By Grace McCarty | UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
When Pecolia Manigo’s eldest daughter lost out on a $20,000 scholarship after a breakdown over a grade dispute, Manigo heard more than one family’s frustration with a school system.
She heard the harm she had spent years trying to prevent.
As a co-chair of Oakland Unified School District’s original Black Thriving Task Force, Manigo had helped build an unprecedented framework aimed at repairing the harms Black parents and community leaders say the district has inflicted on generations of Black students. Now, five years after OUSD pledged to pursue reparations for Black students, Manigo says her own children are still feeling the consequences of a promise that fell through the cracks.
“I lost a $20,000 scholarship for my child because one teacher didn’t know how to maneuver through your system to change a grade,” Manigo said.
Another daughter, she said, has dealt with colorism at school, where she has been made to feel lesser because she is one of the darkest girls in her grade.
“She has no sense of belonging,” Manigo said. “If that happens to me, who is literally writing policy, imagine what other Black parents are experiencing.”
In March 2021, during a Zoom meeting 10 months after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, the Oakland Unified School District board voted to pursue reparations for Black students.
Parents, teachers and community leaders soon began meeting to imagine what repair could look like: stronger academic support, Black-centered cultural programming and resources for families long underserved by the district.
Today, five years later, much of that plan remains unrealized.
The school board’s resolution created a 24-person Black Thriving Task Force charged with developing a five-year plan to improve outcomes for Black students by 2026. But the original group stopped meeting after about a year, amid internal conflict and district leadership changes. Interviews with former members show the effort fractured over disagreements about school closures and the role of district officials in the reparations work.
“It was as if we all got together and wasted our collective breath for a whole year,” said Kevin Hill, a task force member and organizer with the Brotherhood of Elders Network in East Oakland. “One of the harsh realities I learned in this process is that the district can just wait people out.”
The task force continues today in a new form, but its work looks different. Some educators, including teachers and school administrators, say pieces of the original promise continue quietly in a handful of schools. Others argue the district never followed through on its commitments.
A sweeping promise
The original task force was unusual. It was set up as a public body, with open meetings and records. Former members described the listening sessions as healing, both as former students and as current parents of children in Oakland schools.
Members envisioned “implementing healing-centered, anti-racist interventions, holding the system accountable and becoming advocates for students,” according to the Black Thriving Plan posted on the district website.
The plan was sweeping. It called for the creation of a Black Thriving Fund, a dedicated pool of money intended to hire more Black teachers, expand Black-centered curriculum, require anti-racism training for all staff and increase outreach to Black families facing barriers to participation in the district.
The fund also was supposed to provide emergency financial assistance to Black families affected by COVID-19, including help with rent and overdue payments to prevent displacement.
The task force was charged with developing measures of Black student success and monitoring both the initiative’s progress and how money from the Black Thriving Fund would be distributed.
“Let’s get ridiculously crazy in love about Black children,” said Lawanda Wesley, then-director of early learning education who served on the task force.
“What we were imagining — we were ahead of our time.”
Stark gaps, then a fracture
Task force members began in 2021 by reviewing district data on Black students. The disparities were stark: Black students had some of the district’s highest absenteeism and suspension rates.
“We kept looking at these data points — chronic absenteeism, literacy, mathematics — it was just dismal,” Wesley said.
The Black Thriving Plan acknowledged the district’s responsibility directly: “OUSD has a responsibility to stop perpetuating anti-Black racism. We must acknowledge our past actions — and lack of action — that have caused harm to Black students, families, and educators.”
The district’s goal was to close achievement gaps and reverse declining Black enrollment by 2026.
But years later, many of those gaps persist. In the 2024-25 school year, Black students made up less than 20% of Oakland Unified’s enrollment, down from nearly half two decades ago, according to district data.
Black students also had the district’s lowest proficiency rates in math and English on 2025 district testing. About 46% of Black students were chronically absent, and nearly 10% had been suspended.
