By Clayton Trosclair/WEST OAKLAND
In 2000, the Oakland school district was about to hit rock bottom. Classrooms were so crowded teachers resorted to hallways, most students could not read at grade level and the district was named in a class-action lawsuit for failing to provide such basic necessities as textbooks and qualified teachers.
Administrators decided part of the problem was megaschools – overgrown, impersonal campuses that enrolled as many as 2,300 students; too many, it was believed, to adequately support or manage in one place. The district responded that year with a restructuring plan: the largest schools would be split in two, and dozens of new campuses would be created from scratch.
The first review of the project, in 2003, reported higher test scores, attendance and graduation rates. Parents were more involved, it said, and students were better-behaved. The city drew national attention and a $15 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Oakland believed it had turned a corner on the problems of the past.
A parent rallies in support of small schools outside the Oct. 8 OUSD school board meeting.
But now officials are rethinking that approach because the district is facing a different crisis: an $18 million budget deficit. The network of tiny campuses has become too expensive to maintain, according to administrators, who in recent weeks have begun considering the idea of closing or merging as many as 17 of 108 city schools. Parents, students and teachers now fear that the gains made over the past eight years will disappear along with those campuses.
The small schools movement grew out of the idea that principals could raise student performance if they were given greater autonomy and flexibility to run their schools. The idea had already produced encouraging results in New York City and Chicago, and Oakland believed this decentralized structure could especially benefit the largely minority and lower-income students in its flatlands, who for years had lagged behind their peers in the city’s northern and eastern hills.
Holly Babe Faust, director of the Oakland Small Schools Foundation, said the strategy has proven effective because fewer students means more personalized attention.
“Anytime you walk into a small school,” she said, “you can tell you’re in a small school. You can see mutual respect between kids and teachers and principals. If you see a kid in the hall, four adults will know where that child is supposed to be, because the kid is so well-known by everyone.”
In the 2000-2001 school year, Oakland schools enrolled an average of 620 students per school. Since then, 21 campuses have been added, driving the average enrollment down to 359 students per school last year.
The academic success of small schools is not disputed. All sorts of local and federal tests are used to measure student performance, but officials frequently point to Oakland’s improvement on the California Academic Performance Index, which rates each school on a scale of 200 to 1,000. The state’s target is 700. Before the small schools program was introduced, 42 Oakland schools scored below 500 on the test. Last year the number fell to four.
At a school board meeting on October 8, a student named Esteban described how his grade point average improved after transferring from Skyline High School, which has 2,036 students, to Youth Empowerment School, which has only 237.
“I don’t want to be conceited or anything,” he said, “But I consider myself a walking example of what big schools and small schools can do to high schools students. At Skyline, I had lower than 1.0. At Youth Empowerment School, I just found out my grade – I got a 3.67.”
The fear among many Oakland parents and teachers is that successful small schools will be shut down simply because of their size. In fact, the district is using eleven criteria to determine which schools might be closed. Schools that rate high in these areas, including academic performance, substandard facilities and low rates of minority enrollment, are at higher risk of closure.
Henry Hitz, the director of a parents group called Oakland Parents Together, is worried that one of the most improved schools he has worked with, Sankofa Academy, could be shut down. His group used to offer tutoring programs for the 116 students there, until test scores rose so much that Sankofa no longer met his group’s threshold for a school in need of help.
“We actually worked ourselves out of a job at that school,” he said. “It’s very ironic that here’s this successful school and now they’re trying to close it.”
Over the past months, Oakland’s interim superintendent of schools, Roberta Mayor, has met with upset parents at a series of community hearings. At one of the meetings, in West Oakland, a group of students from BEST High School asked Mayor to elaborate on the district’s priorities.
“Are finances more important than achievement?” one student asked. “And how do you expect success if you are going to close down the small schools that are achieving?”
Mayor acknowledged the progress that smaller schools have made, but warned that the high cost of running those schools could jeopardize the entire district.
“We want to maintain the growth that we’ve made, but we also want to maintain our district’s fiscal solvency,” she said. “Fiscal recovery is very fragile, particularly with the state’s economy in the state it’s in now.”
Mayor suggested that the push for smaller schools has stretched district finances too far. Oakland has set target enrollment for each school at between 300 and 400 students, yet nearly half of all campuses– 53 out of 108 – fall short of that goal. West Oakland Middle School, the site of one community hearing, has just 71 students on its roster. Another meeting location, Urban Promise Academy, has 280. Relying on an analysis from an education management group, Oakland says those kinds of schools are draining city resources because their administrative and utility costs have reached a staggering 30 percent or more. By contrast, schools that enroll more than 300 students spend about 25 percent of their budget on administration.
To close next year’s $18 million budget gap, Oakland must make drastic cuts or else find a way to increase revenue. A principal at one of the first small schools in Oakland, Hae-Sin Thomas, is one of many educators calling for the latter. She has reminded the district that Oakland could earn an extra $2 million a year just by getting 1 percent more children to show up to class, because of the way California distributes funding based on average daily attendance.
“If you’re in a tough economic situation and all you think about is cutting instead of ways to create revenue, you might as well throw in the towel,” she said.
Mayor claims boosting attendance or other proposals such as selling off surplus property would take too long to realize. She said closing schools is the quickest and only guaranteed way to balance the books by next year.
The deficit is blamed on several problems, some of which have been evident for years, like declining enrollment and rising operation costs. Another has only recently become a threat because of California’s multibillion dollar budget woes: the state will not give any increases in education funding next year, not even minimal allowances for inflation. On top of this, Oakland is saddled with an $85 million loan it has to repay the state.
Administrators are desperately trying to prevent the kinds of fiscal problems that nearly caused the district’s collapse in 2003, when state officials seized control of Oakland schools because of gross mismanagement. Since then, local officials have reclaimed responsibility for three of five management areas, and they are now trying to take charge of the other two: Pupil Performance and Finances.
Thomas, now an education consultant, said officials are missing the big picture by emphasizing costs over performance.
“I think the district has a responsibility to really look at whether a school is failing,” she said. “If it’s making growth, I’m hard pressed to see why – to save money – it’s a good idea to close it. Especially because unlike a corporation, our bottom line is not dollars.”
Teachers have echoed that concern at the community hearings. They complain that children are being punished for the district’s lack of foresight. Carol Johnson, a kindergarten teacher who has worked at Prescott Elementary for 25 years, said administrators often forget that individual children suffer when schools are closed.
“When are we going to ever really care and save the children,” she asked. “When are they going to become important? There’s always something else that’s more important than the children.”
In response to hundreds of outraged parents and teachers at the October school board meeting, the president of the board, David Kakishiba, promised that no campuses would be closed in the immediate future. But he warned that small schools, particularly those with lower academic performance, will remain at risk until Oakland can find a solution to its ongoing budget problem.
Denita Lewis, a parent of five Oakland students, reminded administrators of the promises they made almost a decade ago when they created small schools.
“I would like to remind the board that the small schools movement was started by parents and community members from all across the city who came together with the belief that our children deserved better than the education they were getting,” she said. “Because of all the hard work we have put in over the past ten years, and with your support, we have become the most improved urban district in the state. We can’t afford to go back.”