Let Oakland Voters Decide!

June 22, 2010

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On Saturday, the Board of Education discussed the status of efforts to develop a parcel tax to ensure that Oakland can attract and retain the best teachers for our students.

Over the next couple weeks, Director Kakishiba will work with a firm to poll the community about the potential measure and the Board decided to schedule a special meeting after the July Fourth holiday to consider the results.

The documentation to place the measure on the November 2010 ballot must be filed by August 6. If it decides to move forward, the Board will likely meet again later in July to come to agreement about what specifically they're going to ask the voters to support.

Parcel Tax Benefits

From our understanding of the discussion, a successful measure will do four things:

1. Increase compensation for teachers to be competitive with other local districts
2. Include incentives for hard to staff subject areas and high need schools
3. Benefit students and teachers at both district and charter public schools, ideally pegged to the percentage of Oakland students in both schools
4. Increase compensation for all school employees

Our hope is that the Board is polling about scenarios that meet all of these criteria. Oaklanders will be less in interested in just improving teacher compensation.

Ultimately, we want to be sure that the measure "solves the problem" and makes us competitive to attract and retain the best teachers for our children.

How You Can Help

City and education leaders need to hear from community that we want to prioritize our children, teachers, and schools.

City and education leaders need to coordinate a shared approach to November ballot measures so that we can support our students and teachers while sustaining other essential city services.

Add your name to our petition in support of the parcel tax. Urge school board members to let Oakland voters decide whether they want to pay our teachers more. The board should not stand in the way of Oaklanders having the opportunity to vote!

Call or email our elected city and school district leaders urging them to collaborate and get this done for our children.

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