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(Left to right: OUSD Paul Robeson Administration Building, Lake Merritt Channel, TerraMark's proposal for high-rise development on the OUSD administration building property, State Senator Don Perata)

"Leadership in action": Don Perata and the state takeover of the Oakland Unified School District

What was Don Perata's record in the California state takeover of the Oakland Unified School District?

It's an important issue for Oakland voters making up their minds on who they want for the next mayor of the City of Oakland. The Oakland school takeover was the greatest crisis in Oakland government in more than a generation. Understanding what Don Perata did—or did not do—before and during the school takeover would be very helpful in understanding what Don Perata would do—or not do—if he were elected Oakland mayor.

In a section called "Delivering Results—Leadership In Action," Perata's "Believe In Oakland—Perata For Mayor" campaign website describes Perata as the savior of the Oakland schools, stating simply that Perata "rescued Oakland Unified School District from bankruptcy and further financial mismanagement in 2003."

But newspaper articles and columns written during the time of the state school takeover—most by journalist/columnist J. Douglas Allen-Taylor for the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper and one by East Bay Express investigative reporter Robert Gammon when he was writing for the Oakland Tribune—show a far different role played by Don Perata.

It is true that Don Perata was the driving force behind the 2003 state takeover of the schools. Perata authored and sponsored the SB39 state legislation that authorized the takeover.

But the column "Suspicious Minds" below shows that the 2003 bill was actually the second time Don Perata tried to force a takeover of the Oakland schools. The first was in 1998 and 1999 when Perata introduced SB564, the state legislation that would have authorized then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown to appoint a trustee to run the Oakland schools. But Perata quietly dropped SB564 in 2000 after he got what he and Jerry Brown wanted, the resignation of then-OUSD Superintendent Carol Quan. That resignation eventually led to the hiring of Superintendent Dennis Chaconas, who was then ousted when Perata's 2003 SB39 law went into effect three years later.

Was Perata's motivation in his two Oakland school takeover bills to save the Oakland schools and protect our children's education?

At least two of the articles ("One Of Oakland's Greatest Public Scandals" and "Phone Logs Link 'Politics' To School Takeover") show that Perata and his political allies blocked attempts the Oakland School District to balance its budget in 2003 without the state loan and the state takeover.

And the article "Who Was Looking Out For Oakland's Schools, And Who Was Not?" shows that once the state took over Oakland Unified, Perata seemed to lose all interest in the Oakland schools. Perata failed to use his position as the president of the California State Senate, Oakland's state senator, and the SB 39 takeover legislation author to monitor the situation in the schools and make sure the state was doing its job in educating Oakland's children and properly managing Oakland's school funds. While all evidence showed that education in Oakland was declining and the budget was spinning out of control under state operation, Perata did nothing to help. And the "Looking Out" article shows that it was Assemblymember Sandré Swanson who eventually stepped in after taking office in 2007, forcing the state to do its job, protecting the Oakland schools, and beginning the process to regain local control. Swanson showed leadership in the Oakland school crisis. Don Perata did not.

Rather than saving the Oakland schools from bankruptcy, as his mayoral website claims, the record shows that Don Perata pushed the Oakland schools toward financial ruin, blocking the district's attempts to save itself without state funds. But if that is true, and if Don Perata did not seem interested enough in the Oakland schools to intervene during the crisis years of full state control, why did Perata push so hard for the state takeover in the first place?

The articles and columns below show that Don Perata's interest in the Oakland school takeover may have been more about valuable Oakland school property than about helping the schools or the children. The Oakland school district holds several parcels of property on the Lake Merritt Channel that include the district administrative headquarters and several educational institutions. A provision to allow the property sale kept showing up in Perata's Oakland school takeover bill while it was being debated in the legislature, and made its way into the final law ("The Curious History Of The OUSD Land Sale As Told In The Legislative Record".

In fact, California State Superintendent Jack O'Connell did try to sell the Oakland school property to private developers while the district was under full state control. The State Superintendent was prevented from selling it only through determined action by a coalition of Oakland residents and political leaders.

Did Don Perata "rescue Oakland Unified School District from bankruptcy and further financial mismanagement in 2003," as his mayoral campaign website says?

