Occupy Oakland
On Wednesday evening, a crowd of nearly 150 people, many of them parents, kids, and Occupy Oakland protesters, gathered on the concrete steps of Lakeview Elementary School hours after their two-week-old tent city was raided by Oakland Unified School District police and other law enforcement officers. The encampment was an effort to protest the district’s decision to close five elementary schools —Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell and Sante Fe—and keep all neighborhood schools open.
The tent city at Lakeview Elementary School has been dismantled. At 4 a.m. Oakland Unified School District police and other law enforcement officers raided the encampment where parents, teachers, and community activist had been sleeping for two weeks in an effort to protest the district’s decision to close five elementary schools.
After 16 days, the number of tents visible at the encampment at Lakeview Elementary School has doubled and protesters have changed their rules: No one is allowed to know the number of kids or adults who occupy the site in an effort to avoid a police raid. To celebrate the first two weeks of the sit-in protesting the closure of Oakland elementary schools and the launch of the People’s School of Public Education, the tent city residents hosted a community potluck on Sunday, as well as a documentary screening.
On Saturday afternoon nearly 200 protestors showed up for a 1.7 mile march organized by a coalition of community organizers, Occupy Oakland supporters and Lakeview Elementary parents to protest the closure of five Oakland elementary schools by the Oakland Unified School District.
The People’s School for Public Education is nearly a week old.
Protesters, including parents of students at Lakeview Elementary and members of Occupy Oakland, continued to occupy the Oakland Unified School District elementary school across from the Grand Lake Theater on Thursday, holding classes like gardening, art and social justice for the dozen or so adolescents present.
On Tuesday a second “stay away” order was issued by the Oakland Unified School District to protesters currently occupying the Lakeview Elementary School property but a small group of people continued to camp on the school grounds overnight as well as hold classes and community speak outs there during the day.
“We reserve the right to remove protesters from the premises,” said OUSD spokesperson Troy Flint.
By 7 p.m. on Monday night, the encampment at Lakeview Elementary School that drew over 200 people from the community had quieted. Parents, teachers, and activists who had taken over the school in protest of the district’s plans to close it and four other elementary school campuses were preparing for the night’s rest and having two roundtable meetings outside of the school.
Protesters at an encampment that has been growing for the last four days at Lakeview Elementary School, just off Grande Avenue, have been served with notices from the Oakland Unified School District to leave the school immediately and not return for 30 days.
School is out and parents who disagree with the Oakland Unified School District board’s decision to close five elementary schools—Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell and Sante Fe—at the end of this school year are protesting by building an encampment on the Lakeview campus, just off Grand Avenue.