Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/1533049
IS YOUR SCHOOL DISTRICT CONSIDERING SCHOOL CLOSURES? Take a proactive approach if your school district is considering school closures (often called "consolidations" by districts). Reach out to your local leadership and CTA primary contact staff to learn more about how you can help your union support your students and school community. Here are some good practices: • Emphasize the impact on students, families and communities. District discussions about closures often leave out the people who will be impacted most. Lift student and community voices on your platforms and use input opportunities to call for more attention to these impacts. " The way to fight school closures is with the community it directly impacts — on the closure level and the receiving level," says UESF President Cassondra Curiel. " This is a justice issue — we need to be in solidarity with students, families and communities who are under attack ." • Don't let the district decontextualize and describe closures with jargon. School closure discussions focus on numbers and data, stripping out their role in our neighborhoods. Take every opportunity to amplify the value these special places have to students and families (and be sure to call them closures). • Shine a light on layoffs. Districts avoid talking specifically about potential pink slips until closure decisions have already been made by the school board. Lift and share that school closures often come with layoffs of educators and classified employees, which is devastating for students and school communities. " We're only as strong as our collective voice," says AREA President Sandra Rivera. "One voice saying something is different than 500 voices saying something. If we say it together and we stand together, our voice will be heard." • We Are CTA. Approach school closures in your community collectively with other CTA locals. Show up for each other and your students. Reach out to neighboring locals for support and to share information. Contact fellow locals around the state fighting closures to learn more about how they 're fighting back. • Be mindful of charter encroachment. When public schools are closed and create significant distance between remaining schools, charter schools often pop up and siphon students away from traditional public schools. As school closure plans are being developed, pay attention to empty areas created by proposed school closures and call out potential charter encroachment in your school district. "We're concerned about charter encroachment because closures will leave large areas without a neighborhood school nearby," says SWTA President Vanessa Barrera. OAKLAND: Educators and community defeat school closure proposal " We know that Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) plays fast and loose with the numbers and with public process," says OEA's Chris Jackson. "We as educa- tors know the money is in the district." Th e p ow er of edu cators an d c om- munity united for students was on full display in December when OEA and dis- trict families rose up to fight back against a consolidation proposal that would have seen five schools close — winning when district officials opted to back off the plan, for now. Jackson says OEA expects the district to resume the process with community meetings in spring with the goal of another school closure proposal in fall or winter. "It was a lot of hard work from our community and parents to get the deci- sion to delay, and it was really a stress test," says Jackson. "We were able to talk with parents and community about the kind of impacts these closures were going to have and see how far they were willing to go to fight them." OUSD's declining enrollment issues are self-inflicted, Jackson says, with decades of unchecked charter school proliferation draining neighborhood public schools of students, ushered in by charter school industry-funded school board members. OUSD's repeated school closure attempts have further caused families to leave the district, Jackson says. " We saw in 2022 that OUSD violated state law in the way they closed schools, with no community process and barely a public process," he says. "We've had to live with that for the past three years with those schools being closed, Franklin-McKinley's closure committee meetings were sparsely attended at first, then became crowded as the final recommendation approached. 29 M A R C H 2 0 2 5