OAKLAND — With less than a week left before the school year begins, Oakland Unified School District and its teachers union are haggling over how many hours of live online instruction teachers must provide each day and the length of their work day.
The district says it cannot release clear detailed plans to reopen schools without reaching an agreement with its labor unions, including the Oakland Education Association, which represents teachers.
The two sides have been negotiating for four straight weeks and continued to do so throughout the weekend, district spokesman John Sasaki said Monday.
He said Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell joined the negotiations Friday. “I am not privy to where they stand now, but we are certainly hopeful we are close to reaching an agreement,” Sasaki added.
The union is pushing for a plan that calls for teachers to spend one hour a day meeting with students in a video conference during the first two weeks of the school year “building strong relationships, and creating strong learning communities.” The union also wants teachers to have four hours of planning time each day “to create lessons and collaborating with grade level and subject matter teams.”
It also states that students should be given access to online learning platforms, and the district should “not only make sure students get the technology they need, but the support they need to use it.”
“We believe that this is the best way to give our students a strong start,” the union said in a statement on Facebook. “We saw what happened in the spring when we didn’t have time to plan. We don’t want a repeat of that for our students.”
The state requires districts to provide 180 days of instruction through distance learning — 230 minutes, or 3.8 hours a day, to students in first through third grade, and 240 minutes, or four hours, to students in fourth to 12th grade, as well as “daily live interaction” between students and teachers.
The teachers union is proposing a five-hour workday that would include 90 minutes of “wellness time” for teachers’ minds as well as to get some physical activity.
The district, on the other hand, wants elementary school teachers to put in 6.25 hours of daily instruction and secondary teachers and other certificated staff to work 6.5 hours.
The district is also proposing 100 additional minutes of live interaction between special education teachers and “students with the highest needs,” including students with disabilities, African-American and Latino students, foster youth, newcomers and students behind grade level.
Oakland Education Association President Keith Brown last week criticized the district in a Facebook Live statement for its “lack of leadership” that he said “is leaving our students, families and all OUSD staff with too many uncertainties.”
The teachers union, in a Saturday press release, said the district’s counterproposal offers “no significant movement on the issues that matter to Oakland educators and families. Once again, their lack of preparation, leadership, and respect for educators was insulting.”
The association said its plan is “our last, best, and final offer” and would proceed with it “unless there is significant movement at the bargaining table.”
According to the teachers union, this “is a collective work action, but it is not a strike.” Oakland teachers went on strike for a week in 2019 in a bitter contract dispute that at times became confrontational before school board meetings.
In April, after schools closed down because of stay-at-home orders to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Oakland teachers struck an agreement with the district to be paid for full-time work even though they were required to work just four hours a day.
Under that arrangement, teachers had to deliver two hours of online instruction and were given two hours of flex time. In addition, teachers couldn’t sit or be on the computer screen for more than 90 minutes at a time for safety reasons.
“The agreement was right for the end of the school year, but it will not work going forward,” Brown said in his Facebook Live statement Thursday. “We must and can improve distance learning to make it meaningful for all of our students.”