We don't think so. Instead, we think the articles below show strong evidence that Don Perata caused turmoil in the schools, pushing the district towards bankruptcy by blocking any means for the district to save itself. Why? Although there is no "smoking gun" evidence in the articles that presents absolute proof, the articles lead to the reasonable conclusion that the real purpose of the state takeover was an attempt to push the sale valuable district property to real estate developers. Meanwhile, there is no doubt from the articles that Don Perata bailed out on the school district's problems when his leadership was most needed during the darkest years of the state school takeover, and others like Sandré Swanson had to pick up the tasks that Perata should have done.

Don Perata's role in the Oakland school takeover is a complicated and largely-misunderstood story that unraveled slowly, and even now, all of the facts have yet to come out.

But we invite Oakland residents and voters to read the articles below, and make up your own mind if this is the type of leadership we need in the Oakland mayor's office.

 

Suspicious Minds

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
April 25, 2003

Me, I hate to go cynical, I really do, but it’s hard not to get suspicious when a politician ends up with the same result he originally advocated, but for exactly opposite reasons.

Like when the President proposes a federal tax cut because we have a national budget surplus and then, when the national budget surplus disappears, proposes a tax cut not in spite of the fact that we no longer have a national budget surplus, but because of the fact that we don’t have the surplus. That one, of course, was easy for everyone (except my good Republican friends) to see.

Less easy to follow is the thread of state Sen. Don Perata’s advocacy of a state takeover of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). That takeover is pretty certain after the Senate Education Committee voted this month to loan OUSD $100 million, with the schools being run by a state-appointed administrator until the money is paid back.

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Phone Logs Link "Politics" To School Takeover

By Robert Gammon
Oakland Tribune
August 18, 2003

Before the state takeover of Oakland schools, top officials from a Bakersfield agency with power over the district kept in close contact with two high-profile East Bay politicians and the future boss of the city's schools, public records show.

Critics say office and cell phone records obtained by the Oakland Tribune provide evidence the takeover, and the resulting loss of local control of Oakland's schools, was politically orchestrated.

The records show top officials from the Bakersfield-based County Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) called Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, the office of state Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, and then-Compton schools chief Randy Ward at least 40 times each in the months before the takeover.

Brown and Perata at differing times in the past year voiced support for the takeover, which took effect in June and placed Ward and FCMAT in charge of the school district.

By contrast, FCMAT officials made no calls to the Oakland school leaders they were appointed to advise on how to solve the district's financial problems.

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Accidents

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
January 30, 2004

My Mexican friends tell the story of two brothers who lived in a fishing village on the Monterey coast in the days when Alta California was still part of Mexico. From the time they were babies, the two brothers were all but inseparable; where one would be, so would be the other. One summer morning when they were in their late teens, however, they came into dispute. One of them wanted to go to the market at San Miguel, while the other wished to travel to the town of Gregorio, where a young woman lived. For the first time, neither would give way to the will of the other, so finally, one of the brothers hit upon the plan. "Let us put on blindfolds and set out from home together," he said. "We shall let Fate decide where we go." And so they did. Blinded, arm in arm, they walked along the road, and after many turns and bumps and bruises and stumblings into the brush, they heard the sounds of a town in front of them. Pulling off their blindfolds, they found themselves on the outskirts of San Miguel. When one of the brothers showed his disappointment, the other brother insisted he should not. "After all," he said, "it was only Fate that brought us to the town where I wanted to go." "Either that," replied the other, "or one of us peeked along the way."

The moral of this story, my Mexican friends explain, is that when a group reaches a destination to which one member of the group always wanted to go, luck or divine intervention can generally be ruled out as the cause.

Many months ago, when the Oakland schools were still in the hands of Oakland citizens, and long before the present fiscal crisis, we began hearing suggestions about selling the Paul Robeson Administration Building on 2nd Avenue. These suggestions were not coming from the Superintendent's office, you understand, nor, if I remember, from members of the School Board. Instead it was friendly observers who were saying that the administration was too big and too inefficient for the needs of the district, and should be done away with. The suggestions of selling the School Administration Building never seemed to make much sense to me, from the point of saving money for the district, any more than it makes much sense for somebody selling their mortgage-free house and then paying rent somewhere for the rest of their lives. Still, we kept hearing that this is what we ought to do.

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Looking Down The Channel

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
March 11, 2005

It seems almost fantastic, doesn't it, looking at it from the perspective of today's situation, but five years ago the Oakland public schools were in the middle of a renaissance, a golden period in which confidence in our schools was growing, and hope was high. After years of patient work by many people, Oakland had finally pulled itself out of the doldrums and public school scandals of the '80s.

