'They Will Be Lifelong Voters': Oakland and Berkeley Youth Get Ready to Vote for the First Time

For Oakland High School senior Soliyana Dawit, one thing is clear: To get her vote, a school board candidate needs to have deep ties to Oakland schools.

“Someone who knows how schooling in Oakland is,” Dawit said on a gray October morning in her U.S. Government class. “Someone who’s gone to school here and knows what the problems are and understands it at a personal level.”

A first for California, Dawit is one of an estimated 3,500 16- and 17-year-olds in Oakland now able to cast a vote in local school board races. Teens in Berkeley will also be voting in school board elections for the first time this November. The city overwhelmingly passed youth voting in 2016, and Oakland followed suit in 2020. Delays in the county registrar’s office to implement the new system postponed the first vote until this year.

Across the U.S., some smaller cities in Vermont, Maryland and New Jersey already allow youth voting in some local elections, but Oakland is the largest American city to give young people this right.

As the results come in from the Nov. 5 election, we’ll see how many young people in Oakland took advantage of this new power and what impact that had on four school board seats up for grabs.

Leading up to the election, an alliance of organizations forming the Oakland Youth Vote Coalition created a curriculum for teachers to help prepare young Oaklanders to vote.

During KQED’s recent visit to Oakland High School, Dawit’s teacher, Isabel Toscano, was using the curriculum to help students fill out voter registration forms and familiarize them with Oakland’s school board candidates.

Toscano, who grew up in the Fremont suburbs and came of age in the 1970s, wished voting had been a part of her high school experience.

“I think if I would have gotten a lesson like this, I think I would have been a stronger activist,” Toscano said. “It’s exciting to see young people are registering now and getting that habit of not just registering but hopefully voting. They will be lifelong voters.”

A recent study from the University of California, Los Angeles, found it’s easier to initiate voting habits in high schoolers before barriers such as work and moving to new places separate them from civic institutions. Another 2016 study found that people who start voting regularly early in life are more likely to vote consistently throughout their lives.

These findings help explain why more jurisdictions are granting voting rights to minors. Oakland’s youth vote is part of a trend across Bay Area cities that have recently voted on or are considering legislation to give young people more say in how their schools — and, in some cases, cities — work. In Albany, residents will vote on whether to give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in all municipal races.

In San Francisco, voters rejected a law similar to the one under consideration in Albany in 2016 and in 2020, though the measure saw growing support. Youth organizers are now pushing to bring the issue back to voters for a third vote.

At Oakland High School, seniors Ojiugo Egeonu and Chiagozim Chima are part of a group of student organizers drumming up enthusiasm about the election on campus. They put up youth vote posters in the school’s hallways, presented in classrooms, posted on the school’s social media channels and tabled in the cafeteria at lunch.

“I feel like there’s still a long way to go,” Egeonu said. “Now people know what it is, but they’re still asking questions, like, ‘Who are the candidates? What district do I live in?’ And they know the basics. They need to go further in depth.”

Chima said talking with her peers about what changes they want at Oakland schools and explaining what the school board does and doesn’t have power over can help motivate the students to engage with candidates and fill out their ballots.

The top issues she wants to see addressed are bathroom cleanliness and teacher retention.

“One of our AP teachers quit in the middle of Thanksgiving break, and she made us write a 10-page paper that she never graded,” Chima said. “Then we had no World History teacher until like January, which I was like, ‘So what’s the point of having a teacher if the school year is almost over?’” She added that she has asthma and students smoking in the bathrooms sometimes makes it hard to breathe after using the restroom.

The push for the youth vote in Oakland started in 2019. Oakland Unified School District was facing budget cuts and students were fighting to save foster student caseworker positions and restorative justice and AAPI student support programs. Despite student protests, cuts to those services and programs were made anyway.

UC Berkeley sophomore Natalie Gallegos Chavez was a student in OUSD at the time and helped kick off the fight for youth voting in the aftermath.

At a press conference organized by the Oakland Youth Vote Coalition on Oct. 16, Chavez reflected on why students wanted this right.

“We initiated this movement because we observed our school board directors making decisions without adequately considering student perspectives,” Chavez said from the steps of the Rene C. Davidson Courthouse by Oakland’s Lake Merritt. “We were losing valuable programs and witnessing our school board directors make decisions that weren’t in the interest of our students.”

Chavez was there along with a handful of other students to mark the moment and cheer on students dropping their completed ballots in an Alameda County ballot drop box.

As of Monday, Oakland Youth Vote Coalition said they registered more than 1,000 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in Tuesday’s election.

Maximus Simmons, a junior at Oakland High and one of two nonvoting student representatives on OUSD’s Board of Education, said this election marks a real change for student power in Oakland.

“This is a seat at the table,” Simmons said to the students assembled around him and the gaggle of journalists looking up at him from the courthouse’s stone steps. “We’re not at the kiddie table anymore.”

Student votes, he said, are “not just a recommendation to old leaders, but a way to make sure that our input actually counts and matters.”

This year’s vote is just the beginning, he added. “We’re not gonna stop until everything, and I mean everything, we know we deserve and we know will help us thrive in schools becomes a reality.”