Great School Voices and State of Black Education Oakland (SoBEO), a collective co-founded by our founder Dirk Tillotson, are gathering information from the Oakland public education community about the state of Black education in Oakland through a survey we developed. (Please take five minutes to complete it. We would love to hear from you, too!)
With the 2024 election right around the corner, we wanted to hear what candidates for the Oakland school board had to say about the challenges and solutions related to the state of Black education in Oakland. We reached out to each candidate with the opportunity to answer the same set of questions. Here is our interview with Dwayne Aikens, Jr., District 3 school board candidate.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity:
Great School Voices: Greetings. Greetings.
Dwayne Aikens: Hey, thanks for having me.
Great School Voices: Welcome, welcome. My name is Keonnis Taylor, and I am with Great School Voices and just so excited to welcome Dwayne Aikens Jr., who is a candidate for the OUSD school board, district three. How are you today?
Dwayne Aikens: I’m doing pretty good. Thanks for having me on your show. I really appreciate it.
Great School Voices: Of course, of course. Now, I happen to know that you do really incredible work in your district because my daughter was a member of the tennis group that you facilitated.
Dwayne Aikens: Yeah. So pretty much my nonprofit, We Lead Ours. We’ve been in business now 14 years, partnership with the Oakland Unified School District. We do substance abuse reduction across the district. What that looks like kids that may have issues, marijuana use, tobacco use. They meet with one of my case managers or myself, depending on the school site, and we support them with a harm reduction plan so that they can be healthy kids. In addition to that, we do summer camps. And, like you touched on it, the tennis clinics. That was something that sparked up because nobody was doing anything during the pandemic. And I was like, well, tennis. They said, you can play tennis. So got with the tennis coaches and we started a tennis program. That program will be coming back pretty soon after the election. All this stuff is over.
But, yeah, I’m just committed to doing work like this. I’m on the board of directors for Oakland Parks and Rec foundation, former park commissioner, former board member of Keep Oakland beautiful. I’m also on the advisory board for BART, Title Vi Environmental justice, and the Sugar Tech advisory commission for the City of Oakland, and former secretary for Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity Incorporated. And so, I just have my hands in the community, and that’s why I’m running, just to really take all the things I’ve learned in community education and collaboration with school districts, take that into the policy realm and support our kids.
Great School Voices: You know, I was just so impressed because you literally answered my first question without me asking it. I literally just mentioned one of the things that I was familiar with in your work, and you answered the question, which is who you are and what you’ve done to improve the education and just the experience for young people in Oakland. So, thank you for that overview. Is there anything else that you want to share about this particular question? Just about who you are? Maybe a little about your background?
Dwayne Aikens: Yeah. I’m an Oakland native. I attended Oakland public schools. I went to E. Morris Cox, Amherst, Castlemont, and then Oakland Technical High School, where I graduated in 2000 from the health academy. I went to Xavier University of Louisiana. And so, the day after elections, I actually fly into New Orleans to celebrate our 20-year class reunion. So that’s my, that’s going to be fun. And my birthday is that Friday, so I just can’t wait for that. But I studied psychology minor in special education. In 2005, I came back because Hurricane Katrina hit. And so that’s how I end up back in Oakland. And I was still going to go back to New Orleans, but I ended up going to the Red Cross. And instead of just getting support, I asked, what can I do to help?
That led me to partnering with Oakland Tech and some other school sites to do disaster preparation workshops. Talk about being from earthquake country, going through a major hurricane and all the lessons learned. That led to doing a couple of interviews and I think I was on Comcast, or I think it was Comcast at that time, or Xfinity. It’s one of those. But I was on their platform and Sports for Kids contacted me and that led to me taking a job at Ascend school teaching physical education, which then turned into me starting a young men’s group called MAPS (Men at Power Strategically), which was modeled after Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity Incorporated. So, it was pretty much a way to get the young men to start organizing, doing leadership stuff on campus and just about being good, healthy young students.
