OAKLAND — An election to fill a vacant seat on the politically divided Oakland school board this November could establish a crucial swing vote on intensely fought-over issues such as school closures and labor contracts.
Whoever fills the seat may either cement or erode the growing political power of the Oakland Unified School District teachers union. They’ll also have a significant influence on how the district deals with its embattled finances.
The election, ordered this week by Alameda County education officials, will fill the school board’s seat in District 5, an area south of I-580 that spans parts of East Oakland, including Fremont High School and the Fruitvale neighborhood.
The new member will help govern a district that saw a tumultuous fight last year to end school closures, a botched November election that took months to resolve, and, in the past few weeks, an extended faculty strike.
But the election may not do much to stabilize a school board experiencing unprecedented turnover — no current members served before 2021 — because the winning candidate, set to take office immediately after the election, would end their term just one year later.
That’s because the seat in question was filled until recently by Director Mike Hutchinson, who last November won election for a seat in District 4, where his home address was shifted during a redistricting process.
“We’re looking for a candidate who has longstanding and deep connections with the community,” Hutchinson, who is also the board’s current president, said in an interview.
One candidate has already stepped forward: Sasha Ritzie-Hernandez, a graduate of Oakland High and Holy Names University, has set up a campaign website and plans to submit papers as soon as the filing period opens.
An immigrant from Mexico who recently became a U.S. citizen, Ritzie-Hernandez works for the advocacy group Bay Area Coalition for Education Justice and volunteered last year for her colleague Pecolia Manigo’s District 4 school board campaign.
Ritzie-Hernandez’s wife also did communications work for the campaigns of board directors Jennifer Brouhard and Valarie Bachelor — two school board members who were heavily allied with the teachers union during this past month’s faculty strike.
“I supported the strike through and through,” Ritzie-Hernandez said in an interview, “and I spent a lot of time mobilizing parents to support the strike as well.”
Brouhard, Bachelor and Director VanCedric Williams have aligned on a number of board decisions, including one in March where all three pushed for the vacant District 5 seat to be filled by appointment and not an election.
Their argument against leaving the seat unfilled for months didn’t do much to convince Hutchinson or directors Sam Davis and Cliff Thompson. The board reached a deadlock, leading the Alameda County Office of Education to order the November election once a 60-day period expired.
“It was a strange mix of political philosophies,” Hutchinson said of the non-decision. “But it was very clear to me from the get-go that it’d be very hard for four of the six directors to agree on appointing one person.”
That has emerged as a theme on the school board, and the next member could hold an unusual degree of power in influencing the board’s direction.
That could be especially important after the board in March placed controversial school mergers back on the table — a money-saving move for the district, which struggles with enrollment and has relied on yearly state bailouts of $10 million after nearly going bankrupt in 2017.
The election, meanwhile, would be the first since last November’s catastrophic District 4 race, which Hutchinson won in a legal battle after Alameda County officials admitted they had mistakenly declared another candidate as the winner.
Now the school board is again casting scrutiny on county Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis, who still hasn’t yet implemented a 2020 ballot measure allowing residents as young as 16 years to vote in school board elections.
The registrar’s office, which said last summer it couldn’t implement the changes in time for the 2022 election, now is on the clock to figure it out by this November.
“We continue to work with the school district and the vendors to modify systems to support youth voting,” Dupuis said in a text message response to multiple interview requests.
