Oakland Teachers Are Set to Strike This Week, Union Tells School District

Oakland’s teachers union informed the district on Tuesday morning that its nearly 3,000 members plan to strike on Thursday over what it called unfair labor practices surrounding the district’s budget shortfall.

The announcement comes after 65% of voting members elected last week to support a one-day work stoppage on May Day, accusing Oakland Unified School District leadership of withholding requested financial information and manufacturing a budget crisis to justify teacher layoffs and significant budget cuts.

OUSD officials said in an update to families on Tuesday that schools would remain open during the strike, though it was not clear exactly what students would do.

The strike would be the fourth by Oakland teachers since 2019.

“Oakland’s cycle of strikes has created decades of mistrust and instability,” the district said in its email to families. “This ongoing turmoil puts the entire district at risk — including the very real threat of returning to state receivership. Every strike weakens our ability to deliver stable services and sustain improvements families and students deserve.”

Oakland Educators Association President Kampala Taiz-Rancifer told KQED last week that the strike vote was spurred by the district’s lack of financial transparency as it prepares to make layoffs and cuts to contracts.

“OUSD’s response to those requests [for financial information] has been delayed,” Taiz-Rancifer said. “They have cut members’ jobs, and we have to … understand what are the resources in the school district, along with whether or not the job losses are actually necessary.”

She has accused the district of manufacturing a budget deficit that was projected as high as $95 million in December, while adding nearly as much in overhead to the central office’s spending.

Projections of the shortfall for the 2025–2026 academic year have swung wildly in recent months, recently shrinking to $12 million after factoring in some of the district’s cuts. This year, the district is operating at a deficit of $70 million, it said.

On Friday, district spokesperson John Sasaki said the district had responded to 30 information requests from the union this year.

“[The union] acknowledged that the district has fully responded to all but two complex, budget-related [requests for information] that were recently submitted,” he wrote in an email to families. “We remain committed to transparency, open communication, and working in good faith.”

Although Taiz-Rancifer had told members that the union’s bargaining team was focused on finding a resolution in negotiations with the district over the weekend, the situation escalated Tuesday when she said the strike would go forward Thursday without an agreement.

The planned strike comes as tensions have mounted between top district officials and the teachers’ union. The union-backed school board majority voted last Wednesday to remove Oakland’s longtime superintendent, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, two years before the end of her contract.

The school board set a special meeting for Tuesday night to discuss the decision and the impending strike, which the district urged families to speak at.

Taiz-Rancifer said her union has had significant labor challenges with the district, pointing to the three strikes that have taken place during Johnson-Trammell’s eight-year tenure. A strike in 2022 closed schools for more than a week and ended after educators were promised a retroactive 10% raise and continuing wage increases, which the district has blamed in part for its budget shortage.

The teachers’ union accuses OUSD of using an inflated budget shortfall in December to justify layoffs of about 100 teachers and hundreds of contract changes that will result in lower salaries for its members. The district also gave administrators the option to make more than 30 spending reductions in its upcoming budget proposal, including centralizing services and eliminating some contracts.

In February, school board President Jennifer Brouhard and Vice President Valarie Bachelor proposed an alternative budget solution plan that puts caps on some central office spending. Although the union supported that proposal, it said it still wants access to financial documentation that it hasn’t received.