Education
School District Settles Case of Police Brutality Against Parents and Teachers
The case settles claims of police brutality at a board meeting in October 2019, when parents and teachers protested the closure of Henry J. Kaiser Jr. Elementary School at 25 S. Hill Court.
Parents and teachers in the Oakland Unified School District will donate $100,000 toward keeping their schools public following a settlement with the district in a case of alleged police brutality, organizers with a coalition to preserve public education in the city said on September 23.
The case settles claims of police brutality at a board meeting in October 2019, when parents and teachers protested the closure of Henry J. Kaiser Jr. Elementary School at 25 S. Hill Court.
The district closed the school despite the continued protests of supporters of the coalition Oakland Not For Sale and others. School officials decided it will reopen next year as a preschool.
The amount of the settlement is $337,500 in damages, with $100,000 going toward supporting school board candidates who want to keep schools public instead of converting them into charter schools, for example. Three of the seven school board members are up for election next year.
“We’re thrilled to be announcing not only a settlement with the district, but our ability to now give a six-figure donation to our fight to stop public school closures and support candidates who will fight the privatization of the Oakland Unified School District,” said Saru Jayaraman, plaintiff in the litigation Jayaraman v. OUSD, in a statement.
“We’re also thrilled that in the same moment, we can declare victory in that Kaiser Elementary, which we fought to keep public, will indeed remain a public facility – and we will build on these victories with resources to continue to fight all future public-school closures,” Jayaraman said.
“While it isn’t exactly what we would have hoped, we’re happy Kaiser is being used as a public facility for students and that we were able to resolve the litigation,” said Amy Haruyama, a OUSD teacher who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit and former Kaiser Elementary teacher who now works at Sankofa United Elementary School.
Organizers with Oakland Not For Sale said OUSD officials have closed 17 public schools and almost all of them have been replaced with charter schools. Most of the closures involved schools serving mostly Black and Hispanic students, the organizers said.
Kaiser, when it was closed, was one of the district’s highest achieving elementary schools as well as one of the most racially and ethnically diverse.
California, which has trusteeship over Oakland public schools, and wealthy charter school advocates are behind the drive to replace public schools with charter schools, ONFS organizers said.
The new state budget trailer, approved in July, requires the district to continue to close and sell or lease public school properties.
Families, teachers, and community groups formed Oakland Not For Sale following the decision by Oakland school officials to close Kaiser Elementary School.
“It was a wonderful diverse space,” Melissa Korber, treasurer for Oakland Not For Sale, and the mother of a student who once attended the school.
Korber believed Kaiser Elementary was a successful school, with a diverse student population that was wrongly portrayed as a school that was not diverse.
School district officials declined to comment on the settlement.
