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With members of the Oakland Unified School District’s powerless advisory board of trustees renewing their call for an immediate return to local control of the Oakland schools, incoming Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums used the platform of the joint city-school inauguration at the Paramount Theater last week to issue his strongest statement to date on the subject. 

“I want to tell the members of the school board that you are not hanging out there by yourself,” Dellums said to a packed inaugural audience and school board members sitting on the Paramount stage near the speaker’s stand. “Whenever democracy is interrupted, we should be nervous. We should be loud, boisterous, and active in supporting it. There has been an attack on public education that is like dropping a bomb on democracy. Public education and democracy go hand in hand. We are prepared to be partners with you in restoring both.” 

Oakland’s public schools were taken over by the state in 2003 following the district’s request to the state for a $100 million line of credit in the wake of a projected $50 million budget shortfall. The district’s schools have since been run by an administrator hired by California Superintendent for Public Instruction Jack O’Connell. 

There have been increasing calls in recent months for a return to local control of the city’s schools, with the latest effort a bill introduced by newly elected District 16 Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland), a former Dellums aide, for local school control in most areas of operation. 

Last summer, Dellums met privately with O’Connell to discuss the Oakland school situation as well as to voice his opposition to O’Connell’s controversial plans to sell 8.25 acres in downtown area property owned by the school district, including five schools and the district’s administrative headquarters. That sale proposal has been put on long-term hold while O’Connell continues private negotiations with an East Coast development partnership. 

Speaking at last week’s inauguration ceremonies, re-elected school board president David Kakishiba said that in “very fundamental ways,” the district was better off now than it was four years ago when the state assumed control. 

“We have established a balanced budget, and by the end of the year, we will have re-established our rainy day budget reserve,” Kakishiba said. “Last year we passed a $430 million bond measure that allocates money for critical construction needs. All across the board, we have had steady yet incremental gains in student test scores.” 

But Kakishiba said that in other ways, state control has seen the district take a significant downturn, in part because of the continued distruption of the school district. 

“We have had a tremendous loss of student population,” he said. “At the same time, over 60 percent of our students perform below grade level in math and English. Many of our young people have been lost to the streets, where they have lost their lives. Many more have had their spirits poisoned.” 

Kakishiba said that the time has come “to put a proper closure to state receivership.” In addition, in order to bring the district up to standard, he called for a longer school day and year for elementary students, “integrated careeer and college programs” in the high schools, increased compensation for district teachers, and “real relief from bureaucratic federal, state, and local regulations that have acted as roadblocks and stifled the ingenuity of our district to meet our responsibilities.” 

The OUSD board president said that with OUSD sponsoring one of the largest proliferations of charter schools in the state, with 7,000 students now enrolled in Oakland-based charters, “the charter school movement has now come full circle. The district’s publicly-run schools must now become competitive and beat the charter schools” in the drive to attract city students. “We must take on that challenge,” Kakishiba said. “We can’t bury our heads in the sand.” 

Other board members used the inaugural occasion to renew the call for local control. 

“We seek to restore local authority not because of power or personal pride, but because local schools are better run by a school board with authority that is accountable to the citizens,” re-elected board member Gary Yee said. 

And Christopher Dobbins, who replaced retiring trustee Dan Siegel on the board, said that “during my election campaign, I promised to bring back local control, and we’re going to do that.” 

Re-elected City Councilmember Jean Quan, a former school board member, also joined the local control chorus, saying in her inauguration speech that “we need to return to local control. We can make Oakland the Athens of America, just as the city’s Founding Fathers envisioned 100 years ago.”