Oakland Teachers Strike Is Called Off After Union Reaches Deal With School District

Updated 3:46 p.m. Wednesday

Oakland public school teachers reached a tentative deal with the city’s school district on Wednesday to avoid a one-day strike scheduled for May Day.

In a statement, the Oakland Education Association said the district agreed to maintain contracts for 120 high school teachers whose hours would have been reduced in next year’s budget to shrink the district’s deficit.

Campus-based substitute teachers, whose roles would have been centralized after this year as part of the proposed budget cuts, will also remain at their assigned school sites under the new $2.5 million deal with the Oakland Unified School District.

“This outcome reflects the power of educators standing together against cuts harmful to our goal of retaining experienced teachers in Oakland’s hardest-to-staff classrooms,” OEA President Kampala Taiz-Rancifer said.

The district said Wednesday that it reached an agreement with the union after extensive negotiations throughout the beginning of the week.

“It was a process that ended with both sides putting students first, and keeping all of our young people in school through the end of the academic year, which is now less than a month away,” a spokesperson said in a midday email to families.

More than 2,500 educators were poised to walk off the job for a single day on Thursday in protest of unfair labor practices, the union informed OUSD on Tuesday, after the district failed to deliver transparent financial information, according to Taiz-Rancifer.

The union had previously accused the district of manufacturing its budget shortfall, which was estimated as high as $95 million in December, to justify cutting teachers while inflating the district’s administrative overhead.

In February, the district proposed reducing more than 100 teacher positions from 11-month to 10-month roles, which would have cut hours they worked over the summer with students on college readiness and curriculum development, according to the union. It said the cuts would have resulted in lower pay for employees and harmed students.

The district also proposed centralizing substitute teaching positions that had been allocated to individual school sites during the COVID-19 pandemic, to give students more continuity in who their substitutes are when their teachers miss school or have to attend meetings.

OUSD’s school board also gave staff permission to incorporate a laundry list of other cuts in next year’s budget, including centralizing contracts and reducing campus discretionary spending.

Projections of the district’s deficit for the 2025–26 academic year have swung wildly in recent months, shrinking from the December high to $12 million after factoring in some of those cuts. This year, the district is operating at a deficit of $70 million, it said.

Now, where the deficit stands is unclear. Board director Mike Hutchinson said the deal, which is subject to county approval, doesn’t specify where the funding will come from.

“Either we’re going to have to find someplace else to cut — and at this point, it’s going to really impact a lot of things to cut this way — or there’s also a really good chance that either the trustee will stay this decision because we have not identified how to pay for it,” he said. … “The contracts still have to be approved by the county as well, and I will expect the county not to approve this either.”

The deal did not make mention of the financial transparency requests that the union said spurred the strike. On Friday, spokesperson John Sasaki said the district had been committed to delivering those documents.

“[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.

Hutchinson believes that the union’s claim that the district hasn’t been financially transparent was not the reason it proposed the strike.

“It was very clear that this was all just an effort and a threat to our whole community just to leverage a payout from their friendly school board directors.”

Just last week, he said, the same school board members voted to push out the district’s longtime superintendent two years before the end of her term. Kyla Johnson-Trammell, who has been credited for the district’s impending exit from state receivership, often butted heads with the union as the district has navigated layoffs and possible school closures in recent years.

The district said in a statement Tuesday that the planned strike, which would have been the fourth by OUSD teachers in recent years, would have worsened mistrust and instability at a tenuous time for the city’s public schools.

“This ongoing turmoil puts the entire district at risk — including the very real threat of returning to state receivership,” OUSD wrote in a statement urging families to oppose the strike at a special Tuesday night school board meeting discussing the potential action. “Every strike weakens our ability to deliver stable services and sustain improvements families and students deserve.”