Oakland Unified School District Cuts Teachers But Keeps 'Sanctuary' Training
The educational priorities of our coastal elites
Due to an estimated $95 million budget deficit and an even larger shortfall looming in 2026, the Oakland Unified School District is cutting hundreds of jobs. Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell blames “declining enrollment, higher salaries, and sunsetting COVID relief funds, which expired last fall.”
The first hundred layoffs were announced on Friday. However, yesterday OUSD still held the first of two scheduled trainings “on our District Sanctuary protocols,” according to a message posted on ParentSquare and shared with The Distance. For no matter how bad things get for the children, there must always be resistance to immigration authorities.
The message is signed by the Office of Equity and the Office of English Language Learner and Multilingual Achievement (ELLMA). A Zoom session took place at 2 PM local time yesterday and a second will be held at the same hour on 19 March. The brave Trump #resistance fighters have been spared from the layoffs. One might even suggest that their jobs are considered ‘essential.’
This Sanctuary Protocol is in fact deeply embedded in Oakland schools. According to an official community message copied in a local education blog entry from 2020, “OUSD is a sanctuary district, inside a sanctuary city, inside a sanctuary state.”
While Oakland has a long tradition of leftist overflow from Berkeley, the OUSD Board of Education “reaffirmed” their status as a Sanctuary District in December 2016, right after Trump was first elected president. His second term makes this #resistance all the more important and meaningful, surely.
A theme runs through these materials: undocumented immigrants are not just a protected class, but a secret that everyone in OUSD is expected to keep from themselves and the government. No one is supposed to know what any child’s immigration status is. No one is supposed to ask, let alone answer questions about it.
Instead, everyone with questions is referred to a group of four nonprofits for resources. Any ICE or law enforcement questions should be referred to the same nonprofits. This script is called “the Santuary Protocol.”
OUSD maintains an official web page with the H1 headline “Oakland Unified is a Sanctuary District.” Below is the summary of last week’s presentation.
The Sanctuary Protocol is also explained in this short video found on the OUSD Google site. It is seven years old and even mentions the first Trump administration as an impetus behind the Sanctuary Protocol.
ACILEP, the Alameda County Immigration Legal & Education Partnership, wants the engaged citizen to report any activity by federal immigration authorities. After all, we wouldn’t want them disrupting the learning environment, would we?
If the reader wishes to see learning environments disrupted, here is a spreadsheet of eliminated positions from the OUSD Board of Education. One of the workers affected, a person who works with special needs children, spoke to The Distance on condition of anonymity.
“We were all shocked by the news,” the special education therapist says. “The disabled kids are the ones who really suffer from these policy priorities. They get very attached to their school therapists, and they expect us to be there through at least the end of the school year.”
“I think the outcome for the kids is unnecessary trauma and loss,” our source continued. Worse, “this loss is attaching to their efforts at learning. This may discourage them from attaching to future clinicians.” But at least they will be protected from Trump and ICE, which is what matters the most in Oakland.
The teachers of Oakland have learned to keep secrets, to withhold citizenship status information from the government and law enforcement, to pretend they don’t know who the immigrant children are. It was good training for all the pretending and lies they want to do around ‘gender.’
‘Sanctuary’ infers salvation. Too many education professionals think they are saving other people’s children from the government — or from their own families. School systems that fanatically promote sex confusion in kids and ‘affirm’ children, for example encouraging boys to play female sports, will always prioritize these ‘salvation’ goals over their core mission of education.
Their politics will always come first, the kids will always come last.
How The 'Open University' Closed Its Legal Mind To Almut Gadow
When the “curriculum liberation” fad arrived at her department, law lecturer Almut Gadow started asking questions about the new speech codes. The Open University responded to her questions about “LGBTQ+” by silencing and then firing her.
*facepalm*