That led into them being the leadership group on campus. One of our highlights, they started a student store and they raised money through that store to do different dances and take the 8th graders on a class trip to great America. And I still keep in contact with a lot of those young men, and one of them young men actually work at Ascend school right now, which is pretty good. I’ve just been in education and community since then, working with kids across the bay, across ethnicities and across even gender types. So, I’ve worked with all our kids.
Great School Voices: Wonderful. Wow. Thank you for that. You have such a rich history in Oakland, beyond Oakland, and just have taken such wonderful steps to connect all of your experiences to benefit kids. So, thank you for that.
Dwayne Aikens: You’re welcome.
Great School Voices: Is Oakland public education heading in the right direction?
Dwayne Aikens: I think we’re heading in the right direction. We just have to get past a lot of the combative work. I think when you’re working, anytime you work in a group, you have to come with a collaborative lens, and it can’t be one. Get everything and nobody. Get nobody else. Get anything. We have to do a better job making sure we utilize the resources and the money that we have. We have to really decide how we’re going to pretty much budget and prioritize our goals and take care of necessities. We need to do a lot more when it comes to making sure that our kids are reading. I think across the board, literacy is. It has to be one of the single most important things.
My theory is that if our young people are capable of reading on the level, we’ll see a reduction in behavior issues. I’m one of those kids that early on, I couldn’t read on my level. So, outbursts, getting in trouble in class, getting into fights, all those different things added up soon. In fifth grade at E. Morris Cox, when Mister Taylor challenged me towards, I’m not gonna suspend you, and I’m gonna help you get to your level, and I’m gonna trust in you, and I’m gonna put you in the oratorical fest, and I’m going to pretty much make you do the work that start helping me get out of trouble. And when my reading skills went up, so did my math skills. And in the 8th grade. In the 8th grade, I was in a special cohort math group at Amherst.
We had a special group where it was those of us that test really well in 7th grade. So, 8th grade we had algebra one, and we had all our core classes together. So were kind of like a magnet group on campus. And by the time we got to Castlemont, were all in geometry. And by the time 10th grade, I already was intrigued. So, literacy is so important. Another thing that’s important is youth volition. We got to make sure that our schools are creating spaces to where the instructors and the administrators, they are there to coach and mentor, but they’re taking the creative young people on campus, and they’re really forging leadership groups. Because one thing that I hear from kids is the things that we as adults might think is cool, that they want, they don’t really want that.
So if we want them filling up after school programs and we want them motivated to come to school, especially when they get in high school and they start taking themselves to school and parents stop dropping them off, if we want them to enter those doors, we have to really reimagine what does daytime learning look like. My one theory that I joke around with before I even decided to run for school board, I was like, I wonder if somebody did like a case study. If you started the school day, if you started school day later and it went a little later through after school hours, will attendance go up? Because I question that, because a lot of people don’t like doing nothing at 08:00 in the morning or 830 in the morning.
And I’m like, if a kid can just be like, okay, I got to about 1030 where I actually got to put myself in. In the mindset of focusing on math or English or something like that, I just. I would love to play with that theory of change in education, because I feel like that’s a place, an area where we can grow is be creative, especially with OUSD, potentially have to close down some sites instead of closing down the sites and not doing nothing with them, play with some redesign of some schools and some tests and see if they work, what worked there, what don’t work there. And then if we find a working model that can help with support some of these areas, then we can take one of our schools and we can remodel it using that formula.
So I think it’s times now to be creative. We definitely need leadership when it comes to school board because we talk about the kid’s social emotional intelligence, but we also have to talk about the adult social emotional intelligence. And that’s not just school board. That’s across politics and leadership roles in the city of Oakland, in the Bay Area. If we’re so divided as a local government, what’s that telling the kids? That’s telling them you solve your problems by yelling and just getting on twitter and popping off. And, no, that’s not what we supposed to be doing as elected officials.
We supposed to be setting the pace and the presidents, and most importantly, we supposed to work hand in hand with the superintendent to make sure that they have the things that they need, make sure that we’re collaboratively working within their vision and mission statement as the executor. And we’re the board advisors, advising them on great policy in order for them to be successful. Because I want any leader that I’m working with to be successful because they represent me and I represent them. So, we got a lot of work to do when it comes to learning how to solve problems from an SEl model.
