“There’s a lot of concerns regarding safety measures and how to protect us from COVID-19, especially the highly contagious Omicron variant. We must go back to distance learning until the cases go down again,” reads the online petition, which as of late Tuesday was signed by more than 900 Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) students. If the district doesn’t respond to their demands, the students said they would strike “until we get what we need to be safe.”

Oakland students gave the district one week, until Monday, to meet the demands before boycotting classes the following day and holding an in-person strike outside district headquarters on Jan. 21, according to the online petition.

On Tuesday, the district appeared to respond to the health and safety concerns by announcing that it had distributed KN95 and N95 masks to teachers, and ordered 200,000 KN95 masks for students in the district that enrolls about 50,000 children.