Proposal to Merge 10 Schools 

on 5 Shared Campuses

In early November, the superintendent and her staff shared her draft recommendation for reducing the footprint of Oakland Unified with school board members in small meetings, called ‘two by twos.’ 



This draft plan involved a long list of closures, consolidations and mergers across the entire town, from the hills to the flatlands, in light of continued declining enrollment projected over the next eight years, not just in Oakland but across the Bay Area and California.



Due to severe gentrification and displacement in our town, as well as sharply declining birthrates nationwide, Oakland Unified is projected to continue to decline in enrollment over the next 8 years.



However, after understanding that there would not be majority support on our Board for such a plan at this time, I followed the will of the majority and did not agendize the draft plan for our November 13 meeting. Instead, as Board president I agendized only the mergers of ten schools on five shared campuses, which is what I believe reflects the overall will of the Board:

• International Community School and Think College Now merging on the Cesar Chavez campus
• Manzanita SEED and Manzanita Community School merging on the Manzanita campus
• United for Success Academy and Life Academy merging on the Calvin Simmons campus
• Acorn Woodland and Encompass merging on the Woodland campus
• Korematsu Discovery Academy and Esperanza Elementary merging on the Stonehurst campus



At our November 13 meeting, the Board heard public comment as part of the first read of this list of mergers, proposed to take effect next August of 2025. The proposal will come back for a vote at our December 11 meeting.



There would have been no benefit from agendizing the longer draft list of closures and consolidations, only to traumatize those school communities, since such a plan would not pass in December.



However, we should be very clear that although that longer draft list has been put on the shelf, if we do not meet the deadlines set by Alameda County Superintendent Alysse Castro for us to resolve the $101 million projected deficit for 2025-26, we face likely intervention by the county or state.



In that case, the longer draft list could very well be taken off the shelf, dusted off, and implemented on a speedy timeline by a future County or State Administrator, if local control were taken away from our Board as part of such intervention.



Oakland Unified started the year with a healthy reserve, but is spending it down this year and will run out of funds next year unless serious changes are made in the next 3 months.



Last Friday, a number of CTA locals from across Alameda County sent a letter to Supt. Castro expressing opposition to budget cuts and school closures in Oakland. And others have accused me of “colluding” with her and others in the Alameda County Office of Education (ACOE) during this process. 



This comes on the heels of a stern warning from Supt. Castro in her November 7 letter to our Board that:



“It is almost inevitable that the District will face a Lack of Going Concern or Negative Certification without major and prompt action. These designations would lead to ACOE reluctantly implementing additional fiscal interventions to comply with a COE’s responsibility under EC 1240(b) to provide more intrusive fiscal oversight through the tools identified under EC 42127.6(e) and EC 42637 to ensure the District has sufficient cash to meet its payroll and financial obligations for the current and subsequent fiscal year. Nobody wants this.”



Let me be very clear that Alysse Castro is not our enemy—in fact, she is a tremendous ally of Oakland Unified in this process. She, more than anybody, dearly wants Oakland Unified to exit county receivership, as does the county trustee, Luz Cázares. I am not “colluding” with anybody; rather, I am working hand-in-hand with my colleagues at the County, as our next Board president will also have to do, to keep us from needing more severe intervention.



If the national election had gone differently by 240,000 votes on Nov. 5, I could see us going to the federal government and asking our favorite daughter, President Harris, to provide extra funding to Oakland. That’s not what happened. Instead, we will be facing a federal administration hostile to even the idea of public education, especially in California.



Until billionaires start paying their fair share in taxes and urban school districts get all of the funding they deserve to solve the problems we face, ACOE is going to have to hold us to the same standards to which it holds every other district in Alameda County. There are no magic solutions here, and fighting ACOE isn’t going to help.



We are going to have our hands full over the next four years fighting the feds on behalf of our immigrant students, our LGBTQ students, our students with disabilities, and other marginalized groups that Republicans will target in order to divide us. The County is our ally, not an adversary, in that fight.



Oakland is not alone in facing school closures due to declining enrollment—this is a problem facing large urban districts across the United States right now.



Oakland Unified Faces a Fork in the Road

A member of the OUSD finance team expressed concern to me after we spent over two hours at last week’s meeting talking about the proposed mergers on the five shared campuses, but only 15 minutes discussing the budget balancing solutions (which will come back to the Board at a special study session on December 2). 



He told me that he is worried that Oakland will spend 99 hours talking about the mergers that save about $2M, but only 2 hours talking about the budget solutions that address $99M of our projected deficit.



That’s a big mistake, because we may end up doing severe damage to our school communities with the budget solutions if they are not well-considered—or even worse, the changes we implement may not have the consequences we expect, leading us to run out of reserves as we did in 2003, provoking state and county intervention with potential severe impact.



