Dig Happy Hour and May 13th board meeting links

🥑 The first Dig Happy Hour: Saturday May 16 from 3 til 5ish at Nido’s Backyard

We're hosting a Dig happy hour to get to know you before summer starts. Come to talk OUSD, swap notes, and finally put faces to names. Tell us you’re coming.

📋 What we're watching at the Wed. May 13 Board Meeting

The school year is quickly coming to a close, but there’s a lot of unfinished business before our school board in the next couple meetings.

S.-1 and S.-2: Special Education Stability Resolution (Returning)

This item was postponed at the April 22 meeting and is back. The board will consider two competing versions of a resolution on Special Education program stability. One (S.-1) establishes formal oversight and stability parameters, and one (S.-2) frames the issue as promoting school stability and belonging for disabled students. This resolution has been 3 years in the making. We are paying close attention to which version moves forward and what it actually contains.

T.-1: Superintendent Employment Agreement

The board will vote on a formal one-year employment contract for Interim Superintendent Denise Saddler, covering July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027, at a salary of $367,765. Based on Board discussions in the past few months, it seems like this is making something formal that has been informally accepted by the board majority for a while.

Appeal of the Going Concern Designation as a General Consent Item

As we wrote in our last April recap, Alameda County Superintendent Alysse Castro issued a Going Concern notice to OUSD on April 16, a formal signal that the county is watching the district's finances closely and is prepared to intervene if things deteriorate further. The board will ratify the district's formal appeal of that designation to the California Superintendent of Public Instruction.

This is a protective appeal so the district is preserving its legal right to contest the designation, not necessarily expecting to win. The Going Concern label itself doesn't go away just because the district files an appeal.

Watch for whether board members say anything during discussion about the district's response to the county's April 30 deadline, and whether the Superintendent's Report (N.-1) includes any update on the fiscal accountability roadmap.

How to participate

• Agenda
• Zoom link to join
• RSVP on Partiful with comment instructions

We will send a recap after the Board Meeting this week.

🗓️ Upcoming community meeting

PSAC (Parent Student Advisory Committee) is hosting an in-person meeting on Monday, June 1 at 6pm, location TBD.

This meeting will help define the key questions and goals that will guide the Fall 2026 engagement process. (If you have missed their past sessions, check out their recap from the March 31 Community meeting.)

📰 Latest news

U.S. Schools Face a Crisis as the Number of Children Drops, New York Times, gift link. We wanted to share this because it mentions the Oakland principal’s letter from April.

Getting Down to Facts 3: A coalition of education researchers in California released the most comprehensive review of California's public education system since 2018. The researchers identify three recurring system-level problems: 

• accountability tools and data systems that aren't connected to one another or to clear action
• ambiguity about when the state should lead versus defer to local districts
• capacity gaps in the teacher workforce, including the fact that nearly 30 percent of California's math teachers are not fully certified in their subject area. 

The report's core argument is that the problem isn't a lack of good ideas. It's coherence: the degree to which the state's standards, funding, accountability tools, and support for teachers and districts actually connect to one another so that good policy reaches classrooms.

They are very dense, academic research papers, and also helpful for context that Oakland’s issues are not unique.