Oakland teachers strike Day 7: Union calls district’s $1 billion common good price tag ‘ridiculous’

Teachers, parents, students and school staff headed to the picket lines Friday for the seventh day of the Oakland Education Association’s strike against the Oakland Unified School District as both sides remained far apart on key issues, such as their wildly different price tags for the union’s “common good” proposals.

In a firm and aggressive statement against the intricacies of the union’s common good measures on Wednesday evening, the district said the measures would cost more than $1 billion to fully implement.

“The remaining issue is how best to work on the common good proposal, which seeks to assign the school district with addressing such broad societal issues as housing for homeless and drought-tolerant landscaping,” Superintendent Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell said in a video posted Wednesday night. “While the district agrees that these issues should be addressed, and we are already working on many of them, the issues cannot be tackled by school district budgets alone.”

The union issued a statement Friday morning rebutting the district’s comments and calling the $1 billion estimate “ridiculous” and not based on fact.

“Our Common Good goals are largely about ensuring educators, parents, students and other stakeholders have a voice in the decision-making process,” said union Vice President Kampala Taiz-Rancifer. “We also have proposed the addition of a small number of additional staff to support our most impacted community schools. We have no idea how OUSD came up with that ridiculous number.”