Additional Background

By Kerry Hamill

Problems and Solutions for Oakland Public Schools

This is a community crisis in Oakland far greater than the loss of a sports team, an earthquake or a fire. It will only be solved if the entire city becomes involved. From the City Council to the Mayor to the state and federal representatives, we must singularly focus on public education in Oakland as the great equalizer in a world of larger gaps between the well off and the poor.

My own school community is a great example of how a school can be re-energized with community involvement. It is the best and most important tool we have to help our children succeed. In my daughter's school, we have rebuilt the library and started a thriving volunteer reading program. We are raising money from local businesses and neighbors to paint the school.

We have brought hundreds of parents to the school in the evening with "reading nights" and curriculum activities and after school programs funded with our Title I federal money.

In short we have put our community into our school. In doing so, we have dramatically improved student performance in a school population that is 55% low-income and 89% minority.

School reform in Oakland must take place # school by school, in partnerships among teachers, parents, students and the larger community. I know what it takes because I am part of a school where it is happening successfully. It takes leadership, community involvement and accountability. And, it can be done.

If the Syrians and the Israelis can talk peace, if the Northern Irish and the English can agree to a cease fire, we can fix our troubled schools in Oakland.

I have worked in Oakland politics for 11 years, particularly in my own North Oakland neighborhood. I have a substantial base of support among school activists, neighborhood leaders, labor, business people and elected officials.

In my capacity as Senator Perata's Chief of Staff, I organized the school bus tour this summer which took 750 parents, students and community members into 75 schools to rate them for health and safety issues. My entire political life # as a newspaper reporter, community organizer and staffer for Mayor Elihu Harris and Senator Perata, I have worked to make bureaucracies more accessible and responsive to the people they were created to serve.

We must develop a recovery plan for each and every school site at this important moment in time. It must be done with parents, teachers, school board members and students discussing student performance and making agreements about what everyone has to do to ensure success for students.

I am running for school board to challenge the Oakland Unified School District to do things in an entirely different way # from the ground up!

Only when the key players are included in the process of recovery will we change the way children in Oakland learn.

Let's begin at the beginning. In Oakland, our public school children can't read at grade level. Two-thirds fall behind by third grade. Most never catch up. So begins a cycle of struggle, frustration and failure that involves 75% of our students by high school...it is the root of poor student discipline, low teacher morale and one of the state's highest dropout rates.

We need a new reading program in Oakland; we need a research-based program that is appropriate for the challenged population of children we serve. The key component to this will be to ensure that our teachers have a say in choosing the program then have necessary training and support. There is plenty of money at the state level for reading. We must work with foundations to come up with additional support and training resources.

Our schools are overcrowded and run down. We must reorganize our buildings and grounds and facilities departments, so that our money is spent efficiently and our school sites are given they attention they need.

We must build at least one (I support two) new schools at the Montgomery Ward site to ease the overcrowding in the Central/East Oakland area. There is a short-term plan underway to create a new elementary school at the Woodland School site, which I support. Additional classroom space could be created by moving the Harper Building administrators to an Eastmont Mall site, and recreating another new school at the Harper Building.

We are in the midst of a statewide teacher shortage. Oakland's teachers are paid the lowest salaries in Alameda County. Teachers are the centerpieces of school reform. If we are to attract the best, we must pay them at the top 1/3 of the scale for teachers in Alameda County.

The current commitment to increase teacher salaries by 20% over three years is one I support. We must reduce central office administration to 8% and transfer that money to teacher salaries. We must evaluate every administrative function against student performance to decide on its usefulness. We must house all teachers on special assignment at school sites, and guarantee that they spend 80% of their time teaching children.