Students, organizers march to protest ‘policing culture’ at OUSD schools

On Tuesday afternoon, more than 60 parents, students, community organizers — and even the Grinch in a Santa suit — rallied at Oakland Unified School District’s headquarters to commemorate the five year anniversary of disbanding the district’s police force.

Their message: Even though it no longer has a police department, OUSD must do more to remove policing culture from its schools.

The dissolution of the district’s police department was part of a plan known as the George Floyd Resolution, or GFR, which passed in June 2020 and was implemented six months later. It also resulted in millions of dollars for alternative forms of violence prevention, including a team of employees called “culture keepers” and “culture and climate ambassadors” who respond to incidents that were previously handled by police.

OUSD was one of the first districts in the country to vote to eliminate its dedicated police department following the murder of George Floyd, and it has maintained that policy even as other schools have backtracked. 

But the protestors, who arrived at the locked doors of the district office at around 4 p.m. after a march down Union Street, said that OUSD’s efforts have fallen short. They argue that culture keepers and ambassadors are not properly trained or paid, and that Black students remain the targets of higher rates of disciplinary action.

“Removing law enforcement is necessary, but it’s not enough because policing is just a badge,” said Jessica Black, co-executive director for Californians for Justice, a group that helped organize the rally. “Policing is a culture; policing is a mindset; policing is a way of seeing Black children as threats before seeing them as thinkers, creators and dreamers.”

Nelson Alegria, OUSD’s safety director, opened the doors for the protestors about 10 minutes after they arrived. He was presented with a list of demands by Malcolm Harris, the co-organizing director of the Black Organizing Project, a grassroots organization that led the original push for the GFR. Many of the demands are also outlined in a new BOP report.

Among them is a request to ensure that culture keepers and ambassadors receive the full de-escalation training and resources outlined in the GFR’s district safety plan. That includes strategies for trauma-informed care and intervention that involve working in tandem with a team of onsite therapists, social workers and other trusted adults to assess students’ mental health needs. 

The BOP also says that the Black-majority team of culture keepers and ambassadors are underpaid. The two positions pay an average of $37,000 and $47,000 per year, respectively, according to BOP’s analysis of OUSD salary data, well below what is considered a living wage in the Bay Area. 

According to the OUSD data and BOP’s analysis, there are currently 62 culture keepers in the district who do the everyday work of preventing conflicts by building relationships with parents and students. The report also lists 16 climate and culture ambassadors working in the 2024-25 school year (OUSD lists eight people currently in the position). They train the culture keepers and are called in from the OUSD central office to deescalate conflicts. None of the people in these positions carry weapons or have the authority to arrest students. 

Keala Uchoa, a co-author of the BOP report, said that at a Skyline High School town hall on Nov. 20 where students and parents discussed the recent campus shooting, many students told her they didn’t know what resources were available to them, or even what culture keepers were.

“If schools and districts are not implementing that knowledge in every classroom — they’re not even telling students why these adults are here, what they’re trained to do, how they’re supposed to lean on them — how can we expect students to trust them?” Uchoa said.

Alegria told the crowd that the district is fighting to keep violence prevention programs that are in danger of city budget cuts. He also said the district has made their case at board committees and urged city leaders to support gun violence prevention efforts.

“It is not enough, right, and I acknowledge that,” he said, responding to an interruption from a protester. A BOP organizer wearing a Grinch suit later handed Alegria a papier-mâché lump of “coal.” 

The OUSD did not reply to a request for additional comment on the BOP’s demands. 

Nifa Akosua, the co-lead of BOP’s Black Sanctuary project, said that if workers are expected to hold the burdens that students share with them, they must be invested in properly.

“These are the ones who the young people can speak to, and if they’re not being taken care of, then how’s the school being taken care of?” Akosua said.

Significant racial disparities remain in disciplinary actions taken by the district. BOP’s analysis of district data found that while Black students are only 20% of OUSD’s population, they made up half of all suspensions between 2021 and 2024. 

Amia Brizendine, who graduated from Skyline in 2019 and is now a school site organizer at BOP, recounted the trauma of getting suspended when she was 14 after an altercation with another student. She remembered being treated like a threat, and said she wished she had had access to the resources that the GFR later provided, such as trained mental health professionals to ask her about her home life.

“I was one of many Black girls who just wanted to be understood, but yet didn’t have the tools to express what I had going on,” Brizendine said at the rally. “The GFR shows us what’s possible when we prioritize healing over punishment.”

This story was updated to more accurately reflect the size of the crowd at OUSD headquarters.

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