Seven weeks ago the lives of 900 Oakland children and their parents were seriously disrupted. Five Oakland elementary schools were being considered for closure. After a dozen meetings in half as many weeks, the School Board ended its period of so-called consultation. For hours upon hours, parents, children and teachers expressed their love for their schools. And up on the stage, the School Board simply sat there checking their watches.
Subsequently we have heard that many concrete plans were in place to close the schools a long time before the final vote of the Board.
It’s in this background that a thousand young people, parents and teachers marched on the School Board on the day of November 2nd, 2011, the historic Oakland General strike initiated by the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Two of the 900 students that will be kicked out of their schools this year are Havana and Ilyana, our daughters. One is in 3rd grade and one a Kindergartener. We kept them home from school on the day of the strike. Their mom, the following day, handed in a note at the school office. It read “Havana and Ilyana were absent yesterday, as the closure of their school made them sick.”
At 9.30ish on the day of the strike, friends, parents and kids began arriving at our house to make picket signs for the day. About 20 of us were scattered around the front room busily using sharpies on our pink poster boards. “Kids are the 99%” was one, “Keep our schools open” was another. Being mostly younger kids there was a fair amount of animation used to get their message out. Later on BART I noticed one parent “x” out a crown on a princess, with a sly smile to the other parents as she did it.
Our ragtag group entered the quad at Laney community college where a couple of hundred students were listening to speakers and rappers. There was plenty of music to keep our kids totally in awe. It’s funny, but Occupy just makes a good fit with kids. It’s just not shaped like the boring protests of past. A parent arrived from another elementary school on the closure list, Lakeview, with news that they’d shut down their school altogether. Wow! Only 20 kids were on site out of 300 children. It was solid.
More feeder marches of dozens and sometimes hundreds entered into our rally site and in less than an hour we were heading off with a huge head of steam to the School Board. The plan for the action at the School District building was for a couple of parents to hand in an Eviction notice to the elected School Board members that’d voted to close our schools. They’d evicted 900 young children from their schools, now we were putting them on notice that their time in office is going to be over.
We sent three runners ahead of the march to let the District’s smooth-talking spokesperson know we were coming and for him to come down and meet us. A secretary sent the three young people up to his office, but they lost their way in the hallways. The sight of one of our people in a hoodie wandering the offices of the District set off a small panic, “we’re being occupied!” Our people explained to their people, that, well, that wasn’t totally true. The District’s PR guy headed downstairs.
A thousand people were coming up the street, with banners, signs and an incredible loud energy. The press mounted the steps to get their best shots in. And we took a bullhorn and read out our eviction notice: for evicting our 900 children, for doing this dirty work for the 1%, you are hereby given notice: we will evict you from office. Our children’s future’s will not be cut!
A harried and anxious School Official stood in the background as the Eviction Notice was read out. We handed him the symbolic Notice. He looked somewhat shocked, but not nearly as pained as our parents have felt over the past seven weeks.
I looked over the crowd of mostly high school students, union workers and people that just care. Every color of humanity was there. And then in a creative curve I personally hadn’t anticipated, one kid yelled, “You’ve been served! You’ve been served!” And within seconds everyone was chanting to the School Board, “You’ve been served! You’ve been served!” And I looked out from the steps of the School Board at the crowd and thought, this is my Oakland. This is why I love this city.
And our huge convulsive energy of a thousand people, with more than a thousand reasons to be there, headed out down the street to join the epicenter of Occupy Oakland at Oscar Grant Plaza. In our wake we left behind a stunned Education official and a couple of sweating School Board cops and a group of journalists busily scribbling down what they’d just witnessed.
They had just witnessed the future. And I thought of Havana and Ilyana and how upset they are about Maxwell Park school being closed. And on this day I saw their excitement and shared their feeling of power. And more than ever before I understood that we will have a future because the youth of today will turn this world upside down.
3 comments:
Awesome. Wish me and mine could have been there. I'm not sure what I think about O/O yet, but it's exciting. No doubt about it.
We all have been missing the “Master Plan” of the school board which has been in place for some years. Their methodical technique to rush the process of the school closures is blatant proof. I find it very ironic the business of the school closures were like an undercurrent of the Occupy Oakland movement. The school closures should have had much more weight in the movement considering the closures impacted so many lives on so many levels negatively. Oakland IS OUR CITY and the SCHOOLS are OUR SCHOOLS! If we don’t do all we can do to make them recognize and respect that, we will always be fighting a losing battle. I have been giving indepth thought to, “what could possibly be the real reason/motive for the closures of so many schools”. Not only the 5 of this year but prior years as well. In speaking with other political figures, union representatives and clergymen of various churches, I have come to the conclusion, it has nothing to do with financial budgets or the lack thereof… but for monetary gain and political power in other areas. One of the many questions never answered doing our protest efforts, is “Who or what can overturn an OUSD decision”??? One unacceptable reason I was told, is that because they were voted in by the people, nothing can be done until they are voted out.
In reference to the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Unless we all woke up in Russia the morning of Wednesday, October 26, 2011, everyone has someone to report to in the ranks in this country, in what has been known to be “the land of democracy”, not “dictatorship”. They have taken upon themselves to literally “dictate” our children’s future. We all knew, quiet as it was kept, even though we were fighting tirelessly to prevent the closures, that the decision had been made already and set in stone long before the announcement 7 weeks ago when it was first announced. With that being said, I feel the meetings and the useless discussions were all an insult to our intelligence.
I strongly feel and I feel many would agree, we can not take the decision on October 26, to be an acceptance of defeat. That was not a losing battle, I accept its purpose to make us aware of how important it is to exhaust any and all efforts to pull our strengths together to prevent the completion of their “Master Plan”, or the future of our children will be totally lost from our control and placed in their decision making powers for many years to come.
Thanks for your comment Sepee. Juanda: I agree, it's not simply about the money and Occupy should've put this issue closer to center stage, but it's a young movement. I also agree that both the democratic rights and process AND the Board are becoming increasingly remote from us, the people.
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