Features

The California Senate Education Committee has scheduled a public hearing in Oakland next month on the State Department of Education and procedures for return to local control of school districts in state receivership. 

The hearing, to be held at the Oakland City Council chambers on Monday, Dec. 3, from 9:30 a.m. to noon, was requested by State Senate President Don Perata (D-Oakland), and is being coordinated by his office. 

The Senate Education Committee hearing is separate from the hearings scheduled to be held next year by the Assembly Select Committee on School Takeovers, chaired by Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland). The first of those hearings is tentatively scheduled for January in Sacramento, and at least one of the Assembly Select Committee hearings will be held in Oakland, as well. 

A spokesperson for Senator Perata’s office said that the Senator “wanted to hold a public hearing to examine the role of the Department of Education in bringing financial stability to local school districts under state control. He wants to lay out the state’s role in restoring fiscal solvency to those districts, and to develop timelines and benchmarks.” 

Both Perata’s office and a representative of the Senate Education Committee said that while the hearing would be held in Oakland, the focus would not be exclusively on Oakland Unified, but on all of the state’s public school districts currently under some form of state control. 

Perata authored the original state legislation in 2003, SB39, which put the Oakland Unified School District under state control, where the district currently remains. 

Swanson authored a bill this year, AB45, that would have brought more certainty to the process of returning local control to OUSD, taking it out of the discretion of the State Superintendent’s office and leaving it solely to the recommendation of the state’s education watchdog and intervention agency, the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT).  

Perata served as floor manager of the bill in the Senate, which passed both the Assembly and Senate, but was vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

The Senate Education Committee hearing in Oakland next month will take testimony from three panels, one of them composed of representatives of statewide organizations, including the California Education Department and FCMAT, as well as two panels composed of representatives of areas where school districts are currently under state control. Oakland Unified School District Board President David Kakishiba has been invited to testify at one of the panels, but the rest of the panel’s list has not yet been finalized. 

There will be no opportunity for the public to speak at the Senate hearings. 

This week, Swanson said he was “in full support” of the Senate Education Committee hearings.  

Kakishiba said, “I think the public hearing is a good step forward.”  

The school board president said that AB1200, the original legislation that authorized the state to take over local school districts, “has a lot of weaknesses that need to be addressed. It takes a one size fits all approach to problems in school districts.” 

During the 2003 Assembly debate over the Oakland Unified takeover bill, SB39, several Assemblymembers pointed out that AB1200 was geared specifically towards districts in which fiscal malfeasance had been practiced by either the local school district administration, the local school board, or both, adding that the legislation’s complete stripping of power from the Oakland Unified School Board did not seem appropriate because no such malfeasance was alleged in Oakland’s fiscal problems.