Strike Update 4/24

FamiliesFeaturedInnovationLiberator
Written By Lakisha Young • Founder and CEO

Since we started our petition last week, more than 540 people have signed on to demand the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) take whatever legal action is necessary to prevent the Oakland Educators’ Association (OEA) from using teacher strikes as a bad-faith tactic in contract negotiations. Here are where things stand now: 

  • OEA’s strike vote ends today, and we have learned that they will announce the results of that vote Tuesday evening. 

  • OUSD has also filed a request for an injunction, seeking a legal remedy that would prevent further strike activity by OEA — exactly what we are demanding in our petition. I offered a written declaration for the injunction.

It’s important to continue to speak out publicly on behalf of our students and families against these types of disruptions to our students' learning. 

These disruptions — in April 2022, March 2023, and again now — have been excessive, unpredictable, and traumatic. Over the last year, REACH has spoken out every time OEA has used teacher strikes to address its own needs, rather than the needs of students who need to be in school. Only 3 out of 10 of our kids can read and do math at grade level. They’ve already lost enough.  

If you haven’t signed our petition, please take a moment to add your name in support of Oakland's kids and their education. If we don’t keep speaking out against the normalization of strikes, we’ll keep accepting learning loss as the status quo. We can’t do that.

I’ll keep updating you on the status of the strike vote and the district’s injunction — and REACH will keep doing everything we can to keep kids at the center of this conversation.

In solidarity, 

Lakisha Young
CEO, The Oakland REACH

Lakisha Young • Founder and CEO

Lakisha Young is Founder & CEO of The Oakland REACH, a parent-power organization that launched in 2016. She knows from her own story that winning in education is par for the course when you already have what you need to win in life — and because of that, everything REACH does is about ensuring every family has what they need to win in life.

Lakisha developed a formula that has guided REACH’s work since day one: Ask families questions. Listen to their aspirations. Build the solutions. Liberate our communities. This formula has produced a mix of groundbreaking programming and advocacy work over the last 6 years, including The Opportunity Ticket, which gives the most vulnerable students higher preference for enrolling in quality schools, and the Literacy for All campaign, which is about empowering the whole family around literacy to truly disrupt systemically poor literacy outcomes in underserved communities. 

During the pandemic, Lakisha pioneered one of REACH’s most innovative solutions to date: The Virtual Family Hub, a one-stop shop supporting families’ economic survival and their children’s educational success. The Hub has been featured in local, national, and international media, including Today.com, TIME Magazine, CNN, KQED, BBC News, Univision, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more.

Inspired by the Hub’s success and with families returning to in-person learning, REACH created The Liberator Model to train parents and caregivers in the community to become tutors in some of the lowest-performing Oakland schools. Through this model, REACH is now supporting the training and retention of ~200 tutors, providing high-quality, high-dosage tutoring to 5,500+ students across 38 schools. A study of the model called parents an “untapped pool of talent” and noted they were as effective as teachers in tutoring readers.

Lakisha is a respected national voice on parent power and regularly consults other cities across the country interested in learning more about REACH’s transformative model. She is a Senior Fellow at The Center on Reinventing Public Education and is a regular contributor to their “People in Action” series. In 2023, Lakisha was recognized by KRON4 as the Bay Area’s Remarkable Woman.

Previous

Strike Update 4/26
Next

The Oakland REACH & CA Parent Power Respond to District’s Negotiations Update