On September 25, County Supt. Castro addressed our Board, and Oaklandside quoted her as follows: 



“OUSD is at this beautiful fork in the road where we are about to fork away from 20 years of loans and 20 years of fiscal oversight and onto the path of fiscal stability. We’re still standing at the fork because there are decisions that have to be made to walk down the fork of fiscal independence and fiscal stability. If those decisions aren’t made, we go down the other fork: returning to a crisis state, payroll concerns, a loan, or other receivership.”



As Alameda County Superintendent Alysse Castro said to our Board, Oakland Unified faces a fork in the road right now.



The right path includes attracting an excellent new district superintendent when Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell finally leaves that post after 9 or 10 years of service in 2027. It also includes the Board finally being able to pivot to focusing on student outcomes, instead of spending meeting after meeting agonizing about budget, budget, budget, austerity, austerity, austerity.



The wrong path is the one that keeps me up at night. What if the only new superintendent we can attract is one who thinks they are a superhero who will swoop in and rescue Oakland Unified from itself, similar to Antwan Wilson who came in with great hopes only to mismanage the situation terribly?



What if voters see the continuous drama in our District and refuse to reauthorize the parcel tax that is up for renewal in 2026 and the new facilities bond in 2028, leaving us with even fewer resources?



What if our schools continue to languish with resources spread too thin over too many school sites, creating a downward spiral as more families abandon Oakland for neighboring districts, lowering our enrollment even further?



In recent years, enrollment in Oakland’s charter schools has declined at about the same rate as in its public schools.



Last Wednesday morning, I had coffee with Greg Hodge, who was in my seat as school board president in 2003 when the state first took over OUSD. He said that people who were pushing for state intervention at the time thought they could control it, that it would be brief and would help them achieve their political ends. 



Instead, it resulted in a massive increase in charter schools and a severe wave of school closures that set OUSD into a downward spiral that it has only recently been able to pull out of. 



Under Supt. Kyla Johnson-Trammell’s leadership over the past seven years, charter enrollment has finally declined at the same slow rate as OUSD’s, and the school closures under her leadership have been managed in a way that the district has recovered from the temporary hits that they caused to our enrollment. 



Most of the sites where school closures have happened over the past seven years have remained entirely under district control, except for one where an existing charter moved in. Over this period, the total number of charter schools in Oakland has declined significantly for the first time.



This infographic shows public school mergers and closures over the past 22 years, along with the growth and recent decline in the number of Oakland charter schools.



Do we want to risk a return to full control by the state or county? What could be the unintended consequences of allowing that to happen again? 



For example, as we proceed with the mergers on the shared campuses, our Board is very clear on the need to preserve both a dual immersion Spanish/English program and an English-only program at each of the shared sites where those currently exist, because those programs appeal to different populations which are each important parts of our community. The additional cost of maintaining those programs is far outweighed by the number of families who would leave our system if we eliminated one or the other of the programs. Would a county administrator understand that?



Would a county administrator understand the need for keeping large vacant sites like 1025 Second Ave as public property and seeking only long-term leases, not sales, of such sites? Or would they sell off unused property to the highest bidder to quickly reduce our debt?



Again, current county leaders are our allies in this dilemma at the moment, wanting to help Oakland Unified get out of receivership and avoid another intervention by the state. But pendulums swing, and the state loan from 2003 has taken over 20 years to pay off. 



If our Board refuses to take the necessary steps to balance our budget and ends up with another state loan, there’s no telling who will be running the County Office of Education 10 or 15 years from now and what their political priorities will be for Oakland.



As I hand the reins over in January to the next Board President, whoever she may be, I urge her to take these issues seriously and make the hard decisions as soon as possible. She doesn’t want to experience what Greg Hodge did in 2003, taking up the gavel only to have it wrested away from her by the county or state, who will impose fiscal austerity without the patience and sensitivity of an elected school board.



My Town Hall on these topics has been rescheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, at 5:30 pm on Zoom. Click here to register and receive the zoom link.



Board Policy 7350: Real Asset Management

On my way out of office, I am continuing to emphasize the importance of direction from locally-elected board trustees on the issue of our vacant property. At our meeting last Wednesday, we passed another resolution recommitting ourselves to previous Board direction that the District should accept proposals to develop 1025 Second Avenue as a center for Career Technical Education and Transitional-Aged Youth.



I also introduced a revised version of our Asset Management Policy (BP 7350), using language that the Board passed in January. This clarifies the goal to make vacant District property available for development as affordable and/or workforce housing when Oakland Unified has no other good use for it. Aside from the 1025 Second Avenue project, these include the former Bunche Academy in West Oakland, the former Golden Gate CDC on Herzog Street in my neighborhood, and the former Piedmont Ave Children's Center (see below).



