OUSD School Board Candidates Respond to Questions About Policing Students & School Climate
On Thursday, October 16, the Black Organizing Project hosted an OUSD school board candidates forum with the Parent Action Leadership Network and Californians for Justice. This was an important opportunity for school board candidates to address critical questions and concerns from the community about their views for the future of Oakland schools. BOP’s Bettering Our School System Campaign focuses on implementing alternatives to policing Oakland students. Below are the candidate’s responses to questions on policing Oakland students and school climate in Oakland.
Would you support the removal of police in schools and on campus?
District 2
Aimee Eng
“I would not be able to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I don’t know enough to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at this time.” Aimee did, however, say that she advocates for the use of violence prevention and restorative justice programs on school campus.
District 4
Nina Senn
“Yes. I’m a major advocate of RJ and volunteer support on campus. We’ve done that successfully at Montera Middle School.”
Cheri Spigner
“No. I would not remove police from schools. There’s a need for safety and security in our school environments and because of that I would make sure that every student would be able to have a safe place to be. However, disproportionately there are arrests in the African American community so because of that I do believe that police need to have more training, there needs to be more collaboration in the neighborhoods and in the communities, and there needs to be working collaboration with our city officials and city leaders.”
*Cheri left the panel after responding to this question.
Karl Debro
“No. I do not support removing police. I’m an admin and sometimes police do a lot of things that are not good. I see that as a problem with training and not presence. We need police on campus. I do not support removing police I support much better training of police.”
District 6
Renato Almanzor
“My initial response is ‘Yes’, but that would change over time. Yes. I think what we need to do is create a space where we have much more comfort and understanding in creating community. That’s what my commitment would be- to work with not just police but all community partners and providers and city and non-profit organizations to serve as partners towards creating what I characterize as a beloved community for our kids.”
Do you support moratorium on suspensions?
Renato Almanzor
“I’ll have to say ‘No’ first and I’m willing to be persuaded… I think about a year ago I was working with a statewide group to see what it would take to eliminate suspensions… What I learned was there’s a lot of awesome principles around restorative justice, which we can really implement, and I know Oakland is a great leader in that work. But there are just some legal requirements around suspensions… What I would prioritize in terms of the work [is that] we do need to figure out how to create a positive school climate. I think we need to figure out how to do that together. I think we need to work with our students in particular to say what is the kind of world that we want on our school campus. I believe that the greatest poverty in Oakland is the poverty of our imaginations. We can barely imagine something better for ourselves, let alone each other. So how do we create a space to work with our young people to say ‘What can we imagine so that we all feel safe, proud, comfortable in our environments?’ If we do that then that will help us figure out how to address issues of suspension.”
Aimee Eng
“I would not support a moratorium for suspensions… I actually was at a meeting yesterday, which was talking about how our suspension rate has significantly decreased… I think that we are on a positive trajectory in terms of decreasing suspensions. In terms of school climate… we’re fortunate in Oakland to have a number of nationally recognized programs around school climate. I think the district needs to be doing a better job in investing in and increasing some of those programs at the school level. A lot of those programs are being funded either through private foundations or through PTAs and other mechanisms and not necessarily through the school district. I think that there’s a lot more work that we need to be doing in scaling up some of these positive school climate programs that are located in Oakland.”
Karl Debro
“No. I do not support a moratorium on suspensions at all. Suspensions aren’t the problem- it’s abuse of suspensions. It’s a lack of, I agree with what Renato said about imagination. I’m in the Richmond area, where the school district there is still under receivership over a horrible, brutal rape that took place at one of the schools. Should those students be suspended, yes, of course. I work with dropouts that are coming from some really tough circumstances and what they didn’t have at their comprehensive high school, we provide at our program, which is a lot of support. A lot of students that get in to trouble and it ends up in suspension are not getting supported. We have kids who are coming to school after their friends have been murdered. They’re coming to school with terrible pain and we’re kind of ignoring that… We provide support, case workers so that we can help them work through it and then they don’t just blow up in classrooms because the teacher got out of line a little bit. They’re supported and that’s what we need more of.”
Nina Senn
“No. I aspire to us not ever needing to suspend our students because I want to keep everybody in school because that’s the only way we’re going to disrupt the school to prison pipeline. One of the ways [to disrupt the school to prison pipeline] that I’ve been advocating for as a practitioner is restorative justice. One of the studies shows that restorative justice reduces suspensions by 80%. If suspension is needed in egregious circumstances, then we need to create re-entry spaces.”