Great School Voices: Understood. Understood. I love that you use the word reimagine. I think that’s so important to bring imagination into leadership. Now, shifting a bit, can you tell me what you see as the challenges that are affecting the state of black education in Oakland?
Dwayne Aikens: Oh, that’s a really good question. I get so many because I’m on a grass. I’m on the floor with kids. I’m with families from different economic perspectives. But when I’m talking to parents, they. They feel like people aren’t listening to them. And especially when you got the charter versus non charter, some black parents that I’ve spoken to that pulled their kids out of OUSD public into charter, the number one reason they say that they pull them out is because of safety and also that literacy thing. And they don’t feel like they’re getting the proper education that they need. One thing that I see across school sites, and this is charter and public schools, when I’m just observing, I do see this level of, we want to console our black men, we want to build them up, but we don’t want to.
Being a black male, I don’t want to just pop Dwayne on the hand and be like, okay, you’re not going to be held accountable for that. We have to show accountability, but without over policing. And it’s a tough road to walk. But we have to make sure that we’re also, when it comes to us, right? We got to make sure that we’re not misdiagnosing a young person that may be a kindergartner saying that they got ADHD. No, they explore in the world. They might be comfortable and they might actually be learning. Laying on the ground. Let that kid lay on the ground. Now, if that kid still at 12, 13 years old, is laying on the ground and doing stuff like that, then we might want to say, okay, maybe they do have ADHD or some other disorder. Now let’s get them some help.
So the misdiagnosis is, is very important because some of our single parents that are from households that where its low means they can be taken advantage of because SSI give you that extra check and that extra check can be great for the time, but when you start marking your kids up with all these social emotional disorders and different things like that, you can mess up them from when they turn 18, they can’t get insurance policy because you have them looking like they have severe disabilities, especially some of the ones that get their kids classified as emotionally disturbed and all these other things and bipolar and all these other things. It’s like, you know, that they might not give them insurance policy because they look like they at suicidal risk and stuff like that.
So a lot of education and then also when it comes time to communicating with the black parents, to let them know when their kids are misbehaving and doing something inappropriate, don’t just wait until report card night to say it. Do it throughout the. Throughout the school year, just creating that communication place and then recognizing that several parents, especially in the Oakland Unified School District, a mother brought this up that I met at the Defremery [Park] Library in West Oakland. And she said that she went to school in Oakland, and I forgot her daughter goes to a Montessori school or something like that. But her own trauma from her experiences is the reason why she won’t put her kid in the Oakland public school. And so, it exists. It exists like, I’m a product of the Oakland Unified School District. I don’t have any kids.
But I often say, if I had the means, and I do have kids, or whenever I have kids, if God goes, still bless me with some at being 42. But if I have kids, I’m definitely going to put them in a private school simply because I want them to be able to be ready for a university. I want them to be able to compete and get that full ride scholarship so that we take out less financial aid and different things like that. And I bring that up because I did graduate from the Oakland Unified school District with a 3.4 GPA. But when I got to Xavier University in Louisiana, those kids, they were running laps around us.
And so if we’re going to really be real and talk about the state of black education, we want our kids to be able to compete in society. And right now, I feel like at certain junctures in OUSD, that level of competition stops. And kids are on campuses, and if they’re not going into honors classes, some of them may not be getting the things that they need in order to be successful in the real world. Because all the behavior class, behavior issues that’s going on in some of the classrooms also, you have. Also, you have some things to where just teach to pass the test and stuff like that. So, we need to really move past that of all of education. I thought one of the most beautiful things yesterday that I see across OUSD was that the Wi Fi system went down.
