Oakland (Special to OaklandNewsOnline.com) – Dear Oakland Unified School District Community,
At tonight’s regularly scheduled OUSD Board of Education meeting, the Directors are scheduled to discuss staff recommendations on changing the District to make it more efficient and to save money. They’re scheduled to vote on the recommendations at their regular meeting in two weeks.
As part of our annual budget development process and multi-year planning, staff has continued to provide the Board with recommendations to address the OUSD District’s financial realities. Simply put, the Board will need to decide how to “restructure” the District to address its decision to provide staff a significant raise and a one-time off-schedule payment last year, and because of declining enrollment, plus rising costs of transportation, special education, healthcare and pension maintenance for staff, and even everything impacted by inflation.
There could be a restructuring of: Staffing Formula to Schools, the Continuous School Improvement (CSI) Division, Centralized Business and Operations to Services to Schools, School Site Allocations to Centralize Key School Investments, and Schools Aligned to the Assembly Bill (AB) 1912 Process. There could also be a revising of current OUSD Board Policies to move from Results-Based Budgeting to a more centralized approach with clear criteria for earned autonomies. All of this together could save the District tens of millions of dollars.
The OUSD Board has engaged in a series of retreats and study sessions since June 2023 to identify their collective priorities and more deeply understand the District’s ongoing fiscal realities. The community has been invited to each of these five engagements and tonight they will have an opportunity to hear the OUSD Board deliberate before their decision at the meeting on February 28.
As a reminder, both meetings will take place inside the Great Room at La Escuelita at 1050 Second Avenue. Open session begins at 5:30 p.m. For online access, you can find the meeting links on the Legislative Information Center on our website.
In community,
OUSD News