday evening at Oakland Technical High School, Oakland teachers will vote on whether to authorize its leadership to call a one-day strike — not now, but in a month or two. 

When I first saw a flier advertising the membership meeting (which, ahem, includes an unattributed Tribune photo apparently lifted from the Web), I was confused by what I read. Why a vote at this stage, weeks before a strike is legal? Read the rest of this entry »

As some of you might have heard, Phyllis Harris, the Oakland school district’s former director of special education, has died. She was just 64, and passed away Dec. 15 ”after a year-long battle with cancer,” according to her obituary, which was published last week.

Harris left OUSD in October of 2007 to become the Deputy Chancellor of Special Education in Washington, D.C. In September of 2008, she took a leave of absence. I believe she moved back to Oakland, where she died.

My condolences to her family.

Oakland’s adult education programs would be slashed by nearly 40 percent in 2010-11 ($4.5 million of the $11.5 million they currently receive in state funding), if preliminary budget recommendations made by Superintendent Tony Smith are approved by the school board in January.

The recommendations, to be discussed at Wednesday’s school board meeting and voted on Jan. 27, contain few specifics, such as which services (aside from adult ed) would be cut and by how much. But the presentation does give us an idea of how the pain of a $28 million cut – Oakland Unified’s projected deficit for the 2010-11 school year — might be shared across the district.

K-12 schools would absorb $9.3 million of the $28 million reduction, which means Read the rest of this entry »