What is the Vote Tracker?
The Vote Tracker has aggregated the legislative items and vote records from ousd.legistar.com into an easily sortable and searchable interactive dashboard.
Vote Tracker
Welcome to GO Public Schools Oakland’s OUSD Vote Tracker. The Vote Tracker makes it easy to follow how Oakland School Board Directors have voted on the issues important to you.
The School Board makes decisions that have significant impacts on the District, including: setting the budget, hiring and management of the Superintendent, enrollment policies, school portfolio management, discipline policies, and more.
Knowing the issues that are coming before the Board and how individual Directors voted on those issues is key to holding the Board accountable and advocating for continued improvement in the District.
How do I use the Vote Tracker?
At the top of Vote Tracker is a search bar. This can be used to search any text contained within the tables, including item name, subject, and type.
Beneath the search bar are four filters: Subject, Date, Director, Type.
Below the filters is the table of individual legislative items. In this table, you will be able to see individual votes on the legislative item. Each row is linked to the legislative item on ousd.legistar.com. Click anywhere on the row to go to the corresponding legistar page.
What does the Voter Tracker include, and not include?
The Vote Tracker contains voting data on all legislative items that received a vote at both regular and special Board meetings from 2014 to present, excluding items on the general consent report*. Only the votes of currently sitting Board members are displayed in the Vote Tracker.
*The general consent report is a list of items that the Board votes to approve en masse at every meeting without discussion. It typically includes items like professional services contracts and personnel contracts.
This is a lot of data. Can I filter it?
The Vote Tracker data can be filtered by Subject, Date, Director, or Type.
Subject: the broad issue category being addressed by the legislation. For example, the “Schools” category includes things like curricula, school portfolio management, and Quality Schools Development.
Date: By adjusting the starting and end date on the Date slider, you can filter the date range of items displayed in the table.
Director: By using this filter, you can limit the table to only display votes from particular School Board Directors.
Type: the form of the legislation being voted on. For example, motions, resolutions, and Board policies.
What is the source for all the data?
All voting data and legislative items within the table were pulled from ousd.legistar.com by a GO staff member.
The “Types” filter aligns with the list of legislation types used on ousd.legistar.com. The only difference is that we broke the type “Charter School Petition” into sub-types of charter school petitions in order to increase usability. We anticipate that these votes will be some of the most examined and we want to ensure that people can understand what the Directors were voting on without clicking on the individual item (e.g. a charter petition denial and charter petition approval look the same if you’re only reading the item name.)
The list of issue categories contained in the “Subject” filter was designed and applied by GO staff. Some legislative items could be categorized under multiple subjects. In these cases, the more narrow or salient subject category was used.
How often is the Vote Tracker updated?
The Vote Tracker will be updated monthly, though the timeliness of updates depends on how frequently ousd.legistar.com is updated.
If you have any questions, or find any inconsistencies or inaccuracies within the data, please email ryan.beck.turner@gmail.com.
