The Oakland Unified School District is facing pressure from state officials to make sure any decisions relating to school closures or consolidations don’t have disparate impacts on Black students, low-income students, and students with disabilities.
Attorney General Rob Bonta released a report Monday critical of the district’s 2022 closure plan, which aimed to shutter two schools in 2022 and five schools in 2023, along with merging two schools into one, and eliminating middle school grades at two K-8 campuses. The closures to be carried out in 2023—five elementary schools and Hillcrest middle school—were rescinded last February.
Following OUSD’s announcement of the closure plan, groups including the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, urged the attorney general’s office to investigate the district’s history of closures and whether they discriminated against Black students. The schools that were targeted in the closure plan had nearly twice the proportion of Black students than OUSD’s overall student population.
In a letter to school district leaders, the attorney general’s office concluded that had the plan not been rescinded, it “would have disproportionately impacted Black and low-income elementary school students and also high-needs students with disabilities in special day classes.”
“OUSD’s reliance on sustainability metrics to make the February 8, 2022 Closure Decision contributed to closures with a statistically significant disproportionate impact on Black and low-income elementary students, based on review and analysis of publicly available data. And these metrics also penalized schools serving the most students with disabilities in special day classes,” the report said.
District leaders put forward the closure plan as a budget-balancing solution, and targeted schools with lower enrollments that cost more to operate than the revenues they bring in.
The letter from the attorney general stated that relying on sustainability metrics—factors like demand rates, enrollment versus a school’s enrollment capacity, and how many students from a neighborhood attend their neighborhood school—penalizes schools that have a higher number of students with disabilities who are in special day classes, which are for students with more intensive support needs and often have lower student-to-adult ratios.
Many families of students in special education pointed out that the plan would close schools with higher numbers of students with disabilities, like Carl B. Munck and Grass Valley Elementary.
Some school district officials feel the pressure from the attorney general’s office is unwarranted, and that Oakland is being unfairly singled out since OUSD is not currently planning any closures. Director Mike Hutchinson said the election of school board candidates who were against closures in 2022 and the board’s rescission of the plan signaled that they recognized the closures were not tenable.
“As a community, we voted representatives in who stopped that policy. Why are they trying to impose oversight over us now? We’ve made the decision to stop what they’re claiming was wrong,” Hutchinson said. “They’re not coming to us and saying ‘Good job school board on taking the action to prevent that.’ They’re saying ‘We need to step in and make sure you make the right decisions.’”
OUSD board will discuss school mergers
The OUSD board has signaled that it will consider school mergers in budget discussions over the next few months, including merging at least 10 schools that share a campus starting in the 2025-2026 school year.
However, the attorney general is cautioning district leaders against using the same measures it used in 2022 for future decisions about school mergers.
Pecolia Manigo is the co-founder of Reparations for Black Students, a campaign that is urging the district to take specific steps to address achievement gaps between Black students and others and to protect majority Black schools from closure. Manigo said the attorney general’s report validates what Black students and families have been saying about the district.
“We really want the board to not just look at traditional pieces of data, but also look at what it means if this school is closed and how it will particularly impact Black students and their families,” Manigo told The Oaklandside. “It’s heartening to finally have some validation that what families had been experiencing is in fact discrimination.”
Supporters of the Reparations for Black Students campaign attended last week’s school board meeting to pressure the board to follow through on the reparations resolution to establish a task force to study Black students’ academic outcomes, and to implement the agreement that came out of this year’s teachers strike to create a task force to establish “Black Thriving Community Schools.”
The attorney general’s report also urges OUSD leadership to follow the law established by Assembly Bill 1912 regarding school closures and consolidations. AB 1912 was sponsored by Assemblymember Mia Bonta following OUSD’s school closure plan in 2022. Mia Bonta, who represents the East Bay, is married to Attorney General Rob Bonta.
AB 1912 lays out the metrics that districts must use when evaluating a school for closure or consolidation to ensure the decisions are equitable. This includes considering transportation, school facilities, operating costs, balancing the school’s student demographics, and the impact on school feeder patterns. The attorney general pointed out that in OUSD’s 2022 closure plan, district leaders didn’t appear to account for transportation.
“Public data shows that, in the last decade, many of the schools closed were in neighborhoods serving a significant number of Black and low-income families, and closure decisions were made without any public analysis of transportation impacts, including the costs borne by families and travel time to schools.”
The attorney general is also recommending that OUSD hire an independent expert to lead the process for evaluating school merger decisions to ensure the district is following state law. On Thursday, school board directors Sam Davis and Mike Hutchinson are holding a town hall to talk about Assembly Bill 1912 and its implications for OUSD.
“We caution against an exclusive or over reliance on quantitative metrics, without also including a qualitative assessment of how each school is serving the needs of its specific student body, especially as it relates to historically marginalized communities,” the report says.
Director Sam Davis, the school board president, feels that putting Oakland Unified under a microscope ignores disparities present in other districts.
“AB1912 only applies to two districts: Oakland and Inglewood. That we are being held to a standard only one other district is being held to feels discriminatory.”
Davis added that the bill only mentions school closures and consolidations, and he is uncertain about whether AB1912 applies to merging schools that share the same building, which district officials see as different from a school closure.
Following this month’s town hall, the board is expected to vote on the metrics at the end of February. Staff will implement the equity analysis and come back with recommendations in May for a vote, Davis said. If any school mergers are approved, the 2024-2025 school year would be for planning, and the changes would be implemented beginning in August 2025.
Budget reductions will be necessary
On Wednesday, the school board will hold a special meeting to discuss upcoming budget cuts. The board must cut at least $23 million in the 2024-2025 budget, and possibly up to $50 million depending on labor negotiations. A $110 million teacher contract, plus tens of millions in expiring one-time funds, and steadily declining enrollment makes the cuts necessary.
“Everyone talks about the impacts of closures and consolidations. There’s also the impact of not doing them and as enrollment declines, leaving students in schools that are chronically under resourced and underfunded,” Davis told The Oaklandside. “I don’t think that’s fair to those students either.”
Alameda County officials, including county superintendent Alysse Castro and trustee Luz Cazares, who can rescind any budget decision made by OUSD, are also monitoring the situation to make sure the district remains fiscally solvent.
“Districts are required to budget three years in advance, and standard practice is to make plans for adjustments before entering into agreements,” Superintendent Castro wrote in a letter to district leadership last summer regarding the new contract with the Oakland Education Association. “It is possible to move forward, however in order to afford this agreement, the Board must make significant adjustments and tradeoffs in the coming months.”
Manigo, a parent who also ran for the school board in 2022, said the district needs to be more transparent about the budgeting process.
“I think this is the 10th year in a row that the district has said they have budget woes,” she said. “The district needs a significantly deep audit to expose bad practices we see in our audits and grand jury reports. Until that happens, we’re going to see year after year of consistent crisis framing without an analysis of what’s really going on in our fiscal practices that produce these urgencies.”
Wednesday’s meeting, which starts at 5 p.m., will be an opportunity for the community to weigh in on where the board should make reductions. The adjustments could include things like cuts to teacher and staff positions, technology or school supplies, reducing school site budgets, reorganizing the district’s headquarters, and school mergers. The board is expected to vote at the end of February.
