The Oakland Unified School District board approved a proposal Wednesday to lay off roughly 400 workers in an effort to cope with a massive budget shortfall and declining enrollment.
The layoffs will hit both the central office administration as well as the district’s 80 or so schools and are projected to save about $11 million in the next fiscal year.
The need for dramatic cost-cutting is driven by declining enrollment, the expiration of one-time funding the district received to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a roughly $100 million structural deficit that threatens OUSD’s financial solvency, according to a report from interim Superintendent Denise Saddler’s office.
Saddler said that the district’s student population has shrunk from 54,000 students to 34,000 students — but the smaller number of kids still attend the same number of school campuses and the board made an earlier decision to tackle the deficit without closing schools.
“We have to reorganize based on the amount of money we receive from the state and federal government and right now there’s not enough money that we are receiving to maintain our current staff. That’s the real deal, to maintain the current buildings that we have and to pay the utilities,” Saddler said.
Cary Kaufman, president of the United Administrators of Oakland union, said the cuts were made from “the top down without true meaningful engagement” and appear to be an attempt to retain local control of the district “at any cost.”
“This is not stability,” Kaufman said. “This is chaos.”
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