The State - News from Aug. 24, 1988

Six Oakland Unified School District employee groups criticized district officials, accusing them of keeping employees in the dark about a $5-million budget deficit. “All of a sudden, we open the newspapers and see we have a deficit,” said Michael Hopkins, president of the United Administrators of Oakland Schools. “Why does the media know about it before the people working for them?” Hopkins is one of the leaders of six unions representing 6,500 district workers who held a news conference to oppose cost-cutting measures offered by Supt. Joe Coto to deal with the district’s financial problems. The criticism came as the Oakland Board of Education is trying to figure out how the district came up short in July, after it was “cash healthy” a little over a month before.