This first draft of the policy will go to the Facilities Committee for possible amendment and recommendation, and will likely come back to the full Board for adoption after I have left office.



Click here to see a heartwarming video of the Measure G/G1 Celebration event I hosted last month at Urban Promise Academy. Our Board needs to get past budget, budget, budget so it can focus on student outcomes such as these wonderful student performances.



Piedmont Avenue Library Lease

For those who did not see my post on social media last week, here it is again:



Last Wednesday, our Board voted unanimously to terminate the lease to the Oakland Library of the currently vacant building on Echo Ave which formerly housed the Piedmont Ave Children’s Center.  It seems unlikely that the City of Oakland has the funds to build a new library building there anytime soon. 



We all deeply love libraries, and first let me be very clear that our Board and District are committed to continuing to lease the portable on the Piedmont Ave Elementary School campus which currently houses the Piedmont Ave Branch Library and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This is not about that portable, but about the vacant property next door to the school pictured below.

The Board terminated the lease of the long-vacant Piedmont Ave Children’s Center site on Echo Ave to the Oakland Library. The lease of the portable next door will continue as the Piedmont Ave Branch Library for the foreseeable future.



The District is actively negotiating a renewal of the lease in East Oakland for the 81st Ave Branch Library on the Acorn Woodland/Encompass campus, and in those conversations will also explore a possible new lease for the Children’s Center building on Echo Ave. for the Library to build a new branch there, vacating the portable next door. The lease that was terminated last night was signed two years ago, and we weren't able to come to agreement on new terms before the deadline for no-fault termination, which is Nov. 30, and we only had one board meeting this month.



I know that the City has very limited funds for library construction right now, with the current renovation of the Main Library and the goal of building a Hoover neighborhood library as well as one in the future in the San Antonio neighborhood. So it seems doubtful that a large new Piedmont Ave branch library project, in a neighborhood that already has the Rockridge and Temescal libraries, is going to get funded anytime soon.



The current portable on the school campus is too small for a real library, it's true, but I have come to believe that that is all that we are likely to have, until public libraries are valued by our society as much as bars and phone stores. While we continue to explore possibilities with the City of Oakland for the old Children’s Center site, we will also need to explore the possibility of building housing on that corner instead, which has been vacant now for over 13 years.



I also have to say, it rubs our Board a little the wrong way that the City first sues us over election costs, and then comes back next month to ask us to do them a favor and extend a lease that as originally written has no additional rent payments for the property until 2026. 



Finally, there seem to be some very wealthy residents of the City of Piedmont who have been very generous to Oakland election campaigns lately. Until those residents come forward to contribute to the construction of a new library building that would be on their doorsteps, I don’t see this project happening anytime soon.



Last Saturday, the Piedmont Avenue Elementary School community celebrated Dr. Zarina Ahmad, who was the principal there for 16 years. She brought high academic expectations and a loving and joyous learning environment to the school before retiring last year.





Upcoming Charter Renewal Hearings

Nine charter schools submitted renewal petitions to Oakland Unified this fall. The first six submitted early and have been approved, while the remaining three submitted much later and have raised concerns. American Indian Public Charter School II (AIPCS II) has received three Notices of Concern (NOCs) from our Board; Oakland Charter High School (OCHS) has received one; and Leadership Public School Oakland R&D Campus was rated by the state to be on the “low tier” with a presumptive denial.



The concerns for AIPCS II, including the most recent notice issued on October 23, focus on whether the school is serving all students who wish to attend, while for OCHS there are serious fiscal and governance issues, including allegations of possible fraud.



AIPCS II will have a decision hearing at a special meeting of our Board on December 9, at which meeting we will also hold the initial hearings for OCHS and LPS R&D. The decision hearings for the latter two schools will be held in early January just before I step down from the Board.



There will also be hearings on those same two dates for the material revision from BayTech Charter HS to relocate from King Estates to their new campus on 23rd Avenue.



Newly elected school board member Patrice Berry (second from right) with campaign volunteers at the Fruitvale Día de Muertos festival on October 27 (photo credit: Kyra Mungia).

Four Board Members Elected to 2024-28 Terms

Congratulations to VanCedric Williams and Clifford Thompson, re-elected for four years in Districts 3 and 7, and to Rachel Latta and Patrice Berry, newly elected to represent Districts 1 and 5, the first moms of young children to serve on our Board since Aimee Eng stepped down in 2023.



For 2025 and 2026, our Board will be majority female and majority African-American. The new Board trustees will be sworn in on January 13, 2025.



On Election Night, the outgoing elected representatives of District 1 celebrated with the newly elected ones: from left, myself, new Councilmember Zac Unger, outgoing Councilmember Dan Kalb, and new School Board Director Rachel Latta.



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