Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. After years of waiting, 16 to 17 year olds in Berkeley and Oakland will get a say in their local school board races this November. And it’s taken a lot of pressure and advocacy to finally make it happen.
Ixchel Arista: It’s like a relief, but also a long time coming, you know?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It’s been eight years since Berkeley approved a measure giving students the right to vote for school board. And for years since voters did the same in Oakland. Today, how students push for the right to vote and what’s taken so long to implement it. When did people first start talking about allowing 16 and 17 year old students to vote in school board elections in the East Bay?
Annelise Finney: Well, this is all part of sort of a long time burbling national movement.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Annelise Finney is a reporter for KQED.
Annelise Finney: This movement really took off in the East Bay in November of 2016. That year on the ballot, there was Berkeley’s Measure y one, which was going to allow young people to vote in school board elections and Proposition F in San Francisco.
Annelise Finney: Proposition F would have allowed young people to vote in all municipal elections. And it was a pretty big push. Ultimately, Proposition F in San Francisco failed. And Berkeley’s narrower ballot measure actually passed.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This passed in 2016 and Berkeley have 16 to 17 year olds been able to vote there since then?
Annelise Finney: No, not at all. It kind of stalled. The Berkeley measure had a provision in it that said that the city of Berkeley wasn’t going to pay at all to implement youth voting. So in a way, it’s kind of dead on arrival and it languished for a long time. I mean, it’s been eight years since then.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We’re talking about this now because finally Berkeley and now Oakland students as well get to vote in local school board elections. How exactly did this happen?
Annelise Finney: A big part of why we’re seeing this happen this year is because Oakland pushed for this really hard. There’s an organization in Oakland called Oakland Kids First. It’s a community based organization that does a lot of organizing with young people. They’re embedded in local high schools and they work with people to figure out, you know, what kind of changes would you like to see in your school?
Annelise Finney: And then they help them make that happen. So in 2019, that organization was working with young people and they had identified three areas they wanted to change in the school. And they all had to do with budget cuts.
Annelise Finney: There were proposed budget cuts to restorative justice coordinators, to AAPI students supports and foster youth caseworkers. And students felt like those things were super important for their peers. Then a few months later, Oakland teachers went on strike.
News cast: On day one of the Oakland teachers strike kicked off with songs, rallying cries and thousands of teachers, parents, students and members of various unions gathered in solidarity.
Annelise Finney: It was the beginning of a seven day strike. If you live in Oakland. You probably remember this. And Oakland students were a big part of all of this. They participated in pickets. They spoke at rallies and they organized alongside their teachers.
Lukas Brekke-Meisner: There was a lot of young people that were out in the streets.
Annelise Finney: To learn a little bit more about this. I spoke with a man named Lukas Brekke-Meisner. He’s the executive director of Oakland Kids First, and he was there.
Lukas Brekke-Meisner: Picketing in front of their schools where leading marches downtown were at the rallies. And there came a point where the young people shared with union leadership like, hey, we actually are organizing some things right now to.
Annelise Finney: Some of the young people said, Hey, we’re organizing with you. Can you organize with us and weave some of our demands? These three that I just mentioned about budget cuts into what the teachers were asking from the school district. Ultimately, what happened is that when the union deal came through and none of the student requests were in it, a lot of students were really mad.
Student: We are here to tell you what we need, but it seems to be going in one ear and out the other.
Annelise Finney: The school board decided they were going to hold a meeting. It was the day after the union reached their deal with the district. And Lucas told me that students showed up in mass. He estimates there were about 500 students there coming out here. He started giving these really passionate comments.
Student: But time and time again, you let us down.
Student: We are tired of getting stepped on. We are tired of getting dragged through the mud.
Student: Students have a voice and we will fight back. Where was our input in the strike negotiations?
Student: I’m here today speaking for all of the students of all because we deserve better than this. Then what? The student, the director have been.
Annelise Finney: But the school board wasn’t really hearing it and they got a little overwhelmed. They eventually went into closed session.
Lukas Brekke-Meisner: I think it’s cemented for me and for a lot of the young people that like, if this is all we can do, like this isn’t good enough, like we’re not going to be able to move the needle.
