I would support reducing outside contracts and consultant spending, starting with contracts that are discretionary, duplicative, or could reasonably be handled by existing staff. OUSD is already looking at reduced outside contracts as part of its fiscal stabilization work, and its year-end financial report calls for continued contract review.

I would oppose additional cuts to classroom-facing staff and essential school-site supports if there are still reasonable savings to be found further away from students. Teachers, paraeducators, counselors, and other school-site staff are the people students rely on every day. We should prioritize protecting classroom-facing positions and reducing contracts, vacancies, and other non-classroom spending first.

That doesn't mean every outside contract should be cut. Some provide specialized or legally required services that the District cannot simply eliminate. District leadership needs to look carefully at what each contract provides, whether it directly supports students, and whether the work can be done more cost-effectively another way.

With additional budget reductions still ahead and balancing measures required for Board action by February 2027, my priority would be to exhaust discretionary and duplicative spending reductions before making further cuts closest to students.

I have engaged around the OUSD budget for fifteen years. After being elected, I was Board President and then Vice President and Chaired the Budget and Finance Committee in 2023 and 2024. During those two years, by working closely with Superintendent Johnson-Trammell and Chief Business Officer Lisa Grant-Dawson, I helped lead OUSD to negotiate at least a 15% raise with every union, pass balanced budgets, pay off the state loan early, and pass a fiscal systems audit which enabled OUSD to finally leave (state/county) receivership and regain full local control after 22 years. OUSD was no longer in crisis.

Under the current leadership, the Chief Business Officer was forced out and replaced with $400/hr consultants, the Superintendent and Board Leadership have failed to make the necessary spending cuts and instead continue to overspend, and a year after leaving receivership OUSD is again back in crisis and on the brink of insolvency. This year the School Board passed a broken budget that will require $30M in immediate mid-year spending cuts, February is too late. There is no plan and no clear path to long-term sustainability from the current leaders. I have consistently worked to move the Board to follow through with commitments and adopt a real fiscal solvency plan, while also sharing information to keep the community informed. We must look at every option available and then collectively choose the best solutions to implement to ensure financial sustainability.

The role of the Board is to set priorities and give guidance to District personnel, including the Superintendent. The current Board has signaled that any cuts made need to protect teacher salaries, avoid cutting services that directly serve students, and avoid school closures. Before I see the cuts suggested by the Superintendent and the current fiscal team, I hesitate to put any particular cuts on the table or take them off. That said, I'm in alignment with the direction of the current Board, in that I want cuts to fall as far from the classroom as possible. Research suggests that having qualified and experienced teachers working directly with students makes the biggest difference in student outcomes, and the wellbeing of our students needs to be our North Star. School closures does not save money, so should not be suggested as a fiscal stabilization measure. I would support cutting back on costs in the area of curriculum, and placing spending controls on outside contracts… I would not support consolidating schools or classrooms midyear to fill the budget gap.

I would hold the Board and Superintendent accountable by setting clear, measurable goals for the schools and student groups most at-risk, and then monitoring those goals consistently throughout the year.

That starts with better public reporting that's easy to understand and regularly addressed at Board meetings. OUSD already has systems intended to track student performance, but those tools need to be current and regularly reported to the Board and public. Families should be able to see progress in reading, math, graduation, A-G completion, chronic absenteeism, and suspensions by school and student group.

I would also incorporate those key performance indicators into the Superintendent's evaluation. If improving student outcomes is our top priority, progress toward those goals should be a meaningful part of how the Board evaluates its chief executive.

But we also need to understand what is producing the results. OUSD invests significantly in curriculum, coaching and professional development. For example, the District provides curriculum-specific training and coaching in literacy and math and uses benchmark assessments to monitor student progress. The Board should regularly evaluate whether those investments are actually improving instruction and student outcomes, and adjust when they are not.

The trade-off is that meaningful improvement takes time, and schools should not be judged on one test score. We should look at growth, proficiency and trends over time.

The Board's job is to set expectations, ensure effective strategies and resources are in place, monitor results publicly, and hold the Superintendent accountable for meaningful student progress.

Unfortunately there is no magic bullet and the financial crisis only makes this work that much more difficult. District 4 does not have a high school and I am very cautious about using standardized test scores as the driving indicator of performance and proficiency. Overall D4 has the highest performing schools in OUSD. That being said, we must raise the bar across all schools, but there is one elementary school and one middle school in D4 that need increased support. Again, the 3R's was passed to address this through transformational school redesign using the sustainable community schools model that is the only model proven to reduce the "achievement gap" in districts across the country. We must be able to have a process to help struggling schools improve and I believe that transformational school redesign is the answer. I look forward to having deeper discussions about all of these questions which are hard to fully answer in detail in this limited format.

In school districts that are beating state averages, especially for Black and Brown students, one pattern is clear: having fully-prepared and experienced teachers is associated with higher scores on standardized tests. The current Superintendent, Dr. Saddler, settled a contract with teachers which included a raise. This is a step in the right direction towards offering wages and working conditions which can help attract and retain fully-credentialed and experienced teachers to teach in OUSD. The school-year started with 96+% of teaching positions filled. This represents progress. I would like to come alongside the Superintendent and the Board to continue to direct more money towards the classroom, particularly in the area of teacher pay and working conditions, in order to make OUSD a district which attracts highly-qualified and experienced teachers. While we cannot change the socio-economic status of our students or test-score gaps which are based on implicit racial bias in the tests, we can restructure the district to make teacher retention a priority.

I would like to use a more holistic range of indicators to establish whether students are learning and thriving. Standardized tests are important, but so are other ways of measuring learning, including performance-based assessments. Some of the indicators mentioned in the George Floyd Initiative are more holistic.

