October & November 2025 Executive Board Report by Maura

/ Rank and File Caucus

Greetings fellow members of OEA!

My name is Maura McMichael and I am the Visual and Media Arts teacher at United for Success Academy (UFSA).  My apologies for being late to get out this bulletin, so I am combining the business of October and November together.  With the help of fellow Rank and File Caucus members, I send out monthly bulletins to share with fellow members of OEA what is happening on OEA’s Executive Board. 

Please note that Rep Council (RC) and Executive Board (EB) meetings are open to all members to attend.  I highly encourage you to come!   And I usually note that EB decisions are subject to the approval of the RC, but trying to do anything about this was a procedural nightmare at the November RC that confused everyone in attendance.  According to our union By Laws, the RC is the highest decision-making body in our union, but the EB is going unchecked in its powers. There seems to be a lack of clarity from our leaders (and the Parliamentarian who is hired) on how to check the powers of the EB. 

Below you will find my notes from the October and November 2025 OEA EB meeting.

Highlights from the October and November 2025 EB meeting:

🗳️ NEW BUSINESS – *I personally brought two NBI’s to the October EB Meeting

📈 REPORTS 

  • The President’s Report
    • Reasoning to have Rep’s meet multiple times in November and December
      • To get through all of the outstanding NBI’s for November and to separate meetings with one being business and one being for organizing
      • To start organizing around coming to impasse on our contract
    • We spent time workshopping Points of Information on each NBI that RC would vote on
      • On the Drop the ADL Resolution the EB comment: No fiscal impact
      • Most notably we were split with what language to add to the resolution for the 2nd VP to have access (keys) to the OEA office
        • There were suggestions that both sides get 3-4 sentences to be accurate of the spirit of EB, but that was not honored
        • 7 voted for OEA President Kampala Taiz-Rancifer’s interpretation below, 5 voted against:
          •  Officers who remain in the classroom and do not work at OEA daily are not issued keys. No officers have designated parking spaces. Officers who work in the office on a daily basis are assigned office space, while all other available space is allocated to OEA staff. The current secretary does not have keys, a parking space, or office space, nor did the previous Second Vice President.
        • The officers that voted for this language are the same officers who challenged Mayra Alvarado’s election to 2nd VP (after she had won by a majority of votes).

*Notably this did pass at the November RC, but at the end Kampala, our chair and President, started referring to this as an ‘advisory’ vote. When asked for reasons why this hadn’t been enacted yet at the December RC it was again stated that this was only an ‘advisory’ vote. In my opinion this debacle is a personal feud that is a waste of our members time and is unprofessional. Also the RC is the highest body and yet our leadership is not carrying out the will of our membership on this matter. 

  • VP Report
  • 2nd VP Report for October and November 
    • Motion: I move for that the OEA President schedule a CTA elections training for all EB members, as directed by CTA, at a time that accommodates the availability of most EBmembers.
      • Failed 5-7
      • Rationale was this motion is not necessary because it is already in motion and a few days later it was put in theEB chat a few dates of choices for the training.
  • Secretary’s Notes are in the minutes
  • Treasure’s Report
    • Motion to approve Budget Adjustments totaling around $30k.
      • Passed without objection
    • In closed session: one-time allocation of up to $10,000 to pay a hiring agency to help OEA leaders find a new office manager (as our longtime office manager Linda retired two years ago).
      • I tried to amend to postpone this for a month, but that was denied.
    • We also spent time going over what impasse means and the monetary impacts of what is being offered in the new contract

During the October 2025 EB meeting there were also two grievances and they were voted to be sent to arbitration unanimously. 

🧑‍💻 MY 2 CENTS 

Wasting $10k on a Hiring Agency

Who is the agency? Where is the job posting? (there is still no job posting at the point of this being written 12/2/25) Two simple questions that never got answered. As I stated in the above notes I tried to amend this at EB just to postpone for just one month, because I personally know someone who is interested in the job.  That failed.  The rationale from Vilma, our Treasurer who brought the motion, was that if there is a candidate they still want them to go through the vetting process. And later at Rep Council Vilma stated that $10k is a negligible portion of our budget. What do you think? I think that is our hard earned union dues that comes out of our paychecks every month.