So now you got to do some classical, old-school teaching. Okay, let’s get these books. We got it right today because we can’t get on Wi Fi. So, it was really interesting to see people kind of panicking. But we really need to get back to those old school tools. We need some books. We need some workbooks. We need to teach our kids how to do these math problems with it, with the pen and paper, and not just with the computer. So, I think we got ways to go, and our kids need to learn cursive again. Several of my high school interns last summer and the summer before, their signatures were straight lines. I’m like, anybody’s going to go to the bank with your checkbook, and they’re going to write a check on your behalf because your signature is a straight line.
So we need to get back to some of those classical tools when it comes to education. And school should be fun. School should be fun. Kids should want to come to school. Families should feel like they can come into the schools. Community members that stay near schools that may have the resources to help should feel like they can share those resources with the schools. And if we say we’re going to be a community school, we need to really practice what a community school looks like.
Great School Voices: Thank you for that. Now, I have to say that I find it incredibly interesting that as a school board candidate, that you would be challenged at the thought of even sending your own children to Oakland schools. So, in that regard, what can you say about the solutions that you propose? Because I would imagine that the reason why you are running is so that you can implement those solutions and make the schools a place where you would want to your children making sure that.
Dwayne Aikens: All of the, all of the kids, regardless if they’re in an AP class or a standard class, that they’re all getting the tools that they need to be able to compete with anybody coming from any school district in the Bay Area, whether that’s going into the workforce, whether that’s going into trade school, whether that’s going state school or university route, we really need to make sure that our kids are able to compete. We hear a lot of schools across Oakland and other school districts talk about the number of kids that’s graduated from one school and went to college or got accepted. Right, but we don’t have the data on how many kids actually got accepted, how many left, how many stayed, and we don’t.
And then also the other data, how many people stayed for this amount of years and came back, and then finding out that why did you come back or why didn’t you go? Right. That’s how we start to fully help and support our school district, as well as build up and support the learning that we’re providing in the level of teaching. There’s been times where I’ve had to go to schools to do what I’m supposed to do. And I’m coming in and I’m like, okay, Dwayne, you’re the drug education coach. These are not your classes. You’re not mister. You’re not mister Aikens today. Your coach, Dwayne, today. So don’t go in and take over somebody’s school and stuff like that. But there comes a time to where enough is enough. And you’re in the hallway and I’m out of middle school.
I won’t shout out the middle school, but I’m out of middle school and they have a whole bunch of subs. One day I’m there on site and the sub is getting ran by these 7th graders. So, I just like, okay, the culture keeper’s not saying nothing. Nobody’s saying anything. So, I walked into class and just typical, like, hear the sound of my voice, clap once, just firm kids, clap once, hear sound of voice, clap two times. All right, we got 10 seconds to sit down in our seats. We’re going to turn around and get the instructions from our substitute and you’re going to listen. I shouldn’t have to come back in your classroom. The substitute says, thank you, sir. Nobody’s been here, meant by, here all day.
And so those are some things that could make me weary of, like when I have kids, am I going to want to, want them to attend OUSD public school? And I hear that conversation so much. But one of the, one of the cool things that made me smile this week when I was on my way to, I think I was on my way to West Oakland middle and I was passing out some of my flyers as well. I passed out a flyer to one of the parents in front of one of the KIPP schools and she was like, I can’t vote, but I’ll share. And I was like, oh. And she was like, because I stay in Concord and I bring my kids to this school because I don’t like the schools in my neighborhood. So that made me smile. That made me smile.
Smile a little bit. I was like, that’s pretty good. You bring your kid all the way from Concord to come to school in Oakland. That was reassuring. So, when you talk about do I feel like we’re on the road to changing it up and getting to that level of academic rigor? I think we’re there. I just think that we need all of the pieces. We need the school board with the right pieces and the right glue that can work together collaboratively.
And also that same group needs to be able to work very well with our elected city officials that aren’t on the school board to make sure that we’re advocating for things for the school and that we have a collaborative plan so we can pressure Alameda County and state of California to make sure that they take care of OUSD and they help us build up the school district. We’re in Silicon Valley. Our school should be top notch. We’re in Alameda County in Silicon Valley, one of the richest areas in the country. Our schools should be taken care of, and we shouldn’t be taking resources from an underperforming school and giving it to a higher performance school. Everybody should get the same thing.