A popular new mayor was in place who promised to put Oakland on the map. A popular new school superintendent had been hired–a prodigal son returned–with an involved and activist school board willing to carry out ambitious plans for accountability and reform. Almost 85 percent of Oakland voters passed Measure A in 2000, the $300 million school bond ballot measure that approved the city's first real school expansion since the building of Skyline High School in the '60s. Later that year, when the district granted teachers nearly a 25 percent pay raise, bringing them up-at long last-to the Bay Area average, Oakland had reached a high water mark, and had every reason to look forward to a promising future.

Today the Oakland school district is in tatters, controlled by the State of California, disdainful of Oakland citizens, schools being sold off to the first bidders, rapidly being dismantled before our very eyes. No one can remember a lower point in the city's school history, even following the 1973 assassination of School Superintendent Marcus Foster. How could that have come to be? What is it Oaklanders did so wrong, to be so cruelly struck by such a fate?

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Mr. O'Connell Comes To Oakland, Part One

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
April 29 , 2005

Poor, bleeding Oakland. In addition to losing its rights to run its own schools-two years and counting, now-it is now being blamed in the media for school district actions over which it has absolutely no control.

In an otherwise excellent piece this week, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll accuses the Oakland Unified School Board of concocting a scheme in which OUSD teachers were required to meet with a "professional benefits counselor" to provide documentation on the dependents listed in their OUSD health care benefit files. The teachers were told in a memo that if they didn't show up to scheduled interviews to provide the documentation, it would "result in your dependents' coverage ending effective May 30." As was revealed in a Nannette Asimov Chronicle article a week earlier, the "professional benefits counselors" turned out to be insurance brokers, who spent most of the time with the teachers trying to sell them life insurance. In other words it was a coercive scam put together by the district to lure teachers in under false pretenses, which Mr. Carroll loudly and properly condemns. However, he gets the instigator wrong.

"See the respect shown to teachers by the school board!" Mr. Carroll writes. He goes on to mention the school board three times in his column, noting that in conflicts between teachers and school boards, "I tend to favor teachers."

Problem is, as in any other action taken by the Oakland Unified School District in the last two years, the school board had no say in the matter. The Oakland schools were taken out of the hands of Oakland voters by the State of California two years ago after the Oakland school board and former Oakland Superintendent Dennis Chaconas discovered that they had a massive budget shortfall due to a teacher pay raise which they later found they couldn't afford (it's hard to get an exact amount on the shortfall; the general figure seems to be between $40 million and $50 million). The Oakland schools are now being run by California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell through his state-appointed administrator, Randolph Ward.

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Mr. O'Connell Comes To Oakland, Part Two

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
May 6 , 2005

Sorry to continue to be a bother about this, but I continue to be puzzled over the details of how Oakland's schools got taken over by the state, and what needs to be done to get the schools back in Oakland's hands.

In last week's column, we noted that State Senator Don Perata's SB39–the 2003 legislation that authorized the state seizure of Oakland's schools–gave a mandate for how the Oakland schools should be run during the takeover: "To the extent allowed by district finances, it is the intent of the Legislature that the [revised education program to be implemented by the state superintendent and his administrator] shall maintain the core educational reforms that have led to districtwide improvement[s]..."

Does anyone ever actually look at these things after they are passed?

Print that sentence out, tape it on the wall above your breakfast table, and then read (or re-read) Robert Gammon's long and informative article in the April 27, 2005 East Bay Express on state-appointed administrator Randolph Ward's overhaul of the Oakland Unified School District and its education programs ["The Caustic Reformer"]. Rather than maintaining Oakland's core educational reforms begun during the regime of former Superintendent Dennis Chaconas, as called for in the law that authorized his hiring, Mr. Ward has taken Oakland education in a completely different direction. His own? Financier and education-dabbler Eli Broad's? It certainly ain't what Oakland had decided we wanted, and which we'd been having success with until the bottom blew out of the budget.

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One Of Oakland's Greatest Public Scandals

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
May 19, 2006

The seizure of the Oakland Unified School District by the State of California stands as one of the greatest public scandals in Oakland’s history, perhaps surpassed, only, by the waterfront land grab scheme by which the City of Oakland first came into being. It is certainly greater, by far, than the Oakland Raiders scandal that has assumed so much of our attention in the past decades. The Raider deal, after all, only took our money. The OUSD seizure took our schools, and in its wake of confusion, has severely jeapordized the future of our children.

