“On behalf of our 60,000 members across Northern California, including classified staff working hand in hand with educators at Oakland Unified School District, SEIU 1021 expresses our full solidarity with the Oakland Education Association strike. 

“We support OEA educators’ demands for common-good proposals that will ensure Oakland students have what they need and deserve to succeed, including safe school facilities; enforceable shared decision-making around state grant funding for community schools to ensure that it goes toward student needs rather than highly-paid administrators and outside contractors; reparations for Black students as the OUSD school board committed to in 2021; and housing for the 1,500 unhoused OUSD students. We understand that the decision to strike and shut down schools is never taken lightly and that OEA educators are taking this extraordinary step as a last resort to give Oakland students the safe, stable, racially just schools they deserve, so they can get the education they need to thrive.

“We urge the OUSD Board of Education to give the district’s bargaining team authority to negotiate these critical issues to resolve the strike quickly. Further, we urge OUSD’s administration to bargain in good faith with their educators to settle a fair contract that addresses the urgent needs of Oakland students.”