Great School Voices: Understood, and points very well taken. Now, here are some of the challenges and solutions that the members of the community have shared with our team in a survey that we have out there that has to do with the state of black education in Oakland. Okay, so here are some of those challenges. Resources, racism, poverty, poor leadership, lack of political will to make hard funding decisions, wasted money, teacher quality and lack of diversity. Adult special interests.
Dwayne Aikens:
I think I. I think I said a lot of those.
Great School Voices: I wanted you to see those that you can absolutely nexus between your response and what the community is saying.
Dwayne Aikens: Yeah, I was at Fremont High talking with some, talking with some folks yesterday, and a lot of these bullets came up. I was talking to some of the black males on campus and like Mister Taylor and those educators that rallied around me at E. Morris Cox and Amherst, to push me to that level. They were all black men. They were all black men. And two of them are also members of Alpha Phi fraternity, Incorporated. And I’m a member of Alpha Phi fraternity, Incorporated, and they still mentor me to this day. And when I walk on some of their campuses because some of them have served in principal roles, still serve in principal roles. It’s like, thank you. We’re so proud of you for stepping up and being this next wave of educators.
But we definitely need quality teachers, and that means that we need quality pay. That’s why I said, we’re in Alameda County, Silicon Valley, and we need to work constructively with our city council, our mayor, and we need to. We need to come up with a pressure cooker like OUSD should be. They should be, in my opinion, teachers should be starting at about $80,000, a little bit more than that because the cost, which is.
Great School Voices: How would you address those? So, it sounds like increasing teacher pay would be one.
Dwayne Aikens: Yeah. And we got to collaborate. The school, the school board would have to collaborate with the city of Oakland a lot tougher so that they can, both entities can use their powers to be and really lobby. We would have to lobby. We have to lobby the county. We’ll have to lobby the county so that they can help us lobby the state so that we can get more funding. And it should be a no brainer. Because look at it. The cost of living is tough. Like, I’ve spoken to two paraeducators, and one of them, they were like, I love my job, but I can’t do this for the rest of my life because they don’t pay me enough. And when you look at the funding towards jobs in the city of Oakland, across teachers, across recreational leads, it doesn’t pay.
It’s like, we need these jobs to pay so that they can attract strong leaders. If they paid more individuals like myself and other nonprofit executive leaders, we probably wouldn’t have started our own nonprofits. We probably would have gone and worked at a recreation center and lead that. We probably would have led an after-school program or different things of that nature. We probably would have went into the classroom. And like most of us that do have education backgrounds, when I’m talking to them, it’s like, more. So, if I get there, I got to be on teacher, special assignment or principal in order to survive. And it’s really hard for a teacher. I think, when it comes to quality teachers, I think we have some quality teachers. I think that we do have some not so quality teachers.
And some of the teachers, they’re burnt out because many of them, when they finish working, some of them got to go and take a second job. Some of them are UBER-ing, and so they’re not comfortable. And I remember studying a psychology minor in special education, Sister Blum at Xavier. She told us, she was like, whenever you walk on the campus, regardless what capacity you walk on a campus, your light bill can be unpaid. Your light bill cannot be paid. You might not have any food in the refrigerator, but you got to show up for those kids, and you never bring that energy into the classroom. But that’s really hard to do. That’s a really tough thing to do to show up for those kids when your house is not in order. And so that’s a special skill that a lot of.
A lot of great educators know how to do to where the teachers and the families think. And the kids think that teachers just got it going on now they struggling. They just really love education. They really know how to do the job of being an educator. And that’s also why, in elementary schools, I think that we should have some type of model to wherever our elementary teachers have really trained in either special education, early childhood development, our early childhood education.
