Cost Effective

 The Oakland Athletics' final out in their final home game came coincidentally as school was letting out on the day that my principal returned from an "emergency meeting" about the district's budget. Those of us with any experience dealing with Oakland Unified winced in anticipation. The pop up was caught and the team stayed on the field, knowing that they would not be coming back here. There was nothing quite so immediate happening at school. 

Just that looming sliver of Oakland dread that things were not necessarily going to end happily.

This is about the time that a fourth grader came around the corner to let us all know that the boys' bathroom was flooded. I knew that our substitute custodian had gone home for the day. I knew that it would still be another two to three hours before the evening custodian would show up, leaving a gap of time during which half of the after school program kids would have to wade through the half-inch of water that had accumulated on the floor without a drain. 

I set my backpack down. I went to the custodian's closet and grabbed a plunger and a squeegee. I spent the next half hour making the boys' bathroom habitable once again for the boys who needed a place to go. Someone had to do it. 

Here in Oakland, that is the way things work. I can see that the deficit that has blossomed in the wake of creating a district jam-packed with small schools, charter schools, and every effort that had been made to increase the learning potential of the students in these classrooms was costing money we did not have. And that raise that we all got after our last strike? That was money the district did not have. But the negotiations for making things work for the kids of Oakland led us here, to a place where we cannot afford to do public education the way we had set out to do it. Declining enrollment was the biggest arrow people would like to paint pointing directly at the Oakland Unified School District. Anybody looking at the outside looking in will see that there are too many people doing not enough work for the price we are paying. This idea isn't lost on anyone looking at most anything happening in and around Oakland. Silicon Valley is not the fuel that keeps our fires burning. This is a port town. A swirl of diversity and ever-changing community that absorbs and evolves. This is the working class mirror of the city across the bay, San Francisco. 

San Francisco built a new baseball stadium for their Giants. They built a new basketball arena for Oakland's Golden State Warriors. Their schools are struggling to pay their bills. They might have to close schools. And I wonder who is cleaning out their boys' bathrooms.