OAKLAND — After a chaotic Oakland Unified school board meeting in October, when protesters rushed a metal barricade and were struck by police with batons and arrested, the school board — fearing the same protesters would return — closed its first meeting of November to the public and may do it again Wednesday.
Rather than meeting in the auditorium of La Escuelita Elementary School as it typically does, last week the school board took what critics called an unprecedented step of holding a special meeting on charter school renewals in an upstairs conference room. Only the charter petitioners and media were allowed inside. Other members of the public packed the auditorium downstairs, where they were able to use a microphone to comment.
Acting board president Jody London said the board made the decision to meet upstairs fearing that the meeting would again be disrupted by protesters opposing the school board’s September decision to close Kaiser Elementary School in the Hiller Highlands neighborhood and merge it with Sankofa Academy about 4 miles away.
She told EdSource that the board may consider meeting upstairs again this week. Oakland Unified spokesman John Sasaki said the district expects the protesters will disrupt the meeting on Wednesday.
“We would much prefer to hold this meeting in the great room downstairs, but doing so in the face of certain disruptions is not fair to the public as it would delay the meeting and the important business of the board,” London said.
David Snyder, executive director of the nonprofit First Amendment Coalition, said though holding the meeting via teleconference may be legal, it doesn’t seem to adhere to the spirit of the state’s Brown Act open public meeting law. Snyder, a Brown Act expert, said he had never heard of any elected body using the teleconference rule to meet separately from the public.
“I don’t think this is what the Legislature had in mind,” he said, adding that the provision is usually used to allow some board members to participate in meetings remotely when they can’t attend in person. “The board would be ill-advised to continue to do this regularly, because it removes the public from the action in a way that’s probably technically permissible under the Brown Act, but at a minimum, it doesn’t look very good.”
Zach Norris, a Kaiser Elementary parent and executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights who was arrested last month, said his group, the “Oakland Is Not For Sale” coalition, never intended to disrupt the Nov. 6 meeting. They didn’t even show up.
He called the board’s decision to meet separately from the public “unfortunate and anti-democratic.”
“I think it shows that this board that is more focused on closing schools than keeping them open and doesn’t have the confidence of the public,” he said. “Them feeling like they have to meet in secret is indicative of that.”
Norris and his wife, Saru Jayaraman, who was also arrested at the Oct. 23rd meeting and suffered leg and shoulder injuries, announced in October that they plan to sue the district, alleging school police used excessive force and violated their rights to freedom of speech.
The “Oakland is not for sale” group is encouraging its supporters to wear black to the next meeting and to “stand up” and “fight back” against school closures. Norris said he does not know if protesters will disrupt the meeting, but he stressed that his group does not condone any kinds of threats or violence.
