TENTATIVE AGREEMENT REACHED: Oakland Teachers' Strike Off For Now, But Cuts Loom

After threatening to begin a district-wide strike Monday, 3,000 teachers, counselors, school nurses, and other workers in the Oakland Education Association (OEA) reached a tentative agreement early Friday morning with the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). The deal includes a 13% raise over two years for the district’s most senior teachers and an 11% raise for all other educators, as well as stronger workload protections for school counselors and nurses and improved special education programming. OEA had previously demanded a 14% raise for all educators in the district, who have long been among the lowest-paid educators in the Bay Area. Union members will now vote on the tentative agreement, as will the school board.

The agreement comes on the heels of announced massive job cuts at schools across the district. On Wednesday, the Oakland Unified School Board voted to cut 421 jobs — about 10% of OUSD staff — and reduce hours for 144 others, saying the cuts were necessary in the face of declining enrollment and a $100 million budget deficit. OEA has promised to fight the board’s decision, which affects counselors, teachers, and social workers represented by OEA, as well as tutors and other support staff represented by SEIU and custodial and food service workers represented by AFSCME.

“The pay increases for teachers, nurses, speech language pathologists, and school psychologists are good and will help retain quality educators, and the adjustments to special education are a positive step,” said Hamsa Elmi, a 3rd grade teacher at Hoover Elementary and a network lead in OEA. “But the cuts are going to affect learning outcomes.”

“We’ve been bargaining with the district for this new contract for over eleven months, and they, until very recently I would say, haven’t really been bargaining,” Allison Grill, a teacher, union site rep, and organizer at Emerson Elementary in Temescal, told Current the night before the deal was reached. “They don’t bargain with us unless we are strike ready. It’s a really frustrating pattern that we’re in right now, that they don’t take our bargaining team and that whole process seriously unless we are on the precipice of a strike.”

Grill said the staffing cuts, as well as the district’s reluctance to bargain, ultimately stemmed from local and state governments’ misplaced spending priorities. “It’s not a resource problem, it’s a priority problem. And I would say the same structural problem exists on a national and global scale….Where are we putting our money? We’re putting our money toward weapons; we’re putting our money toward big tech. We’re not putting our money into schools,” Grill said. “That’s a choice our leaders have made in this state as to where we put our money. California has more than enough money. There’s no reason that, in Oakland, we should be fighting for scraps.”

“It’s not a resource problem, it’s a priority problem….Where are we putting our money? We’re putting our money toward weapons; we’re putting our money toward big tech. We’re not putting our money into schools."

As they did in the lead-up to previous strikes in 2019 and 2023, educators prepared for a possible strike by organizing a pair of mutual aid campaigns: Solidarity Schools, which are offsite community-led programming where parents can leave their kids during the school day while still honoring the picket line, and Bread for Ed, in which local volunteers use donated funds to prepare thousands of free lunches for Oakland students who would normally be fed at school.

“The rallies, the phone calls to the board members, and community support through Solidarity Schools and Bread for Ed all helped show the district that this was a credible strike threat and boosted our power at the bargaining table,” Elmi said.

With the strike called off, Solidarity School and Bread for Ed donations will now go to OEA’s Rapid Response Legal Defense Fund, which connects Oakland families in need with immigration attorneys and helps pay their legal costs.

Grill said Oakland educators share a clear sense of the connections between their struggle as workers and the national struggle against ICE terror: many of their students are migrants from abroad, new to the country and English language learners, whose families are targets of the U.S. government’s violent campaign of kidnapping and deportation. The job cuts announced on Wednesday will hit support staff particularly hard, including staff responsible for easing newcomer students’ transitions to their new schools — transitions that have become extraordinarily challenging under current conditions.

“Many of them have left family behind,” Grill said of Oakland’s newcomer students. “Many of them are living in intense terror that their family could get torn apart at any moment. I have a fifth grade girl who is so scared every time she comes to school that her mom’s not going to be there when she gets home. And I can’t even fathom that fear and what it’s like to then be told, ‘OK, sit down and write an essay.’”

“If you take all those support staff away, you’re left with principals and teachers,” Grill said. “So then what are we doing to support our most vulnerable young people in this country, while they’re dealing with such intense state terror?”