COVID: Oakland student organizers say they’ll stay home from school starting Tuesday

Hundreds of Oakland students are set to boycott classes Tuesday over demands to improve COVID safety and testing availability, an action organized by three sophomores.

Oakland student organizers Ayleen Serrano, Ximena Santana and Benjamin Rendon, who attend MetWest High School, are part of a local and national movement of students demanding better safety conditions in their classrooms and accountability from school leadership.

They started a petition, signed by more than 1,200 students as of Monday, after seeing a surge of COVID cases when school resumed after the winter break. They are demanding the district move in-person learning to online instruction and provide PCR and rapid testing twice a week, KN95 and N95 masks for every student in all schools, and more outdoor spaces where students can eat. Starting Tuesday, they plan to stay out of school to press for their demands.

The students will be joining other districts in New York City and Southern California who have staged walkouts last week to protest what they say are unsafe conditions at their schools.

District officials are scrambling to avoid more empty classrooms. Last week, they tried to assure students they would meet some of their demands ahead of the planned “sickout” that involved teachers and students at half a dozen schools. The latest action is part of a larger movement at Oakland schools after staff members called out sick in protest earlier this month, prompting at least 12 schools to shutter instruction for the day.

“Public health and education leaders at the county, state, and federal level all say that keeping students in school is the best way to work through this stage of the pandemic, and that is what we intend to do,” said district spokesman John Sasaki about last week’s sickout.

Serrano said after the winter break she walked into a 9th grade class and only two other students were there.

“That’s when I was like, ‘We really need to get things done since the district isn’t doing anything,” Serrano said in an interview.

Serrano said students want to hold the district accountable for what it has promised, including masks for all students and teachers.

“It’s just us telling the district to give us what they are saying they have been giving us because we haven’t received it,” she said.

District officials said they received 10,000 masks as a donation last week and said they started distributing the masks to students last Thursday.

Sasaki also said that the district ordered 200,000 KN95 masks for students and that every employee received at least three N95 masks and two KN95 masks, according to a news release. Another 50,000 KN95 masks were scheduled to be delivered to sites this week, officials said.

Santana said MetWest teachers — some of whom helped administer COVID-19 tests to students during the first week of school — have tried to help. They tried to distribute KN-95 masks and at-home COVID-19 tests they received from district officials to students until they were told not to by administrators, she said.

School staff aren’t allowed to administer COVID tests without training, said Sasaki, who cited California Department of Public Health protocol. Santana said some of the teachers who tried to help also administered COVID tests to students at the school last week, but were later told by administrators that they weren’t authorized to do so.

Rendon added that students are asking district for more outdoor eating spaces for safety. He said many kids go to a nearby Whole Foods to eat lunch on benches there because the benches at their school aren’t reliable.

“The benches outside, they’re broken and are really little so they can fit probably six people and we just want more space to eat,” he said.

Sasaki said the district is working on it, but previously pointed to “supply line issues” as the reason for the delayed delivery of supplies, including tables and shade structures, for covered eating spaces at the schools. He said student testing is available at 10 locations across the district, and the district has bi-weekly testing for secondary schools like MetWest, weekly pooled testing at elementary schools. (The district is also offering vaccine pop-ups this month at multiple locations.)

The student organizers are also concerned that they didn’t receive an at-home rapid test from their school administrators.

District officials said they distributed 41,000 at-home rapid tests to local schools to distribute to students before winter break, but the student organizers said none of them received one. Rendon, whose brother attends Skyline, said neither he or his brother received tests.

“Over the winter break, we were supposed to get some and we kept getting messages saying, ‘Hey, check your at-home tests,’” Santana said. “And I messaged all my friends like, ‘Hey did you guys get COVID tests?’ And no one got them.”

Sasaki said on Friday he hadn’t heard about students not receiving tests. He said if students still need a test, they should contact a principal or him directly for one.

The student organizers said they prefer distanced learning but the district doesn’t want to move instruction to online because they would lose out on funding from California.

“If they’re not going to send us to online school, then we’re asking them to make it as safe as possible to keep us in-person school,” Serrano said. “I love something my teacher said. He was like, ‘A lot of the kids who are missing are the ones who are already behind.’ That’s one of our biggest concerns too. The longer the district keeps up with this, the more we’re going to fall behind.”