Education

School Board Focuses on Balanced Budget After This Year’s $17 Million Shortfall

Published

7 years ago

October 6, 2017

District 3 Boardmember Jumoke Hinton Hodge

Oakland Board of Education members are gaining a deeper understanding of operating public schools in tough times as they work with new superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell to maintain a balanced budget after former Superintendent Antwan Wilson left the district with a two-year $32 million shortfall, including $17 million this year.

In interviews with the Oakland Post, several board members discussed what went wrong under Wilson and the prospects for the school district in the next year or two.

Board President James Harris, who represents District 7, said that though the budget is fragile, “Right now nothing indicates we are going to run out of money.”

“If we put the changes in place, I believe we will see our way through,” he said, “We don’t believe there will be (new) money from the state.”

James Harris

He said the “encroachment” of special education on the district’s general fund has grown by $5 million a year, “though services have not gotten better. In some cases, they have gotten worse.”

“We are going to make cuts or change the kind of services we offer in special education,” Harris said.

Harris says the district has to close schools.

“We need to make some reductions in our portfolio,” he said. “I think we’re going to have to downsize.

“There is no wiggle room for anything else. I think the board is willing to do that.”

District 3 Boardmember Jumoke Hinton Hodge pointed to school sites and principals who overspent their budgets last year and disputed those who pinned the blame for the district’s shortfall on former Supt. Wilson.

While Wilson did not talk about a deficit and budget cuts before he left, she said, “We knew we had to make cuts. We talked about it in terms in realigning (spending) priorities.”

She said board members who fault Wilson for hiring too many central office administrators are “kind of disingenuous. We (board members) approved this.”

Hinton Hodge disagreed with budget staff members who recently reported to the Budget and Finance Committee that Wilson’s administration had hired 75 employees, mostly in the central office, who were not in the budget.

“I know the narrative is about the attempt to hire 75 people without a budget,” she said. “That is not true. I don’t know who made that up. There was a redesigning of job descriptions. There were new (job) positions, adjustments of assignments, but there were not necessarily new people.”

She said a number of district schools, like MetWest and Coliseum College Prep Academy (CCPA), are too small and need to expand. “How can they serve an additional 100 students?” she asked. “I’d like to increase their numbers so they can be self-sufficient.”

District 5 Boardmember Shanthi Gonzales said staff did not inform the board until a few weeks ago about the 75 employees who were hired last year but were not in the budget.

“What’s disheartening is that staff knew this was going on, and nobody alerted the board,” she said.

“Some of the 75 positons were brand new people,” she said. “Some people already worked within the district but were put in new roles. In most cases, their salaries went up,” but their old positions were in the budget and remained unfilled.

In addition, she said, the district’s $30 million budget shortfall was never presented to the board last year.

Aimee Eng

“They tried to make it less serious than it really was,” Gonzales said. “Staff were getting pressured not to be honest (to the board) about what the extent of the crisis was.”

“(Now), everyone (on the board) is committed to staying out of receivership. It’s not good for the community to lose democratic control of our schools.”

Aimee Eng, representing District 5, chairs the board’s Budget and Finance committee. She said she is basically optimistic about the district’s prospects.

“I am feeling good (about the superintendent). Her first priority is fiscal vitality. She not only listens, she understands the district. She is open and collaborative,” said Eng.

She said she does not want to rush into making the decision to close schools.

“Closures is one of several options. I myself have been pretty cautious about (deciding) to close schools. If you look at just the numbers (of schools and students), you are not necessarily looking at the local context.If you look at the local context, you know that it is just not that simple,” she said. “There is a lot of pressure to act really quickly, but there are a lot of questions that really need to be answered.”

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Activism

LIVE! — TOWN HALL ON RACISM AND ITS IMPACT — THURS. 11.14.24 5PM PST

Join us for a LIVE Virtual Town Hall on the Impact of Racism hosted by Post News Group Journalist Carla Thomas and featuring Oakland, CA NAACP President Cynthia Adams & other Special Guests.
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. PST

Published

1 week ago

November 12, 2024

Oakland Post

Discussion Topics:
• Since the pandemic, what battles have the NAACP fought nationally, and how have they impacted us locally?
• What trends are you seeing concerning Racism? Is it more covert or overt?
• What are the top 5 issues resulting from racism in our communities?
• How do racial and other types of discrimination impact local communities?
• What are the most effective ways our community can combat racism and hate?

Your questions and comments will be shared LIVE with the moderators and viewers during the broadcast.

STREAMED LIVE!
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/PostNewsGroup
YOUTUBE: youtube.com/blackpressusatv
X: twitter.com/blackpressusa

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Art

Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

Tony Cokes. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Special to The Post

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[^5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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California Black Media

On Your November Ballot: Prop 2 Seeks to Modernize Public Education Facilities

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities. If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond (Courtesy Photo)

By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities.

If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Supporters argue that the money is critical for making safety improvements in schools, as well as modernizing science labs, performing arts spaces and kindergarten classrooms. School districts in lower-income areas have no other way to pay for these improvements.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 38% of students attend schools that don’t meet the state’s minimum safety standards. The research shows that schools with sub-standard facilities tend to have students with lower attendance rates, lower morale and lower overall academic performance.

California Black Media spoke with a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesperson on why she believes it should be a YES vote on Prop 2.

“Measure US, Los Angeles Unified’s Local Public Schools Safety and Upgrades Measure on the November ballot would provide $9 billion to upgrade Los Angeles public schools for safety and 21st century student learning and college and career preparedness. The average annual cost to property owners is estimated at 2.5 cents per $100 of assessed (not market) property value. The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education adopted a Resolution on October 22 to support Los Angeles Unified’s Measure US, and State Propositions 2 and 4,” the spokesperson said.

Opponents argue that the state should include school repairs in its regular budget instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. Opponents also argue that the proposition would not directly impact students. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is on record as one of the organizations opposing the proposition.

“Proposition 2 is $10 billion of bonds, new state debt, to pay for school facilities. It is almost certain to result in higher property tax bills, because school districts must provide a ‘local match’ of funds in order to receive money from the Prop. 2 state bonds. That will lead to districts issuing new local school bonds, which are paid for by adding new charges to property tax bills,” said Jarvis.

Opponents also have voiced concerns about what they view as an inequitable distribution of funds. They believe that lower-income school districts should receive a greater share of the state’s sliding scale for matching funds.

“Enrollment is declining in both K-12 district schools and community colleges and the declines are projected to continue. But Proposition 2 commits California to pay an estimated $18 billion, including interest, for school buildings that may not even be necessary. Vote no on proposition 2.”

A “yes” vote gives approval to the state to issue $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.

A “no” vote will prohibit the state from issuing $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.