According to multiple former task force members, tensions escalated when the district began discussing school closures as a way to address a growing budget deficit. Historically, school closures in Oakland have disproportionately affected Black neighborhoods.
The task force co-chairs said they opposed closures. But Kampala Taiz-Rancifer, the other original co-chair of the Black Thriving Task Force, said a district administrator told the school board the task force supported the proposal.
Taiz-Rancifer, current president of the Oakland Education Association, said the closures were expected to bring roughly $10 million in financial relief to the district. She said the task force was told it might receive about $2 million in funding if it supported the plan.
Taiz-Rancifer and her co-chair said they rejected the idea, arguing that closing schools in Black communities would undermine the purpose of the reparations effort.
The dispute fractured the group. According to Taiz-Rancifer, members stopped showing up, and then-Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell ordered the task force to pause indefinitely.
Three former members said they felt frustrated.
Hill described the experience as “bureaucratic paralysis.”
“It was a dream realized, not executed,” Wesley said.
Manigo said she still does not know what happened to the Black Thriving Fund, where the money went or whether money was ever allocated to it. No cash payouts were made to Black families, she said. At one point, she said, the district offered “millions” that could have been directed into the fund, but there was never confirmation.
Manigo said the group presented its master plan to the board, but the proposal was never taken up and remains unimplemented, despite still being posted at the bottom of the district’s reparations webpage.
“There was just not the political will to do it,” Manigo said. “It didn’t even take them 365 days to violate their own resolution.”
Afterward, Manigo took the school closure issue to the ACLU, which urged the California Department of Justice to investigate the plan to close majority Black schools. The complaint was resolved when the OUSD board reversed the school closure decision in January 2023.
Manigo said she believes the district focused less on addressing the needs of Black students than on “looking right.”
Meanwhile, Taiz-Rancifer continued pushing for the reparations resolution to survive in some form.
In 2022, Taiz-Rancifer and other advocates pushed to include task force provisions in a memorandum of understanding tied to the teachers’ contract, arguing that would make it harder for the district to ignore or dismantle the work.
When disputes later emerged over whether the district was required to implement those provisions, members of the teachers union and reparations advocates filed a grievance with OUSD. Organizers said the grievance process brought more teachers into the effort and helped lead to the current version of the task force, now co-chaired by Kamisha McLean and Kehinde Salter.
A quieter reboot
This newer version has attracted far less public attention. The district’s reparations website has not been updated since 2021, and the task force no longer holds public meetings. Organizers say that has been intentional.
McLean and Salter said they helped develop a revised Black Thriving proposal in 2023, then presented it to fellow members of the Oakland Education Association and the school board, which ultimately approved it. The proposal focused on improving outcomes for Black students through stronger family engagement, culturally responsive programming and expanded support systems at schools with large Black student populations.
Instead of immediately rolling out recommendations, organizers said the task force spent its first several months building relationships with families and community members, developing bylaws and establishing leadership structures.
“It’s about teaching different communities how to engage with students and uplift Black students,” Salter said. “And that’s a lot of work even before you tell the public.”
McLean said the strategy was to move slowly and deliberately, building a foundation of trust before expanding the work. The task force now largely focuses on supporting “Black Thriving Schools,” campuses where at least 40% of students are Black. There are currently 11 OUSD schools in that category.
To support them, the district has created new roles, including Black Thriving Teachers on Special Assignment. Five positions have been allocated, though one is currently vacant. The remaining four teachers make up the rest of the new, smaller task force.
District spokesperson John Sasaki said in an email that the “Black Reparations Task Force is currently active and moving forward under strong leadership, with a clear focus on supporting Black student achievement and well-being.”
Sasaki acknowledged the new board resolution does not include cash payouts to families.
“We remain committed to this work and to keeping our community informed as it progresses,” he said.
Programs vary widely depending on each school’s needs. At some sites, the focus has been on addressing literacy gaps for students reading below grade level. Salter, a former Black Thriving Teacher of Special Assignment at Sankofa Elementary in North Oakland, said she initially concentrated on teaching children to read because many were struggling academically.
