Oakland’s School Board Has Long Been in Disarray. Is It Turning a Corner?

Oakland’s school board has been on rocky ground for years — board members bicker, and tensions at public meetings often run high.

New board president Jennifer Brouhard said that when she tells school representatives from other cities that she represents Oakland, it’s not uncommon for them to ask, “How do you do it?”

“We’ve been seen as a board that can’t get things done, that’s divisive,” she told KQED.

Despite the board’s reputation — and the $95 million budget deficit looming over its head — Brouhard and some other education officials feel the current group is coming together as it faces significant challenges to start the year. But infighting on the board is far from gone.

“I am more optimistic about this board than I have been for a while,” said Alameda County Superintendent Alysse Castro, who stepped up oversight of the district in January after the board certified a negative interim budget for the first time in over 20 years, spurring dire warnings that its members were avoiding difficult decisions.

How the battles play out over two new proposals this month will offer insight into whether the school board has truly turned a corner.

As the board approved layoff notices and slung accusations about unprofessionalism during last week’s meeting, Brouhard read into the record the first proposal, which she introduced with Vice President Valarie Bachelor. It’s a set of “alternative budget adjustments” meant to supplement rather than replace the budget proposals passed by the board in December, Brouhard said.

“The intent is really to give the board more direction in things,” she told KQED. “A lot of times it feels to us that we’re in charge of making sure that the district is financially solvent, but we don’t always have the ways to direct that.”

The alternatives would add more guardrails to the budget proposed by district staff for next year and aim to make spending cuts away from school sites, limiting their direct effect on students, according to Brouhard.

Board member Mike Hutchinson, who heads the Budget and Finance Committee, was highly critical.

“I would be embarrassed to submit that with my name on it,” Hutchinson said, adding that the budget-balancing proposal passed in December has the district on track. “There’s been no work to even develop a real alternative plan. If that’s what they wanted to do — five bullet points — when we’ve been working on this for five months, [it] doesn’t cut it.”

The short document instructs the district to cap spending on contracts with outside vendors, confidential employees, and books and supplies, a line item that Brouhard said is often used to fund other expenses that arise throughout the year. It would also require staff to alert the board of any new ongoing funds that become available and prioritize rescinding potential layoff notices the board approved sending to staff this month.

Hutchinson said that the board doesn’t cap spending categorically.

Latta said she was “cautiously supportive” of the proposal and looking forward to discussing its merits with the whole board.

Hutchinson also took issue with the other proposal, which new board member Rachel Latta introduced with Brouhard and would create a task force to do a deep dive on the district’s spending on services and contracts. It would be made up of representatives from OUSD labor partners, parent groups, student board delegates and a board member with district staff, and look for excessive or repetitive contracts with third-party vendors.

“We have a Budget and Finance Committee,” Hutchinson said. “If this is something that people want the board to address and discuss, then the board should do that — and the board does the work.”

He suggested that creating a task force would allow board members to outsource the work of sifting through spending to others. However, Latta’s reasoning for the makeup of the group is different.

“I want to honor the expertise that every stakeholder brings, and so I think it’s worth [the] little extra time to get their input,” she told KQED, saying that it “upholds a value that I have around meaningful community engagement.”

In the background of Hutchinson’s ire with both proposals, there seems to be a larger frustration with this year’s board leadership.

He’s accused Brouhard of “locking” the school board into the budget-balancing plan passed by last year’s board by canceling meetings in February, including a study session on the budget set for Feb. 5 and a meeting originally scheduled for Feb. 20, when an item regarding the layoffs would have been agendized.

“President Brouhard has canceled a series of meetings, taking away any opportunity to introduce any alternatives or even discuss the budget adjustments recommendations,” he wrote on Facebook ahead of the layoff notice vote. “Now she hasn’t even put a vote on the $95M budget adjustments package (attachment C) on the agenda for a vote.” That package was approved by the former school board on Dec. 11.

“The only time there was a discussion was at the February Budget and Finance Committee [meeting] because I set the agenda for that committee,” he told KQED, adding that instead of a discussion, Brouhard gave Castro time to present her plan to support OUSD’s budgeting in an expanded oversight role during one of the district’s two monthly meetings.

Multiple board members said a meeting slated for Feb. 20 was canceled after district staff told the board they would not be prepared to present layoff data by that time.

“They weren’t prepared yet with the financials and the number of [preliminary layoff] March 15 letters. So that meeting was canceled because I felt if you’re not ready for it, you don’t want to hand these things out to people who may not get them,” Brouhard told KQED.

She said staff also hadn’t been prepared to have the discussion scheduled for Feb. 5, and that at the time, the board was “figuring out what our relationship was, how we’re going to navigate this thing with the county.”

“Those were opportunities that we could have wrestled with some of these issues in public a little bit more, in a slightly less formal manner,” according to Latta. “But I’ll just also name that because the county wanted to run that meeting. I think there was like an internal tension on the board of ‘Is that what we want to do?’”

Still, she doesn’t agree that board leadership has stifled discussion about the budget.

“We’re trying to be to the strictest letter of the law, the Brown Act, because with the county also being involved, it kind of adds an additional layer of complexity,” Latta said. “I understand why it feels like maybe things have come from on high, but some decisions also come through the county that we don’t have any control over.”

The board does seem to agree on a few key things, though: passing a balanced budget in June and regaining full local control by next year.

“We are now less than 18 months away from leaving receivership; we’ve taken away the cloud of fear hanging over our school sites,” Hutchinson said. “But, projecting forward, we do have to figure out how our district needs to be built going forward, and we can’t stay the same.

“It’s very unfortunate that in Oakland, we elected some school board members who are not prepared for the job.”

Latta said she expects bickering at board meetings to continue but is “confident we’re going to pass a balanced budget.

“We’ve already identified well over the amount of cuts in dollars than our projected deficit; we’re projected to beat our enrollment targets that all of our funding is based on,” she said. “Even though people see arguing, they see tension; I would just want to reassure people that that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to get our work done for the students of the district.”