Annelise Finney: Lukas told me that there was a real realization that, you know, showing up at school board meetings and telling school board members how they felt wasn’t getting students to where they wanted to be.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: How does this eventually lead to them pushing for the right to vote in school board elections?
Annelise Finney: After that meeting, students kind of went back. They thought about it some more. And after the summer, student leaders got together and said, What we want to push for is youth voting.
Ixchel Arista: Like I thought, we just keep our heads down and listen to what teachers tell us and that’s it. But know.
Annelise Finney: Ixchel Arista is a graduate of Oakland High School. She started as a freshman there in 2020 and joined into this voting rights youth movement after sort of the drama I described in 2019.
Ixchel Arista: I realized that it’s really important that students as young as possible get civically engaged and are aware of the change and the power they hold as constituents of a lot of different elected officials.
Annelise Finney: For her, she said, this was all kind of common sense, that it made sense that students had been asking for this. Students are the number one constituency of the school board. They should have a say in what the school board decides to do.
Ixchel Arista: It made sense. Again, the more I saw organizing, the more I was like, No, we should. Students have always had the ability to choose and elect the people who are going to be making the decisions that impact them every single day.
Annelise Finney: At the time, a lot of young people in Oakland didn’t know that Berkeley had passed a similar measure to what they might have been envisioning. And once they figured that out, they started working with some of the young people in Berkeley who had been part of that campaign.
Annelise Finney: They took the bones of Berkeley’s Measure y one and incorporated that into what they were going to ask for in Oakland. And they started meeting with city council members. And what they found was that Oakland City Council members were pretty on board.
Ixchel Arista: But it turns out it was only the beginning of a very, very long bureaucratic, just like logistical, technical process.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, why it took so long to get youth voting up and running. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This measure in Oakland Measure Q. Q had some support among city councilors. It eventually got enough support from voters in Oakland to pass in 2020. But it still takes a really long time to implement.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And then there’s still this Berkeley one from 2016 that’s like not really being fully implemented yet either. Why is that? And please, why is it taking so long for students to actually be able to finally exercise this right, even though these measures have already passed?
Annelise Finney: Yeah. Well, from the organizers I’ve spoken to and the young people who are part of this, they say there are really two things. The first is the technical challenge of getting this done. Young people have never voted in Alameda County before, so the county has to come up with a system for printing and processing. Youth votes have to be young.
Annelise Finney: People can only vote in this one type of election and our normal ballots have a bunch of elections. All of these kind of little questions that have to be answered about technically, how is this going to work? Right. The other part of this is the will. The Alameda County Register has had a lot going on. It’s kind of a fundamentally understaffed office.
Annelise Finney: The best example of that is that the registrar who oversees all of the county’s voting is also the IT director for the county, which means he oversees the entire county’s I.T. department. So they have a lot going on. And for a long time, this just wasn’t really a priority.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I also imagine you have students, I mean, aging out, you know, I mean, the students who pushed for the measure in 2016 and in Berkeley, I mean, in four years are graduating.
Annelise Finney: Yeah, This is something that Lukas said is is sort of a fundamental challenge of youth organizing. And, you know, I think we saw this in a different sphere, but with the pro-Palestine encampments at college campuses that, you know, there are these big breaks in the year, everybody goes home.
Annelise Finney: Oftentimes they’re sort of disconnected from their friends. And then, as you mentioned, after four years, a lot of young people leave where they live and go off to do other things, whether that’s college or something else. And so there is this kind of churn and it is hard to create continuity.
Annelise Finney: But I think this is one thing that, you know, organizations like Oakland Kids First that are able to sort of stick with something and be adult allies through that gap are able to kind of help balance out and hopefully work against.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So what has that look like exactly since this measure passed in Oakland in 2020? What has the Alameda County registrar been up to to kind of get this finally going?
Annelise Finney: Oakland Unified School District hired an election consultant. They’re a technologist and they helped design the state’s voting system so they know how the system works and we’re able to come up with a plan for how this would work in Alameda County. But coming up with a plan is just part of it. They also have to test it and make sure it was going to work.