How—and why—Oakland’s public schools came to be taken out of the hands of Oakland citizens is still being sorted out, a task made all the more difficult because many of the principle players are still in power, working hard to obscure the sorry history of this sad event.

But if we care to pay attention, the signs are all around us, and are becoming clearer.

In a recent interview with the Tri-City Voice, Newark Superintendent of Schools John Bernard, who is running against Sheila Jordan for Alameda County Superintendent of Schools in the June election, outlined Ms. Jordan’s role in the Oakland school takeover in 2003: “Other county superintendents allow districts to use bond money as a loan when the district is going into the red,” Mr. Bernard told the newspaper. “The incumbent, Sheila Jordan, did not allow Oakland to use the bond money, they went into default and the state took over.”

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The Long Road Back To Local Control

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
July 7, 2006

It’s important to remember these days that during the events that led to the 2003 takeover of the Oakland Unified School District by the State of California, there was never an allegation the district’s budget shortfall occurred because someone in the administration of Superintendent Dennis Chaconas or on the OUSD Board of Trustees was either stealing or misappropriating district money.

Don’t take my word for it. SB39, the state law that mandated the takeover, reads at Section I(e): “While in need of a loan from the State of California, there have not been any accusations of intentional mismanagement or fraud in the Oakland Unified School District.”

So what caused the shortfall? Former Superintendent Dennis Chaconas proposed, and the school board approved, a teacher pay raise that the district could not afford. From everything we’ve heard, the district’s antiquated computer financial software did anticipate the full financial effect of the pay raise and, therefore, did not detect the looming budget shortfall until it was too late to patch it over.

The state legislature looking into the Oakland “problem” in 2003 also found that fiscal problems aside, Oakland schools were moving on the right track under the Chaconas administration. SB39’s Section I(f) reads that “[t]he Oakland Unified School District has made demonstrable academic improvements over the last few years, witnessed by test score improvements, more fully credentialed teachers in Oakland classrooms, and increased parental and community involvement.”

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OUSD Confirms Real Estate Negotiations

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
July 13, 2006

The state-appointed administrator of the Oakland Unified School District has confirmed that negotiations have begun with a developer over the sale or lease of prime Lake Merritt area land owned by the district, including the Paul Robeson Building administrative headquarters and several operating schools.

In a letter sent last week to OUSD Advisory Board President David Kakishiba, state administrator Randolph Ward said that a letter of intent could be signed as early as Monday, June 12, and that his office would then schedule “public hearings to review options, receive input and discuss the possibility of selling property at fair market value.”

Ward’s letter mentions 8.25 acres between 10th and 12th streets, the Lake Merritt Channel and 4th Avenue, including La Escuelita Elementary and MetWest and Dewey High Schools, but school board representatives have estimated that the inclusion of streets within the property boundaries brings the total acreage to 9.47.

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Talking About Violence

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
July 21, 2006

Forgive me, y’all, but I am always a little skeptical when a politician announces that one of their public policy initiatives has nothing to do with politics but, then, you’ve got to find the timing of this one is a little curious, as well.

We have known since late winter that we are in the midst of an enormous upswing in East Bay murders this year, and just over the mid-year mark the ghastly toll has now reached 73 in Oakland and 19 in the much-smaller Richmond. Now we learn, according to a Jim Herron Zamora article in the San Francisco Chronicle this week, State Senator Don Perata has “wanted for months to do something about Oakland's spiraling number of street killings.”

What kept Mr. Perata from doing whatever the “something” that he wanted to do was not revealed by the Chronicle article, but Mr. Zamora tells us that the “something” is now being done, as Mr. Perata announced that on Wednesday of this week he was “host[ing] a private meeting … of 40 public officials and community leaders in which he hopes to produce a to-do list for the state to help combat recent violence in Richmond and Oakland.”

Why is the timing so curious? Well, the Perata “Combat The Violence” meeting comes on the same day that Oakland activists and education leaders had planned to travel to Sacramento in hopes to meet with Mr. Perata (as well as local Assemblymembers Wilma Chan and Lonnie Hancock) concerning the issue of return to local control of the Oakland public schools.