At Rep Council I once again tried to bring a motion to pull this item from the Agenda when voting on the EB minutes. The Parliamentarian called it Out of Order because this vote  was solely a vote to validate the accuracy, the correctness, of the minutes.  So then I tried to Amend the Agenda with a Motion to vote on the $ 10k for the hiring agency. And that turned into a fiasco, with no one understanding what we were voting on. It was supposed to be an Amendment to the Agenda, but then the President led us into a vote on the Resolution immediately. This involves calling for a 2/3rds vote, when it should have been a 50% vote according to our By Laws. In other words, the hired Parliamentarian is directing the Rep Council to violate our voting procedures. 

Executive Board Power Goes Unchecked

As an At Large Member on the EB I think it is my duty to try to bring transparency to our union and to bring information to our members that is important. Hence these newsletters. But if there is no procedural avenue to disagree with the rulings of the EB when their power goes unchecked.  It is also worth noting that the EB Minutes were not successfully shared with Rep Council at the beginning. And with no time given to read them once this was corrected, folks were blindly voting on the minutes. It seems like our Parliamentarian lacks any class, and any ability to help our members navigate Roberts Rules. Lorenza Cuesta vaguely mentioned the procedures that we were supposed to be taken but did not help at all make the motions. He is weaponizing Robert’s Rules to shut down the democracy of our union and putting down our members while doing it. Rep Council is supposed to be the highest body in the union, but if EB minutes get passed with no one knowing what is on them, then the powers have been flipped by a poor structure that is symbolic of Democracy at best. 

Majority of OEA Leadership says NO to cluster/regional organizing

Organizing by clusters was very important to our power in our 2019 strike, but since then the Cluster systems have been collapsed. And now with ICE threatening our neighborhoods, regional organizing is more important than ever. Right now there are no union structures to be able to talk to the schools near you.  We share so much in common, from neighborhood similarities to sharing students who will graduate to their next neighborhood school.  If ICE comes into the neighborhood we are just relying on the officers on release to relay that information back to us. Organizing in Clusters could be important too because we could be sharing our school foot patrols with each other, we could be sharing more information about how our communities are doing, and what needs are arising for them. Something that we cannot talk about in Networks because it doesn’t apply in the same way. In Networks the only overlapping similarities are the material structures of the work day.

The rationale for those who voted against this was that the timing is not right and we need to focus on our contract and potential sites. But this would be beneficial for all of that. And now we are ironically being asked to meet up regionally for our Hour of Power on 12/11 from 4-5pm, but we don’t have any structures to communicate regionally.

Gearing Up for Work Action, Impasse Reached

At the November EB meeting this slideshow was created to explain what impasse means for our members. For the next steps of the process a State mediator will come in on December 15 and 16th.  Mediation will at least take a month.   If not settled at mediation, OEA will request to move to fact-finding, which is where a neutral third party studies the situation and issues a non-binding recommendation.  The main debate right now (of course) is the budget with the district claiming that they don’t have the funds for what we are requesting. We reached an impasse with OUSD offering 0% raises for the next two years. This is a fight for our bread and butter conditions.

Each month OEA has been escalating our structure test to gauge membership participation. The last one in November was for all sites to have a family picket out front of their schools. It was unfortunately on a very rainy day, so some sites choose alternative versions of this action to take. In December the idea is to have an hour of power on 12/11/25 where sites will meet up regionally to demonstrate our strength.  We are tracking our participation percentages to gauge if we are ready to fully go on strike.  Members can find the latest updates from the bargaining table here in the December 2025 updates.

There is an ask parents and students to sign this petition: https://www.standwithoaklandteachers.com

Are you and your site ready to go on strike?

How important is compensation for folks?
I would love to know how folks are feeling about a potential strike! We see UTR and San Francisco gearing up as well and will be in solidarity with them if they go on the line.

Once again, please reach out – let’s discuss and build the union we want! My email is maura.mcmichael@gmail.com. The next EB meeting is on Wednesday, December 10th from 4:30pm-6pm on Zoom. Who can join me?

Solidarity!

Maura

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