Crying Wolf: Another Unnecessary Lockdown In Oakland

Oakland Unified School District has now locked down three schools within the first two days of the school year. In at least one of the cases, officials admitted that the children’s safety was never in jeopardy, which begs the question: Why were children’s personal freedom, comfort and learning undermined by being confined to their classroom for hours?

In the latest incident, children at Oakland's Horace Mann Elementary School were locked in their classrooms for most of Tuesday, while police searched for suspects in a string of early-morning home-invasion robberies, the Bay Citizen reported today. OUSD spokesman Troy Flint said that Oakland schools experience lockdowns two to four times per week on average and largely as a precaution. “That figure doesn’t really represent an imminent threat to the school.”

Flint specifically stated that the 350 children at Horace Mann were not in danger. The men surrendered voluntarily to the police, except for one suspect who was obese and got stuck in his hiding place and had to be rescued by the fire department.

Despite the lack of danger, parents were forced to wait over an hour to pick up their children in the afternoon. Many complained that the school did not explain the process sufficiently to them.

Regardless, one has to wonder if there is a better alternative to locking kids in their classrooms for hours at a time on such a regular basis. The two to four times per week figure quoted by Mr. Flint likely means that some schools are being locked down on a regular basis as a result of being located in high crime neighborhoods. During these lockdowns, learning is disrupted, activities are canceled and freedom placed on hold. Secondary students cannot switch classes, causing them to lose valuable instructional time in those classes. K-5 students are disrupted from their usual routines which no doubt creates anxiety and discipline problems for some.

During lockdowns, students cannot use the restroom or the drinking fountain or get food from their lockers or the cafeteria. Lockdowns have become so commonplace that LAUSD has equipped classroom with buckets so students can relieve themselves.

Yet when officials publicly declare that the lockdowns are just a precaution and do not represent an imminent threat, the message to parents and students is that they do not have to take them seriously. Districts like OUSD and LAUSD that lockdown their schools on a weekly “precautionary” basis run the risk of being ignored, like the little boy who cried wolf.

I am not suggesting that children’s safety be ignored. When OUSD locked down two schools Monday, police and suspects were exchanging gunfire. Under such circumstances it is prudent to secure school buildings. However, there was no reason to keep children locked down for as long as they did. And apparently the school district did not find Tuesday’s lockdown to be necessary at all.

It’s The Class

Of course there is also a large gorilla in the room that everyone is ignoring: the violence that has become so common in some communities. This is not a side issue that is only indirectly related to children’s academic success. Rather, much of the violence is directly related to or caused by poverty, which tends to be concentrated in certain communities, and which undermines students’ academic success, even when there is no violence involved. In other words, children who attend low income schools in neighborhoods with high rates of violence tend to be poor themselves, just like those who are committing the acts of violence. In some cases, they are the victims of violence outside of school, violence that does physical and/or emotional harm to them.

Having spent most of my career in low income schools, I have seen plenty of this, including one boy whose father murdered his mother in front of him, and another, whose father was gunned down on his doorstep. I’ve had dozens of students who came to class only because it was a parole requirement for violent crimes committed by the student. I’ve had several students who stopped coming to class because they were either tired of getting beaten up on the way to school or could not get to school without crossing through dangerous or rival gang territory.

Of course I could go on and on, as could many of you other teachers out there. But rather than ignoring this gorilla, because we think there is nothing we can do about it as teachers, we should be confronting it directly, as teachers, union members, and community members, and not only for our students’ safety, but because it is a necessary prerequisite for seeing any large scale improvement in the academic success of low income populations.

Ending poverty, closing the wealth gap, ensuring that all members of society have adequate housing, nutrition, health care, and the other necessities of life, not only will help reduce the violence that results in school lockdowns, it will improve the school readiness and success of our students.

What A Way to Start the School Year--2 Oakland Schools Locked Down

Welcome to Class Students and Here is Your Bathroom (image by Editor B)

I’ve written about numerous school lockdowns in LAUSD (see here, here and here), many of which were gratuitous overkill. This week, Oakland unified began their school year with lockdowns at Castlemont High and East Oakland Pride Elementary, in response to a carjacking in West Oakland. According to a report by the Bay Citizen, it seems the response by school officials may have been warranted, at least initially.

The police chased the stolen car into East Oakland and then chased the suspect by foot, ending with an exchange of gun fire. Under these circumstances it certain makes sense to keep children secure in their classrooms. However, children at the elementary school were locked down in their classrooms from noon until 2:30 pm, while the high schoolers were still locked down as of 3:15 pm.

