Oakland Unified School District board member VanCedric Williams has spent more than a year on the California Teachers Association payroll while voting on school board matters affecting teacher pay and benefits — including a $105 million contract he helped push through in June. Williams denied being paid by the union at all. He was.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Williams has been on paid release since the 2025-2026 school year to work full-time as a CTA state director, and is expected to remain in that arrangement through the 2026-2027 school year and the one after that. The California Teachers Association reimburses San Francisco Unified School District for his salary and benefits, even though Williams represents District 3 on the Oakland school board, a seat he was reelected to on November 5, 2024, according to Ballotpedia. His current term expires in 2029.
Williams was first elected to the Oakland board in 2021 and was separately elected to the CTA Board of Directors in 2022, a body that oversees the union’s policies, budget and fiscal health across its 23 directors. Before any of that, per the California Teachers Association, he spent 23 years as a social and ethnic studies teacher in San Francisco Unified and was a member of the United Educators of San Francisco.
A Vote With Money on Both Sides
On June 24, 2026, Williams voted to approve Oakland’s $105 million teachers contract, according to the Chronicle’s reporting. He declined to recuse himself from that vote despite his ongoing CTA role, and the paper notes he has voted on other teachers’ union agreements over the years as well. Fellow board member Mike Hutchinson has said Williams should have stepped aside under conflict-of-interest laws, and Hutchinson has publicly claimed that Williams urged the board in closed session to offer the union the $105 million deal — a characterization attributed to Hutchinson in the Chronicle’s account…