Or have those type of degrees and not be somebody that was just an English major that didn’t do any education, didn’t do the education route, but passed the CBEST or whatnot, we need to make sure because that will also stop in misclassification, misclassifying kids when it comes to all of these disorders that they get classified for and they actually have the soft skills to know how to work with these kids to get them to that developmental next stage, because that’s what you learn in those majors. And so, education is an art. It’s a great, it’s a great art. But we really need to make sure that we’re funding education. And of course, when you talk about funding our teachers panel more here, it looks at what are we going to cut and what are we going to close.
Well, if we’re closing some of these schools, if we turn them into resource learning hubs that can bring in additional revenue either as grants get people that are CBOs [Community Based Organizations] like me that may not have a recreation center, I need to rent out space, I can rent it from the OUSD, utilize that space and we can do some creative things with some of those buildings instead of just letting them be buildings without anything going on. Anytime you have a building, lights should be on and some activities should be going on. If you have real estate, you should be making some type of money so we can be creative about it. And it’s going to. And I would. 80,000 I think would be fair just in the Bay Area, like in the perfect world.
Great School Voices: Thank you. Thank you for that, Mr. Aikens. Now here are… I showed you some challenges that the community members responded to the survey with. Here are some of the solutions that they responded with. I’ll show you those. More political will, more school collaboration, more funding, better teacher pay, better teachers, more experienced teachers, more teachers of color, and support for families. Now of those which… go for it.
Dwayne Aikens: Go for it. Finish.
Great School Voices: I was just going to ask which solutions do you feel are viable to implement and how would you ensure that they happen?
Dwayne Aikens: And all I just want… I was going to say, oh, I did not look at it. I did not look at those before for this interview. Those were just my raw emotions about school. I was laughing because those were many things that I just hit on. I think one of the toughest things there is to do is for OUSD to get rid of bad teachers. It’s like a hard thing to do to get rid of a teacher that is bad. So maybe that can be a first step, working on a policy that really helps principals say, nah, this teacher is not good, it’s not good. For this school, and it’s not going to be good for that school. Another one is looking at the schools that are doing well in literacy that serve in the same different populations.
I mean, so looking at schools that are doing well in literacy in the population they serve, looking at schools that are not doing well in literacy with similar populations and having their literacy team do professional developments together. Right. Regardless of the type of school it is, having them do professional development together. Because if you have an excellent teacher over here and you have a weak teacher over here and they start mentoring each other. Well, mentoring, working with each other. But this teacher got some things that this teacher doesn’t have, your educators are going to improve. They’re going to improve. They’re going to learn new things. They’re going to learn new systems. They’re going to test and retest and see what’s working. And then also we might need to.
We might need to rethink the different type of learning styles, figure out how to incorporate those into the classroom and into the learning. Everybody learns different. Like, for me, I found out in college that the classes that I excelled in were the classes that I had least, multiple choice tests where I got the right a little bit more. I got to do presentations and more things like that because that’s where my, that’s kind of like my learning style. To this day I hate multiple choice tests. I’ve learned some tricks, how to figure it out, but I hate multiple choice tests. And so, figuring out those different types of systems to how does this kid learn, right? And then even thinking about educating their parents. Educating their parents on certain things.
Cause some of the parents might have had a horrible education process, and some of them have probably been far removed from education and don’t know how to help the kid at home with the homework, stuff like that. Because we know this math changed. They do it differently now than they did. Did it when were in school. So, I’m like, I’m gonna have to go and read. I’m gonna have to come sit in your math class with you to learn how to do this with you so I can better help you. Right. And really utilizing the restorative justice format to open up and set up the school day. And don’t just use it when a kid gets in trouble, but use those circle groups to build community in the classroom and to get the kids excited about learning.
I think once you start talking to kids and getting them excited about learning, and you also have a real conversation with them about what that bell curve means, like what that standard deviation is saying you’re over here. You are over here, Dwayne. And standard deviation, that’s saying that you can’t read like all the other kids, majority kids in America, is right here. So, we need to get you here. Do you want to get here or do you want to stay up here? We have to do those different things. Another thing is thinking about the age group of the young person that may have a reading disability. For example, you may have a high schooler and you don’t want to give a high schooler kiddy books, now do you?
