EMPOWER EDUCATORS

Supporting Schools, Teachers, and Our Community

Schools are anchors within communities: centralized hubs where entire families access vital resources, resources that improve the quality of life for families, and make neighborhoods safer to live in. In fact, data shows that strong schools and teachers are more effective at reducing crime than police. To build healthy communities in Oakland, we need thriving public schools staffed by energetic and well-compensated teachers.

By increasing the amount of support staff present at schools, especially behavioral specialists and social workers, schools can become sites of care for residents both in and out of the classroom. The presence of fully staffed support teams, coupled with increased teacher pay, will attract and retain dedicated teachers. We can further retain teachers by offering them explicit housing support as a corollary to our Black New Deal provisions. 

Supporting all these measures necessitates a moratorium on charter schools. While charter schools can and do achieve positive outcomes, Oakland has one of the highest concentrations of charter schools in the country. Charters were meant to serve as temporary stopgaps, but we’ve made them an integral part of our educational ecosystem. Let’s focus on making our own public schools institutions we can be proud of, that produce educated and engaged young people while remaining accountable to our entire community. 

Achieving these goals requires building and maintaining relationships with the school board as well as with our state representatives.

I pledge to build a reputation of consistency and communicativeness, making it easy to collaborate with other actors both within and beyond Oakland in support of our schools.