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The Curious History Of The OUSD Land Sale As Told In The Legislative Record

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
August 26, 2006

SB39, the bill that authorized the state takeover of the Oakland Unified School District, was introduced in abbreviated form in January 2003 by State Senator Don Perata, with no details included.

On March 27, 2003, the Oakland Unified School District Board of Trustees passed a resolution requesting the bailout loan from the State of California. That resolution read, in part, that “on or before June 30, 2004, the district be allowed to declare as surplus property and sell or lease such property on or before June 30, 2004, and use the proceeds from any such sale or lease to reduce or retire the State loan …”

The key provision is that the board of trustees resolution called for either the sale or the lease of surplus district property to help retire the state debt.

On April 7, 2003, SB39’s details were filled in with amendments by Senator Perata, including a provision that read: “The bill would authorize the district … to declare as surplus property any property of the district and to sell, sell back, lease or leaseback that property on or before June 30, 2004, and use the proceeds from that transaction to reduce or retire the loan.”

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The School Sale Glass Gets A Little Less Dark

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
September 29, 2006

One of the things you learn in the business of journalism is that in trying to uncover the real meaning and purpose of a particular public policy, you rarely come across a smoking gun.

The “smoking gun” analogy, for those who don’t know, describes coming into a room so soon after a murder took place that smoke is still coming from the gun held in the murderer’s hands. Next to actually being in the room and seeing the shooting yourself, that’s about as conclusive eye-witness evidence as it gets.

Few things in politics and public policy are so conclusive. Politicians are so gifted at hiding their actions and motives these days that mostly we are only barely able to see them dimly, as through a glass, darkly, as the Apostle Paul once said.

But every so often you get a breakthrough in understanding, so that even if you are not able to reach a conclusion and a complete understanding, you are able to narrow your field of questions. So it was this week when I finally got a chance to see a video of the May 21, 2003 meeting of the California Assembly Appropriations Committee and its deliberations on SB39, the legislation that led to the state takeover of the Oakland Unified School District.

The May 21st Appropriations Committee meeting is important to understanding the proposed sale of 8.25 acres of prime, Lake Merritt area Oakland Unified School District property currently being negotiated between California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and the east coast development team of TerraMark/UrbanAmerica. As I wrote in an August 11, 2006 Berkeley Daily Planet article entitled “The Curious History of the OUSD Land Sale As Told in the Legislative Record,” the provision allowing the sale or lease of OUSD property was oddly taken in and out of State Senator Don Perata’s bill more than once while it passed through the legislature. But it was in the Assembly Appropriations Committee that the property provision was significantly changed, with someone taking out the language that would have allowed a lease of any property to help pay off the state debt, as well as taking out that language that the property must be declared surplus before it could be sold. In addition, the Appropriations Committee took out language that would have authorized the sale “only [for] surplus property that is currently used to house administrative services or used as warehouse space.”

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Why Is The OUSD Property Sale Proposal Still On The Table?

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
October 27, 2006

Sometimes, in politics, you come to a point where it is not possible to provide definitive answers, only questions. We seem to have come to such a point in the proposed sale of the Oakland Unified School District downtown properties. The question is: why is that proposed sale still on the table?

The original Letter of Intent giving exclusive negotiating rights to developers TerraMark/UrbanAmerican expired in mid-September, but that deadline was extended by mutual agreement of the developers and the developees (the developees in this case being represented by the office of State Superintendent Jack O’Connell, even though its Oakland Unified School District property that we’re talking about).

What TerraMark and Mr. O’Connell have been doing since then is anybody’s guess. Are they negotiating new terms? Are they passing new proposals back and forth by fax or email? Are they talking over the telephone or holding meetings in Sacramento or New York? Are they trying to peel away portions of the land sale opposition, particularly representatives of the three schools and two child development centers who will be directly effected by the proposed property sale? Or are the developers and Mr. O’Connell just sitting on the deal, waiting on a possible change in the political winds? The public—particularly the Oakland public—doesn’t know.

Meanwhile, though the legal foundation of the proposed land sale rests solidly on state law (the SB39 legislation that authorized the state takeover of Oakland Unified), the political foundation of that proposed sale is on decidedly shaky ground.

State Senator Don Perata, who wrote SB39 and engineered its passage through the legislature in 2003, says that the provisions authorizing the sale of OUSD property to help pay down the state loan was put in at the request of the school board.

