Mary Prime-Lawrence canvasses East Oakland voters for GO. (Lillian Mongeau/KQED)

The role of money in politics is a big issue in many elections this year – including the race for four seats on the Oakland Schools Board of Education.

A local non-profit, the teachers’ union, and the board candidates themselves are expected to spend more than $300,000 on seats that have been uncontested in more than half the races since 2004.

Mary Prime-Lawrence is a dozen doors into her list of registered voters on 88th Avenue in East Oakland. She’s standing in the dark hallway of a rundown fourplex. Most people haven’t been home, so she smiles when the deadbolt slides open.

“Hi there. Is Michelle Logan in? Are you Michelle? She’s not here right now? Can I leave some information for her? If you can give her that. James Harris is running for school board. We hope she can give him her support November 6,” Prime-Lawrence asks.

After 40 minutes, Prime-Lawrence has met only two of the voters she’s looking for. The low numbers haven’t dampened her conviction that this is the right way to spend her Saturday morning.

“In Oakland if you are un- or under-educated, you are more likely to get pregnant, get someone pregnant. Be involved in gangs, in drugs, in violence. It’s a life and death issue for some people, for some children,” she says.

Prime-Lawrence, a mother of three, lives nearby and teaches afterschool math at a charter school. She’s working with “Great Oakland Public Schools,” known around town as “GO.” The group is campaigning for big changes in Oakland’s schools. They want schools to have more autonomy and a better teacher evaluation system, and they want bond measures that support both traditional and charter schools.

And they want school board members who will make all that come to pass.

“The school board is really important in Oakland,” says GO’s Managing Director Jessica Stewart. “They control a $600 million budget. They choose the superintendent. They just make really important policy decisions for our kids.”

This is GO’s first political campaign and its political action committee has raised $184,000 to spend on supporting the three candidates and two ballot initiatives they’ve endorsed. In addition to dozens of small donations, GO has received three checks for $50,000 each. Two came from individuals: conservative philanthropist Gary Rogers of Oakland and moderate venture capitalist Arthur Rock of San Francisco. The third is from the California Charter Schools Association.

The city’s teachers’ union is backing different school board candidates. The union says it’s concerned about the motives of GO’s big donors.

“It’s just not healthy for democracy when two people can come in and just flood an election with huge amounts of money,” says Steve Neat, vice president of the Oakland Education Association, the city’s teachers’ union. “I’m sure they’re expecting to get something for that kind of investment. Nobody puts $50,000 into a campaign unless they expect something back in my opinion.”

Both Neat and Stewart say they welcome the competition.

The groups also agree on several other points. Both want the state to spend more money on K-12 education, smaller class sizes in schools and for more Oakland grads to go to college. But they often disagree, sometimes profoundly, on how to get there. GO’s heavy duty fundraising illustrates that point, and Stewart makes no apologies.

“We’re just doing whatever it takes because this really matters. This is a one in four years opportunity to have four seats up on the school board,” she says.  “And we’re in this to win it.”

Whoever wins will have to take on budget challenges, the new union contract, controversies over charter schools and how to tackle the job of educating all of Oakland’s kids.

Public schools in Oakland are looking for major kitchen remodeling with a measure on the November ballot.

If approved, Measure J would authorize the Oakland Unified School District to issue up $475 million in bonds to improve school facilities.

Along with seismic upgrades and lead-paint removal, the bonds could help underwrite a planned overhaul of kitchen facilities in the district, including building a new central kitchen in West Oakland. It’s part of an ongoing effort to improve the food the district serves to students, some 70 percent of whom are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals.

Oakland has made strides toward serving healthier and fresher food in recent years. For instance, the district now buys more fresh fruits and vegetables from within 250 miles of Oakland. There are salad bars at 67 schools.

But it’s infrastructure, not ingredients, that’s become the biggest barrier to making lunches healthier and tastier. Many schools have antiquated kitchens — if they have a kitchen at all.

“It’s a very attractive museum of kitchen dinosaurs,” said Zenobia Barlow, executive director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The facilities limit what food can be served.

“A lot of what is served is processed and prepackaged and frozen,” said Ruth Woodruff, who has a first-grader and a fourth-grader attending Chabot Elementary School. “It gets unwrapped and put on trays and heated.”

Sandra Miranda, a food services worker with the Oakland Unified School District, hands out free breakfasts to high school students at Monroe Academy as part of the district's "universal breakfast" program. (Noah Berger: Bay Citizen)

Some schools, like Piedmont Avenue Elementary, don’t even have a kitchen. Meals there are reheated in the corner of a multipurpose room.

“That’s not sufficient for them to be able to provide appetizing meals,” said Jody London, president of the school board, who is running for re-election. “It’s the difference between cooking on a hotplate and cooking on a stove.”

Meals are cooked on-site at 25 of the 89 schools in the district. The others do no cooking, just reheating, according to a study of food service in Oakland schools conducted last year by the Center for Ecoliteracy.

The district’s 2012 Facilities Master Plan – which the school board approved in May — calls for $43.6 million to renovate and build new kitchens in the district over the next decade.

About $19.1 million would go to build a new central kitchen, or Central Commissary, at the Foster education complex in West Oakland, which currently is used as an administrative office. There also are plans to use about 1.5 acres at that site to develop a farm and garden for the district.

“My vision is to have future urban farmers of America and let students know what it is really like to raise a chicken or a goat, and really get students connected back to where their food comes from,” said Jennifer LeBarre, the district’s director of nutrition services.

The facilities plan also calls for $14 million for 14 new community kitchens, where the public could use school cooking facilities for educational or vocational purposes. An additional $10.5 million would be used to renovate other school kitchens.

“Once you make these changes in the infrastructure, you’re going to be improving the health of the school-age population in Oakland in perpetuity,” Barlow said.

Currently, three central kitchens in the district prepare 73 percent of meals served to students – 6.6 million meals a year, according to the plan. And while the workload has increased, the facilities have not kept pace. One of those central kitchens, at Prescott Elementary School, now makes 20,000 meals a day in a kitchen designed to serve 8,000 a day.

If the Central Commissary were built, ingredients would be delivered, prepped and cooked there. Then they would be transported in hotel pans to schools for cafeteria workers to finish the dishes.

“Instead of getting individually pre-wrapped pizza, they’d get whole-grain pizza shells, sauce, cheese, toppings and then they would make the pizza there and cook it there at the schools,” LeBarre said.

Making school food healthier and tastier has become a priority in Oakland, as more children rely on their schools as a major source of calories.

Thanks to federal subsidies, some of the district’s children from low-income families now are served five meals a day at school – two snacks, breakfast, lunch and dinner. This month, the district expects to serve those five meals to about 3,000 kids, LeBarre said.

“I think that there is a moral obligation to make this the highest-quality food possible,” said Woodruff, a co-founder of the Oakland School Food Alliance, a parents group.

Nationally, school lunches are getting healthier. Under new federal nutrition standards that went into effect at the beginning of this school year, students must be offered both fruits and vegetables every day of the week. School lunches also are required to offer more whole grains.

But Oakland is trying to do more than just meet those requirements by doing more scratch cooking and serving fresher foods.

If Oakland voters approve the bond measure, which must receive 55 percent of the vote to pass, the school board would decide how the funds would be allocated. Four of the seven seats on the school board are up for election in November.

There is no organized opposition to Measure J, though it could fail if Oakland property owners don’t want to pay the taxes to fund it. If the measure passes, the district estimates that homeowners could pay a maximum rate of $60 per $100,000 of their houses’ valuations.

This story was produced by The Bay Citizen, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Learn more at www.baycitizen.org.