Because they still want to feel like, I’m old enough to read this and I want to read it. I’m supposed to read a novel. They know that, but they still not confident. So perhaps you build up their reading skills. You know, they can read on the third-grade level. So how about you start building up their reading and language confidence by giving them second grade books and have them go read to a couple of second grade classes? When you’re building up their reading skills, you’re building up their leadership skills, and you’re building up their confidence of reading. And then eventually they go start figuring out things like, oh, this is how I can figure out how to pronounce this one word that’s in that novel. And you get them reading on different levels. So, we got to bring some creativity to the curriculum design.
If we need some cultural relative curriculum design. I would love to see something; I talked about this at the women leagues of voters. I would love to see some of our, in Oakland, but across the United States, but in Oakland, some of our local rappers create academic books, academic workbooks, utilizing kind of like the culture of Oakland, their story, but getting the kids to actually read it and stuff like that. And also, those could be some good listening to books as well. You hear Mister Fab reading about his reading about our height, reading about our high school years at Oakland Tech. That’ll be pretty funny. You get Marshawn Lynch talking about branding and saying Beast Mode and how he turned that into what, a million-dollar company. So, getting some stuff like that, things that they can relate to will be really good.
Great School Voices: Thank you. Thank you so much for that. Now, before we close, is there anything else that you’d like to share or highlight about your candidacy or anything else that you’d like to say?
Dwayne Aikens: Yeah, I’m excited to do this work. I’m excited to put myself out there, because when you run for political office, it’s different. Like, I’m so comfortable being the executive director of We Lead Ours and now it’s turning into Dwayne Aikens, the politician. And so, it’s really, it’s been a blessing to get on just the ballot and to see your name on the ballot, to get a mailer sent to your house and somebody endorsed you and sent the mailer out on your behalf. It’s pretty like, oh, wait, this is really happening. It’s really real. Little kid from Oakland, 90th and Bancroft. My mom was on drugs. My dad was in and out of jail. Thank God for having a great grandmother and a grandmother who just really took care of us and showed us community. And I wouldn’t be standing here today without my grandmother.
She didn’t drive in high school, but were on every BART, going to every scholarship meeting, conversation and figuring it out. And she used to tell me that I can do anything that I want to do, just do it. And so, I’m just gonna keep that in mind. Drown out the haters. And, yeah, we gotta shake up. We gotta shake up education because it’s sad when so many of my friends who are from here and when I’m talking about the private school conversation, and a lot of them are having that same talk when they talking about when their kids get to high school that they’re often pulling them to go to private school. It’s a real conversation. It’s a real conversation. That’s not white kids. These are black parents. Like, my kids are going to go to a different school district.
When they get into, when they get into high school, are they going to private school? And if we don’t change our systems and we don’t start listening to the people, that will happen.
Great School Voices: Which is why it’s so important that we have great leadership at the top.
Dwayne Aikens: Yeah. And [leadership] that’s gonna listen. And, oh, lastly, when I get elected, people like you and others like, I want a coalition of folks from all different spectrums of education, OUSD experience, kids, no kids, but people that’s going to hold me accountable, help have monthly forums to where we’re educating folks on education policy and why things are such, and having those hard conversations and dialogues. Because we got to bring the people into the boardroom because that’s the only way I’ll be able to make things change. If I bring people into the boardroom, I gotta bring the faces.
Great School Voices: That’s right.
Dwayne Aikens: Yep. Teamwork. Teamwork. Yeah. Y’all trusting me to be y’all representative and so y’all gotta hold me accountable starting November 6. You all heard it.
Great School Voices: Thank you so much. This has just been such an inspiring conversation. I think that you have just done so much work to already show how much you care about the young people in Oakland and improving the lives of students in Oakland, particularly black students, through the work that you’ve been doing. So thank you so much for joining us today. And with that, I’d like to bid you adieu.
Dwayne Aikens: Thank you. I’ll see you later. Enjoy your trip.
Great School Voices: Thank you so much.
Dwayne Aikens: You’re welcome.