While technically it was, memories are now murky on who originally came up with the idea.

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OUSD Land Sale Declared Dead

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
February 23, 2007

If a high school English class were assigned to write a summary of the Oakland Unified School District for 2007, they would probably borrow and paraphrase from the opening lines of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: The year started out as the worst of times, and though by the end of 2007 it wasn’t the best of times, yet, it had certainly gotten decidedly better.

At the beginning of the year, Oakland Unified was moving towards its fourth full year of state takeover, with little prospect on the horizon for local control. Randolph Ward, the state-appointed OUSD administrator who had run the district like a dictator, was gone, and had been replaced by the more likeable Kimberly Statham, but Statham retained Ward’s dictatorial authority to make decisions for Oakland schools without regard for the opinion of the elected school board.

The May 2003 state legislation authorizing the state seizure of Oakland’s schools—SB39—allowed the state superintendent—Jack O’Connell—complete authority over the decision about when local control would be returned. O’Connell had already twice ignored the recommendation of the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) that Oakland’s powerless advisory school board should be granted authority over the limited area of community relations and governance.

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A Year Of Political Turnaround In The Oakland Schools

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
December 28, 2007

In a dramatic but not necessarily unexpected announcement, California Superintendent for Public Instruction Jack O’Connell said on Thursday that the proposed deal to sell more than eight acres of prime downtown Oakland Unified School District land to an east coast development team is dead, killed by overwhelming Oakland opposition.

The proposed sale property included the district’s Paul Robeson Building administrative headquarters as well as five education institutions, including Dewey and MetWest high schools and La Escuelita Elementary and two child care centers, all of which sit near the soon-to-be-renovated Lake Merritt Channel. The developers had proposed putting up luxury high-rise condominium towers in their place.

“Ultimately, Oakland community members made very clear that this project is not in line with their vision for their community, and I respect that point of view,” O’Connell said in a press release. “As a result, I have decided to end the discussion over the sale of this property.”

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Who Was Looking Out For Oakland's Schools, And Who Was Not

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
From the UnderCurrents column of the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper
July 9, 2009

It seems somewhat odd, doesn’t it, that our good friends at the Oakland Tribune waited until the State of California officially turned (back) over the keys to the Oakland Unified School District Administration Building to write one of the better articles summing up the damaging effects of the state takeover (“Oakland School District: Is It Better Off After The State Takeover?” July 6, 2009). Oakland could have used the help of the city’s major media local newspaper during a time when many residents (and some of the city’s political leaders) were fighting to regain local control. Still, better late than never. I suppose.

It has been so long ago, you have to be reminded that the sole reason the state took over OUSD in the first place in 2003 was, supposedly, to put the district’s finances in order. You only have to quote from Katy Murphy’s Tribune article to see how…um…unsatisfactorily that particular endeavor turned out for the locals.

“Although financial problems triggered the Oakland school district's takeover,” Ms. Murphy writes, “the state administration appeared to be more focused on redesigning schools and overhauling central office services than on stabilizing the district's finances. None of the three state-appointed administrators had strong financial backgrounds, and the district has had three chief financial officers since 2007. … In 2008, Oakland Unified balanced its budget for the first time since before the state takeover. The budget is balanced again this year, but because of deep state funding cuts—including several announced in late May—the district's surplus cash reserves are all but depleted. The district also plans to spend the rest of the $100 million state loan in the coming year, leaving the schools with no cushion and a debt that could take decades to repay.”

Ms. Murphy continues that at the time of the state takeover, estimates of Oakland Unified’s debt “ranged wildly” between $35 million and close to $100 million (my information at the time was that the actual debt was closer to the lower figure), and the Tribune story adds that coming out of state receivership, the district is $89 million in debt, with an additional $18 million deficit forecasted for the 2010-11 school year. Even if you take the highest figure—$100 million—as the OUSD shortfall that triggered the 2003 takeover (and, as I said, I believe the actual shortfall figure was lower), the combined $89 million/$18 million debt-deficit figure means that Oakland Unified is in worst financial shape—by $7 million—after the state takeover than before.

Astonishing, it would seem, for a state takeover whose rationale for coming into being was solely to put Oakland Unified’s finances back in order.

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You can contact the Anybody But Perata For Mayor website at admin@notdon.org