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Teachers with the Oakland Unified School District returned to their campuses on Wednesday morning to get their classrooms for the first day of school on Monday.
But 20 Oakland principals aren't coming back this year.
That's a quarter of the district's principals. Some of them apparently aren't returning at least in part because of the contentious teachers' strike that happened earlier this year.
Leroy Gaines, the principal of Acorn Elementary School for the past nine years, is one of those who won't be back, having taken a new job at a nonprofit where he'll help to train principals.
He told KCBS Radio that the strike left him and some of his fellow principals feeling isolated and caught in the middle.
"After a year like last year, I think it was emotionally taxing and draining for a number of the principals. I personally did not leave because of those reasons, but I do know it was a pretty tough year," he said. "Because you're on the ground level. The decisions are coming at the top from the board, the union. The teachers, they're out on the street, protesting, then you had the principals who really had to hold the community together."
District spokesman John Sasaki said it's not an exodus. He acknowledged that the job can be tough, but attributed the numbers to normal turnover, and denied any knowledge that the departing principals were leaving because of the position they were put in when the seven-day strike ended in March.
"[There are> quite a number of different reasons behind the transition that some of our staff has gone through, but that's kind of normal for education. A lot of people decide they want to do something different. Some decide they want to move up in organization, some have dream jobs," he said. "So it is possible that some of the things that happened last year started to get to people? I guess, but I've only heard stories from people about things they wanted to do, whether here at the district or elsewhere, not about what they wanted to get away from."
