Our Demands

Stop and Repair the Immediate Harm

  • Design a community informed plan for a safe and healthy return to school, prioritizing Black students and their families as the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Create an Emergency Fund to cover back rent and ensure that Black students are not displaced. 
  • Commit to closing the Black digital divide that disproportionately limits access to information and resources to Black families. Prioritize Black students for the distribution of Chromebooks and hotspots as part of the Oakland Undivided campaign, ensuring Black students access to learning resources during and beyond Covid-19.
  • End the Schools to Prison pipeline and continue to implement the Black Organizing Project’s George Floyd Resolution for police-free schools. End discriminatory discipline practices and disproportionate expulsions and suspensions of Black students.
  • Stop school closures and co-locations of charter schools at in-district schools. Exempt non charter schools with 30% or more Aftercan American students from school closures. Designate these Historically Black schools as Community Schools with wrap around services.
  • Stop using the new ‘anti-Black’ equity formula that unfairly cuts from schools with high percentages of Black students. Undo the harm by restoring concentration funds beginning with the 2021-22 school site budget. 

Invest in Reparations for Black Students & Families

We demand a new aspirational vision and a multi-million dollar reparations fund for the remaining 8,314 Black students in OUSD to thrive.

  • Establish a Black Thriving Fund that brings targeted resources and opportunities (at the scale needed to dismantle anti-Black racism) to secure a just and equitable education for Black students. Use existing and new resources including LCFF,  Title I, Title II, Alameda County Office of Education, and other public and private sources to create this fund.
  • Create a real Racial Equity Funding Formula that takes into account all of the historic and current factors impacting Black communities (across designations of Foster Care, Homelessness, Special Education etc..)
  • Adopt a community-defined Black Thriving Indicators to establish the needs of Black students, and set goals, outcomes and indicators for the district and schools to be held accountable to and measure progress towards Black thriving.
  • Establish a Black Students and Families Task Force that represents the voices of Black students, parents, families, communities and has the power to monitor the implementation of targeted plans and resources for Black thriving. 

Transform Community Schools To Center Black Students

During the pandemic, Community Schools have become essential to Black families serving as hubs for much needed resources and support. A new deeper investment in the community schools model must center the needs of Black students and families and provide wrap-around services. To ensure that these schools center the needs of Black students and families we demand that OUSD:

  • Invest in Black Family Engagement by increasing opportunities to participate in decision making at the school and district levels.
  • Ensure that Black Students are ready for College, Career and Civic Leadership by providing students with consistent support in the areas of credit recovery, post-secondary preparation, job training, and social emotional learning. Provide wrap-around services for youth and their families so students are college and career ready. 
  • Dramatically increase the literacy rates of Black students across all grades by creating a city-wide literacy campaign for Black students starting Summer 2020.
  • Prioritize resources to create anti-Black racist cultures of belonging and increase the cultural competence of our educators, staff and their school communities to center Black Thriving. Provide continuing  training on anti-Black racism, Black healing-centered practices and how to embed Black studies in all classrooms.
  • Resource and develop a “Birth to Kinder” plan to ensure that all Black families have access to pre-K early education including resources and services that support early family engagement.
  • Provide professional advocacy services to Black families who have children with IEPs.
  • Recruit and retain Black teachers and Black school leaders by meaningfully supporting and investing in them.
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