It is highly improbable that the risk to students lasted a full two and half hours. But even if it did, how could they justify letting the K-5 kids go home, while the teenagers were still under lockdown? If it was safe enough for the younger children to go home, then it was most likely safe enough for the teenagers to leave their classrooms and use the restrooms, get drinks of water and attend their final classes of the day.

Lowered Expectations: Oakland Unified Hires Drunk Racist Cop, Then Places Him on Leave

Oakland Unified School District hired Peter Sarna as their district’s police chief in 2009, despite the fact that he had been cited in a drunken driving crash which led to his resignation as deputy director of the Division of Law Enforcement for the California Department of Justice in 2007.

What they didn’t know at the time was that he was also a raving homicidal racist, too.

According to the Bay Citizen, Sarna told a black colleague, another school cop, that he had no right to live in upscale Orinda because he was a “n-----r and should be hung in the town square.” He apparently then threatened the black officer and an Asian officer who was in the car with them with death.

Sarna was placed on leave by OUSD after the black officer filed a complaint against Sarna.

Broad’s Oakland Financial Martial Law Massacre

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

In 2003, Oakland Unified School District was placed into receivership and bailed out by the state of California to the tune of $100 million. Accused of incompetence and financial mismanagement, a financial manager, Randy Ward, was given control over the district. From 2003 to 2006, Ward ran the district with an iron fist, and amassed over $25 million in fines and other charges from the state Controller’s Office according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Unlike Michigan, California’s emergency financial managers are not given the authority to fire elected officials or nullify union contracts. However, their broad authority does allow them to privatize their districts, as Ward did, bringing in dozens of private charter schools. And it seems they are also allowed to run their bankrupt districts further into the ground without any oversight and then ask the district to pay for their blunders. (Ward quickly doubled OUSD’s debt).

During his tenure, no annual audits were conducted. As a result, no one knew until years later that Ward had mismanaged the district as badly as his predecessors, when he was supposed to be fixing their mistakes. Rather than addressing OUSD’s fiscal problems, Ward, went on an orgy of restructuring and reform, firing librarians and counselors, shutting down student newspapers, while further bungling district finances. He underestimated payroll liabilities and failed to reconcile cash accounts. Two years ago, when outside auditors were brought in, they discovered that records were missing or inconsistent, the Oakland Tribune reported.

Local officials, who regained control over their district in 2009, are now fighting the penalties, arguing they shouldn't have to pay for Ward's fiscal mistakes. Considering that Oakland cut $122 million from their budget last year and faces another $30 million deficit for the coming school year, it seems unlikely they would even be able to come up with an additional $25 million for the fines. East Bay Assemblyman Sandré Swanson is trying to get the district off the hook. He says he has gotten the total reduced down to about $2 million.

Broadie Toady Randy Wardy

Ward was an early graduate of the Broad Superintendent’s Academy, which trains business leaders how to manage school districts for the benefit of private companies, with heavy emphasis on the creation of private charter schools and union busting. Broad even subsidizes a portion of their salaries, making Broadies irresistible to struggling school districts, virtually guaranteeing their hiring over non-Broadie competitors. According to the Broad Report, the Broad Center was specifically called in by then Mayor Jerry Brown and then Superintendent Jack O’Connell to provide a manager to run OUSD after the state take over. Additionally, the Broad Foundation provided Ward with several Broad residents to help him run OUSD and gave him a powerful collaborator, Kevin Hall, Chief Operating Officer of the Broad Foundation. Even after Ward snuck away from the devastation he wreaked on Oakland for a better job in San Diego, he was succeeded by two more Broadies.

An Alameda County Grand Jury found that under the Broadies’ control, the district “was hampered by continuous staff turnover, particularly in the area of finance, numerous reorganizations and a succession of state administrators,” according to the Oakland Tribune. “After nearly five years of state management, OUSD's budget remains unbalanced and the district's future is unclear.”

As boss of OUSD, Ward led a restructuring of the district that fast-tracked new charter schools and shut down many neighborhood schools, leading to overcrowding and parental and community opposition. Nearly half of Oakland’s schools were privatized, shut down or converted into “small” schools. The Indy Bay wrote that Ward stonewalled negotiations with the teachers union, while giving raises to all upper level administrators. He also threatened to replace teachers with uncredentialed scabs, and used the threat of charters to help him gain “the upper hand in negotiations with teachers” (See National Model or Temporary Opportunity?).

Ward led an effort that became known as Effect Success! that attracted funding from numerous philanthropies, including Broad, Gates, Walton, Kaiser and Chlorox. Ultimately, they would raise over $25 million, in addition to the $100 million coughed up by the state to bail out the district and the discounted superintendent’s salary paid for by Broad. With all that cash and all those big guns on his side, it is remarkable that Ward could have doubled OUSD’s debt and bungled their finances so horribly that he saddled the district with $25 million in fines.