I would use a multi-factor framework that weighs:

• Enrollment and utilization: persistent under-enrollment and excess capacity matter because OUSD is carrying more space than current enrollment requires. The 2026 Facilities Master Plan explicitly analyzes enrollment/capacity, facility condition and campus needs.

• Student outcomes and program quality: whether a school is improving academically and whether it offers programs families value.

• Equity and student impact: demographics, special education, transportation, safety, geography, and whether a closure would disproportionately burden historically underserved students.

• Facilities condition and cost: whether a building requires major investment relative to its long-term use.

• Enrollment demand and neighborhood access: whether families are choosing the school and whether nearby schools can absorb students without overcrowding or degrading quality.

The trade-off is real. Consolidation can help OUSD focus resources on fewer, stronger schools and reduce ongoing costs, but savings will take time. Receiving schools may need upgrades, staffing, and vacated properties can still cost money to secure, maintain, insure, or repurpose. OUSD acknowledges that closing a school does not eliminate those expenses.

Any proposal should include a multi-year financial analysis showing transition costs and long-term savings. A closure does not immediately fix the structural deficit.

OUSD would also need meaningful community engagement before making recommendations. Previous closures caused real harm and left many families distrustful. The AB 1912 process was designed to bring community-developed equity considerations into future decisions.

Families, educators, students, and neighborhoods should help shape the criteria, understand the options, and identify what students need for any transition to succeed.

We don't have a good common vocabulary when speaking about this issue. "School Closures" is not a budgetary issue and there has not been a plan to close schools since the last controversial plan was rescinded in 2023. What we do need to do is immediately restart the 3R's process, where one of the R's called for a yearlong community process to inform how OUSD re-envisions the footprint to determine how we want to equitably use our limited resources citywide. The way OUSD currently uses our facilities across Oakland is the result of 22 years in receivership with no local control. We have a need for more early education and adult education spaces, we need to decide if we can better resource schools if we had fewer in number while ensuring that every neighbor has a quality public school. The goal of re-envisioning OUSD's footprint is to involve the community in conversation around how we want the District to look going forward and if the determination is to make changes, do it through consensus and community by in. It is no longer enough to say whether one is for or against school closures but rather the question is how can we best maximize our scarce resources, with an equity lens, to best serve Oakland's public education needs. Lastly, my school was closed in 2012 and I have spent the years since working to prevent others from having to experience the trauma of those failed policies.

82% of OUSD students are low-ses. The school district belongs to all of us, and it especially belongs to these students. All of OUSD's resources need to be brought to bear to help these students be able to leave poverty and live meaningful lives as adults. Whatever is done with the extra capacity in our schools should directly benefit these students and their families and communities. Bringing in adult education services to extra capacity at PK-12 sites would be one way to benefit the community which comes with separate funding. Another possibility is using AA, Oakland Children's Initiative, funding to put free childcare and early learning at elementary schools with extra capacity. Another possible use of this space would be for infant care for teachers and adult education students, which could be done on a fee basis.

To close the structural deficit, I would look at where the school district is spending money and compare this to other school districts. Are there parts of the budget that seem misaligned? These are the areas we should look to close the deficit. The school district has employed many more adults than similarly-sized school districts. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but we should make sure that the adults who work most directly with children are prioritized in the budget, and any cuts in personnel happen outside of the classroom.

I would treat this as a basic accountability issue. The Board has already adopted the policy. The next step is to turn it into a real implementation plan with deadlines, costs, clear responsibility, and measurable milestones. OUSD's own sustainability materials say that is what the implementation plan is supposed to do.

I would push for a firm deadline to adopt that plan and require regular public updates so families and the community can see whether OUSD is actually on track for the 2030 and 2040 goals. Those updates should show what projects have been completed, how much they cost, what has been saved, and where the District is falling behind. OUSD already has utility data that could help support that reporting.

There is a real trade-off. Electrification and facility upgrades cost money, and OUSD has many other urgent capital needs. The District itself recognizes that full electrification will require a multi-year, multi-bond effort.

That is why I would prioritize projects that do more than one thing at once, reducing emissions while also lowering operating costs, improving reliability, or creating healthier learning environments.

Most importantly, the Board should not keep adopting new resolutions without following through on the ones already on the books. Once a policy is adopted, progress should be tracked publicly and the Superintendent should be held accountable for delivering it.

First the conditions that the CEAR resolution was passed under were very difficult, during the pandemic by a lame duck board in their final months in office. Now the current Board and administration have not honored any of the resolutions and commitments made in the past, from CEAR to the fiscal sustainability plan to the 3R's Resolution. On top of that there is currently no strategic plan, no board nor superintendent work plan, and no fiscal solvency plan. It is essential that the Board pass policy and legislation, that the General Counsel enforces it, and the Superintendent implement it. In terms of a policy and plan to address the climate crisis within OUSD, that work must be embedded in the next strategic plan, addressed through the 3R's process, and specifically cited in the next facilities bond to provide the needed funding. I have been very critical of the Superintendent's and General Counsel's lack of accountability and the Board's unwillingness to ensure implementation of previously passed legislation.

The best way for the district to convert to 100% clean electricity would be to upgrade all of its electricity accounts to the Ava Community Energy Renewable 100 service plan for commercial/municipal customers. There is a lower rate for organizations which have solar panels, which the district has. An implementation plan for adopted climate policy should be made with Buildings and Grounds leadership so that realistic goals and timelines can be made.

Regarding carrying out policies that it has already adopted: I spoke with the Superintendent of Alameda County Office of Ed. She said that OUSD tends to have too many initiatives, which makes it difficult to follow through on all of them. Focusing the Board's attention on fewer initiatives and setting timelines to follow through would be a good idea.