VIDEO: Elections are complicated. Here’s why GO engages anyway.

This November, Oakland will elect four new school board members. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ensure that we elect a school board that is both focused on the urgent challenges currently facing our schools. We know that our schools were already not serving Black and Brown students equitably, and that has only worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic. Now more than ever, we need really strong leaders who will bring people together, not divide us, to create a better and more equitable reality for students and families. 

GO has been working in school board elections since 2012, but this year in particular is a big moment for our community. We’re looking forward to kicking off our community-driven endorsement process in the coming weeks, but before we do that, I sat down with our executive director Jessica Eastman Stewart and two community members – Ron Towns, an assistant principal in an OUSD school, and Wanda Wilkerson, an Oakland grandma and GO Election Squad member. 

We talked about why we got involved in elections back then, why we created our very unique community-powered endorsement process, and why this election year matters more than any other before. Watch our conversation here:

Stay tuned for more – we’ll be sharing lots of information you can trust about voting by mail, how Oakland’s ranked-choice voting system, and how Oakland’s voter demographics are not representative of the public school student population.