Could Oakland teacher strike cost district millions for lost instruction time?

California requires 180 days of instruction a year, and another Northern California school district says a two-week strike last year will cost it $47 million for falling short of that.

The Oakland Unified School District has settled a week-long strike with its teachers union — a deal that will boost pay a total of $70 million. But as the administration figures out how to pay for those raises, could it also face stiff fines for the time its 34,000 students went without teachers?

District officials had no answers early this week, but the experience of another large Northern California school district’s lengthy strike last year is sobering: The Sacramento City Unified School District expects to be hit with a hefty $47 million in penalties after a two-week strike left it short of the state’s required 180-day instruction time.

“It’s significant,” said Brian Heap, Sacramento City Unified’s chief communications officer. “It’s not a small amount of money.”

At Oakland Unified, eight days of regular classes were lost, and although campuses were not officially closed, teachers were absent, and the few students who showed up were supervised by administrative staff. The Oakland Education Association, representing nearly 3,000 K-12 teachers, counselors, psychologists, social workers, speech pathologists, nurses, librarians and teacher substitutes, declined to comment. The district did not respond to questions about potential instructional time penalties.

California law requires the state’s school districts to provide a minimum of 180 days of instruction and instructional minutes ranging from 36,000 for kindergarten to 64,800 for high school each academic year. The law specifies a formula for penalties if those requirements aren’t met.

Compliance with annual instructional time requirements and any associated financial penalty is determined by the district’s annual independent auditor, said California Department of Education information officer Brody Fernandez. Audit reports for the 2022-23 school year are due to the state department of education by Dec. 15.

The Sacramento schools strike was different in some ways, and the lost instruction time penalty highly unusual, Heap said. The two-week work stoppage from March 23 to April 3, 2022, involved both teachers and staff, forcing the district to close schools and lose eight days of instruction totaling approximately 2,400 minutes of learning.

The Sacramento district’s 2021-22 academic calendar had only 181 days of instruction planned — just a day over the minimum — and administrators, teachers and staff were unable to reach an agreement on extending the school calendar to avoid a minimum instruction penalty, Heap said.

Heap’s district hasn’t yet paid the penalty but has budgeted the $47 million while the state controller’s office reviews the audit. The district expects the controller to send a letter confirming the penalty and next steps for paying sometime this summer, he said.

Though Oakland Unified didn’t close schools, whether the experience the district offered students during the strike would satisfy the state’s instructional requirement is unclear. Few kids showed up. The district said during the strike that “schools will be open, but it will not be a typical school day as teachers are key to any instructional program.”

“They will be on strike and not in classrooms,” the district told parents. “Central office staff have been assigned to serve at schools to ensure students are safe.”

State funding for school districts is based on average daily attendance. Fernandez said that for districts to claim funding for a day of attendance, “a student must be scheduled for the required minimum daily minutes and offered the annual instructional minutes and annual days in law.”

Fernandez also noted that the law requires that a student receives instruction from a credentialed teacher. He noted that an administrator could also satisfy the requirement if properly credentialed.

The district’s auditor “will check calendar and bell schedule to ascertain whether instructional times requirements were met or not” and that “schools not in compliance will be assessed a penalty per the auditor’s calculations,” Fernandez said.

“The auditor will also check that staff assigned as teachers possessed the required certification documents to satisfy the supervision requirement,” Fernandez said. “Therefore, if the district is claiming ADA because they were open during this timeframe, then the assumption is that the aforementioned requirements were met and the auditor will issue a finding if they determine the district was noncompliant.”

A financial penalty would add hardship on a district that has grappled with shaky finances for two decades.