Oakland boycott: Students hold protest on Zoom, say all their COVID safety demands haven’t been met

Oakland students held a virtual protest over Zoom Friday and are refusing to come back to school until the district meets all of their demands for COVID safety — something the district said it’s already completed or is in the process of completing. But teachers disagree and say they’ve been asking the district for more safety measures for months.

About 300 people logged onto the Zoom protest late Friday morning, where a few dozen students and teachers spoke about the challenges and risks they are still facing as a result of the pandemic and what they hope the schools and the district will do to improve.

Since Tuesday, students across the district have been boycotting classes by refusing to come to school and will continue until the district moves in-person learning to online and provides PCR and rapid testing twice a week, KN95 and N95 masks for every student and more outdoor eating spaces. Teachers at Bridges Academy, United for Success Academy and Acorn Woodland Elementary staged a “sickout” on Tuesday in solidarity with the students, forcing the district to close the schools for instruction, said district spokesperson John Sasaki.

If the masks, outdoor dining and weekly COVID-19 testing, can’t all be achieved, students want to go back to virtual learning for two weeks, said one of the student organizers of the protest, Nuriel Cahigas.

Another of the student organizers, Ayleen Serrano, said two out of the three demands had been met as of this week, but not all the schools have access to weekly PCR or rapid testing.

And, Cahigas added, “Not all of the schools have met all the demands.” Some were still waiting for masks or testing kits, so the demonstration was in solidarity to ensure all schools have access to the same resources.

“It’s also not an impossible ask; other districts already have weekly testing,” Cahigas said. “We can 100% get this testing.”

The students did not specify when the boycott would end, although many tuned into the Zoom from classrooms, indicating they were not participating in the sickout but wanted to support the movement. Some teachers logged onto the Zoom to allow their students to talk and participate in the digital protest.

On Jan. 5, Serrano, along with fellow MetWest sophomores Ximena Santana and Benjamin Rendon created a petition, signed by more than 1,200 students as of Friday, after an uptick in positive cases at their school after coming back from winter break. They previously said they started the petition to hold the district accountable for giving students and teachers what they were promised.

Linh Linh Trinh, a 10th grade science teacher at the MetWest High School Huggins campus who has been working with the student organizers, said the aim of the Zoom protest was to “clear the air,” give an update on the boycott and for students to ask for solidarity from their teachers. Trinh said she held a hybrid class on Tuesday and told students they won’t face penalties for late work, but that isn’t the case for all teachers across the district.

“Teachers are still impacting their grades with work,” she said. “At our school, we’ve sent a message to all of the families that we’re supporting our students and that none of the work is going to be penalized if they’re not in school. We don’t want families to have to decide between their safety and their education.”

The absence rate across all grades and schools was 24.6 percent on Tuesday — up from 20.9 percent the first week of January but down from 28.1 percent the second week, Sasaki said. Around 230 teachers called out sick Tuesday, compared to an average of 250 daily teacher absences on days without a teacher sickout.

A number of students — some of whom were in classrooms or on campus — spoke about the near-empty classrooms they have attended in recent weeks, even well before the sickout.

One high school student said she returned to school from a quarantine period to see only three to five students in class on any given day.

“It’s hard to keep track of where students are and who they’re around,” the student said. “Without testing, we don’t really know who has COVID.”

At least 8,502 students out of around 34,000 across the district were absent Tuesday, resulting in a possible funding loss of $512,466, according to the district’s daily absence dashboard. Teachers and students have previously pointed to the loss of funding from California as a reason for why the district won’t shift to distanced learning. At the MetWest Huggins campus, teachers said ten 9th graders, eight 10th graders and five 11th graders showed up to school Thursday out of a class of around 120.

Malinda Morales, a 7th grade humanities teacher at UFSA who participated in Tuesday’s “sickout,” said teachers had been asking for similar safety measures from the district before students began boycotting classes.

“Seeing their commitment to making sure that their schools are safe really inspired me to keep fighting,” she said. “None of those things were happening in delivery before the students stepped up, even though teachers have been fighting for these things since last school year.”

Sasaki hasn’t specified if students could face repercussions as a result of the boycott but said that Tuesday would count as an “an unexcused absence.”

District officials said earlier this week it’s already meeting student demands by giving out 200,000 KN95 masks to students this week, installing covered outdoor eating spaces and implementing a “robust” COVID-19 testing system, including 10 testing hubs, bi-weekly testing for secondary schools and weekly pooled testing at elementary schools. But teachers say there have been equity issues in how the district distributes tests and PPE. The district previously said 41,000 rapid COVID tests were sent to students before winter break.

Daniel Harbarger, who teaches 10th grade humanities at the MetWest Huggins campus, said rapid tests weren’t distributed before break because the “communication wasn’t clear” from the district and teachers didn’t know they were to hand them out. Teachers gave out masks and rapid tests to students after break, he said, but administrators took away the supplies after they found out.

“We moved ourselves to test our students because we weren’t feeling safe and I had two students test positive in my class,” he said.

School staff aren’t permitted to administer COVID tests without training, said Sasaki, who cited California Department of Public Health protocol.

Montera Middle School math teacher Quinn Ranahan said her school didn’t receive tests until the end of winter break and administrators had to hand them out to students on New Year’s Eve, posing a problem for some kids who usually take the bus to school.

“It was difficult for families to come to the school at the drop of a dime and get tests that should’ve been given to them before break,” she said.

Sasaki previously said: “As far as an equity issue, my understanding is that all of our schools are getting what they need,” adding that any school that hasn’t received supplies should contact him. He also acknowledged that some of the testing kits were distributed during or “shortly after” break.

Sarah Vogelstein, a special education teacher at UFSA said her school received so many tests that they could give kits to all students on the Monday they returned from break. “Our school created a plan where we had every student and staff do a self test and had enough kits to make that happen when other schools didn’t receive any kits,” she said.

Jazmine Lopez, who teaches seventh grade humanities at UFSA and participated in the “sickout” on Tuesday, said she’s also given out COVID tests to students and that as of Tuesday, she received two masks while the district said that all teachers would receive five. The slew of teacher and student absences has impacted student learning and has taken a toll on morale at the school, she said.

“If you have a situation in your family or personal life, you feel very guilty about taking time off because you know it puts the whole school is a situation that is very challenging,” she said. “You see students drop out one by one and you worry about them. It’s really stressful wondering if I’m going to get sick or if I’m going to get somebody else sick or just being constantly exposed. You struggle to live your own life at that point.”