Annelise Finney: Oakland’s registrar had a series of sort of high profile mistakes in the 2022 general election. So the registrar has a lot of eyes watching it closely. And I think they are very kind of nervous about getting this right. And it was taking a long time. Initially the plan was for them to provide notice to Oakland and Berkeley about whether this was going to happen by July 12th, and they just blew past that deadline.
Annelise Finney: There was no word to the public about what was going on with it. At the same time, part of what the city’s had to figure out here is how this was all going to get paid for. As I remember, I talked about the Berkeley ballot measure issue where they said, you know, we’re not going to pay for this.
Annelise Finney: So why is the registrar sort of coming up with the technical plan? The cities are signing a cost sharing agreement. It’s shared now between Alameda County and the city of Oakland and the city of Berkeley.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So how did activists find out that this is finally for real actually happening and when did they find out?
Annelise Finney: Well, they found out really recently. And we’re really excited.
Annelise Finney: I know a couple of weeks ago, some of the leaders of the Oakland Youth Vote Coalition, which is a number of different organizations, had the pleasure of letting some of the student activists know that this was actually going to happen this year. And they posted about it on social media. And you can hear they’re very excited.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, Annelise, how rare is what is happening in Berkeley and Oakland? I mean, this this right, for students to vote in a local school board election.
Annelise Finney: There is a growing movement around this, but this is the first time this has happened in California. And that’s in part why this is such a challenge for the registrar to get off the ground. But it is sort of becoming a growing groundswell.
Annelise Finney: I mean, we saw this in San Francisco and Berkeley in 2016. We saw Oakland in 2020, and then this year on the November ballot, Albany voters are going to vote on whether to allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote not only in school board elections, but all local elections.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: How are students being informed of their right to vote? I imagine that’s going to be its own thing to getting people to know to register, right?
Annelise Finney: Exactly. Yeah. This is something that Lucas also talked about that, you know, this is sort of about getting everybody to vote, but really it’s about building young people’s power and giving them a say in their schools and the way these schools are run. And that doesn’t happen just by having the right That happens when people are exercising it effectively.
Lukas Brekke-Meisner: We’re really optimistic that we can lay a certain foundation of understanding on this so that when people are young, people are voting that like they have a sense of what they’re doing.
Annelise Finney: The Oakland Youth Vote Coalition designed a humanities curriculum. It’s a week long, but you can also break it up into chunks. It’s on their website. It’s free. And the hope is that teachers will take that up and during the school year teach young people about both how to register, but also how to look up who’s on the ballot and then also what it means to go vote, how you fill out all the bubbles, all the things that can get a little confusing and weird the first time that you vote.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And what are the kind of issues that students will not have a say in that they maybe didn’t have before?
Annelise Finney: Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people don’t really know what the school board does. So that’s also part of what young people are going to have to get up to speed on. But what they’re going to now have a say on is how the district spends its money. And that’s a really big deal because it affects what types of programs the students have.
Annelise Finney: And when there’s a pinch, it affects what types of programs get cut. On top of that, they’re also going to have a say in what kind of policies shape the school. To give you an example.
Annelise Finney: A lot of people remember back in 2020, there was a lot of youth organizing around the George Floyd resolution to eliminate the Oakland Schools Police Department. Young people rallied around that a lot, but didn’t actually get to vote on the people who really got to make the decision on it. And now they’ll be able to.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Annelise, thank you so much for breaking this down. I appreciate it.
Annelise Finney: Thanks for having me.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So if you are a 16 or 17 year old who wants to vote for school board in Oakland or Berkeley, you can fill out an online pre-registration form with the secretary of state’s office. We’ll leave a link in our show notes to that. Once it’s time to vote, you should get a ballot in the mail or you can vote in person at the county Registrar’s office located inside the Rene C Davidson Courthouse in downtown Oakland.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Annelise Finney, a reporter for KQED. This 30 minute conversation with Annelise was cut down and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. I produced this episode, scored it, and added all the tape Music courtesy of Audio Network.