She also developed initiatives such as African American Female Excellence, in addition to the African American Male Achievement chapter already on campus. Salter, who is Black, said she often heard Black students speaking negatively about one another, which motivated her work to affirm and uplift them.
When a child was teased about the color of his skin, she intervened.
“What’s up, chocolate drop — do you know how beautiful your hair and skin are?” she recalled telling him.
She cited the interaction as an example of the importance of Black educators in predominantly Black schools, emphasizing the role they play in affirming students’ identities.
Cultural programming is another major component. Salter helped organize a districtwide Black History teach-in and frequently incorporates Black history education into her programming.
Other schools have focused on leadership and enrichment opportunities for Black students. McLean described taking students on trips to the state Capitol, helping start a robotics club and encouraging Black students to take on leadership roles in school programs.
At Westlake Middle School, she helped organize a large Black History Night featuring performances, a choir, dance programs and guest speakers including local leaders such as Barbara Lee, Pamela Price and Cat Brooks.
She also helped establish student affinity spaces, though she emphasized the work goes far beyond affinity groups.
“We need to support students in imagining futures outside the limits they may see around them,” Salter said.
What remains unfinished
Still, many of the recommendations developed by the original task force have never been implemented districtwide. Manigo said the original framework measured Black student success more holistically, emphasizing not only academic outcomes but investments in arts programs, outdoor learning opportunities and other nontraditional pathways for Black students.
There were also discussions of paid student fellowships for Black students focused on addressing anti-Blackness in public schools. The plan called for emergency funding to support Black families. Most importantly, Manigo said, the proposal outlined efforts to close longstanding achievement gaps affecting Black students, including academic credit recovery programs and job training intended to support success after graduation.
Outside of a handful of schools, Manigo said, little has fundamentally changed.
“When you look at the tangible educational outcomes for Black students and the way that Black students feel in the district, I cannot tell you that that has remarkably changed,” Manigo said. “People have just made their Black History Months a little bit prettier.”
Hill said that when the needs of Black families are not heard, families continue to leave Oakland — something he says is already happening as Black families move to cities like Antioch, Stockton and Hayward and the city’s Black population disperses.
“Then Black people don’t have a cultural hub anymore,” Hill said. “There’s cultural implications to that.”
The broader goal, Wesley said, was to make Oakland public schools so supportive of Black students that Black families would want to return to the city.
“We can be the Oakland I knew in the ’70s,” said Wesley, the daughter of an original Black Panther Party member who was raised in Oakland.
Manigo said she hopes to reconnect with the original community task force members when she returns from maternity leave to evaluate the reparations policy.
“This was my life’s work,” she said. “I sacrificed. My kids suffered. We as a family invested in this.”
“If in your heart and in your body you cannot accept an injustice, then you have a duty to fight against it,” Manigo said.
The work continues
Wesley said that despite her feelings of defeat, she does not regret the effort.
“We kept calling it a roadmap,” she said. “We have a blueprint.”
In Oakland, she added, the conversation has never stopped.
“In the private spaces of Oakland, the communal spaces of Oakland, it’s still happening,” she said. “It’s happening loudly in really quiet places.”
Taiz-Rancifer said the task force took an emotional toll on her, but she remains dedicated to the cause. She is the point of contact for the newly launched Black Thriving Newsletter, which updates parents at Black Thriving Schools on the reparations effort.
“This story is about how Black parents have navigated the system,” Taiz-Rancifer said. “We were able to solidify the work so it can’t be taken away anymore.”
She acknowledged that many Black families in OUSD still have needs that are not being met. But she said the new task force is continuing the work in the right direction.
Taiz-Rancifer recalled an instance of racism involving her son in first grade and echoed Manigo’s earlier point: Even as president of the Oakland Education Association, she said, the work remains personal.
“We live in this skin,” Taiz-Rancifer said.
“White supremacy is not something that will disappear overnight,” she added. “Undoing it is the work we have to do.”
