Would school closures help OUSD out of its financial problems?

Why I voted for them in 2022 after voting against them in 2021

OK here we go again…

Would school closures and consolidations in Oakland Unified save the district funding that could be better concentrated at the remaining school sites to provide more opportunities and support for students and families, and higher salaries for employees?

With the recent headlines about looming enormous budget deficits in OUSD, and the prospect of a return to state receivership just months after exiting it last July, some people have been asking me this question.

Of course, if education enjoyed the plentiful resources available to the AI industry, we wouldn’t have to consider this question, but capitalism is gonna capitalism, and we are certainly not in political times that look good for increased education funding. I’ll keep fighting for education to get its fair share along with you, but let’s face it, we need to live in the real world.

When I was elected in 2020, I was skeptical of the rush to reduce the number of Oakland schools, and I provided a crucial vote on the Board to delay what was then called ‘Blueprint Cohort 3’ in September of 2021. But just a few months later, in February of 2022, I was a crucial swing vote in favor of a plan to close 8 schools over 2 years. What changed for me? Why didn’t I explain my position better at the time?

It’s one of my biggest regrets as a school board member (along with not fighting harder to stop the wasteful spending of bond funds to build a district office building at Cole) that I didn’t communicate better about my vote for school closures in 2022.

The isolation of the pandemic, and the exhaustion from many battles over COVID safety, made me resigned to public criticism and attacks that I would have done better to answer with a torrent of words giving clear explanations for my votes. Instead, at the time I seriously considered just resigning from the Board, as Shanthi Gonzales had done in April of that year, and I clammed up for a while in public.

Local Experts Told Us to Close Schools

The simple fact is that over the course of my first year in office, many smart and experienced education leaders in Oakland told me again and again that the massive inefficiency of so many ‘micro schools’ (my term for schools of less than 250 students, as opposed to the ‘small schools’ of 350-450 students each that OUSD created from 2004 to 2010) is bad for kids, spreading out resources too thin that would be more effective at fewer, sustainably-sized schools.

I heard this from Shanthi Gonzales (who had herself started out as a critic of school closures), Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell, and both county trustees, Chris Learned and Luz Cazares. These folks spoke not out of any ideology or self-serving politics, but from hard experience of many years running large urban school districts.

The Board also formally heard this advice in 2021 from County Superintendent LK Monroe (see letter attached here) and the state school finance agency FCMAT (see report here). In November 2021, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond approved a ‘going concern’ designation for OUSD due to its budget issues.

Kyla, by far the longest-serving Oakland superintendent in recent memory, made her recommendation public when the plan came to the Board in January of 2022, stating firmly that there were “two paths:… [to] maintain [the] current structure… [or to make] deeper investments in quality” (see presentation attached here).

So then in January and February, I agreed to vote for a plan to close 6 schools, merge 2 more and truncate the grade span at another 2. Ultimately, 5 of the closures and one grade span truncation were rolled back in January of 2023 by the new Board majority.

The Crucial Element of Superintendent Transition

The most convincing argument Kyla made personally to me in early 2022, with regards to the urgency of this difficult vote, was that she would not be staying forever. Any Oakland superintendent will be burned out and tarnished by the controversy of closing multiple school sites. So it would have been better for that person to have been Kyla in her last year, or the interim superintendent in her one year of temporary service, so that a new superintendent could start fresh with a positive vision for Oakland’s future. I could not say this publicly at the time, but it was the major factor in my vote.

Sadly, that ship has sailed with Kyla’s final departure from OUSD this week, and it seems likely that the district will need state or county intervention to do the very painful and unpleasant, but necessary, deed of closing and merging schools.

People often ask if charter schools will just spring up in place of any schools that are closed. This indeed happened many times from about 2005-2013, but charter growth is no longer a looming threat to OUSD’s enrollment. Since the passage of AB 1505 changed the rules for opening and renewing charter schools in 2019, charter enrollment in Oakland has declined slowly but steadily. Ten charter schools have shut down since then, and no new ones have opened.

Another important issue in this conversation is racial equity. The decline in the number of children in Oakland is much more notable in more gentrified areas, so campuses need to be shuttered in the hills and in North Oakland, not just the flatlands. Racial equity is not however a reason to refrain from consolidating schools, even though it should be a big consideration during planning and implementation. And, we need to consider the equity impact of not closing schools as well as the equity impact of doing so. The current spreading out of resources limits the educational outcomes of low-income kids of color way more than it helps them.

There will always be other arguments against closing schools, but in my time on the Board, the advice from people who have run school districts, whether in Oakland or elsewhere, was 100% unanimous: it is the only sensible way forward for a district with as many micro schools as Oakland.

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Other Experts Chime In with the Same Opinion

Recently, several experts with no personal or political gain to be made from school closures have publicly advised OUSD of the need to reduce the number of schools, emphasizing the resulting gains in efficiency which will ultimately benefit students and school staff.

In 2023, the Board commissioned an agency called Public Works to study our central office. They pointed out that one big reason OUSD has such a big central office is to meet the logistical and management needs of so many school sites, and they highlighted the ‘strong need to consolidate small schools to improve... services’ (see presentation attached here).

In early 2025, county Superintendent Alysse Castro advised the Oakland community of the need to reduce the number of schools, even though in 2022 she ran for election on a platform of skepticism on the rush to do so. After looking closely at the numbers, she told one community meeting, she saw that even though Oakland has more funding per pupil than any other large district in California, ‘infrastructure costs are eating OUSD alive.’

Supt. Castro offered county support for the restructuring process in hopes that the current Board would not plunge OUSD back into receivership, since their own plan, passed unanimously in the fall of 2024, called for a Board-led process to reduce the district’s physical footprint--yet after inviting her to speak at one meeting in February, the Board leadership got cold feet and declined any further advice.

A few months later, an external fiscal systems audit of OUSD by Eide Bailly auditor Caroline Larson, an expert on school district finances, congratulated OUSD on finally having the systems in place to exit receivership, but under the heading ‘Oakland USD finances have been overburdened since 2003. Why?’ the top reason was: ‘Operating the most schools per pupil in the state,’ followed by seven slides detailing how the number of schools (both public and charter) is disproportionate compared to other districts (see full presentation attached here).

What Happens Now?

Nobody wants to close schools—it’s probably the single most painful and unpopular action that the leadership of a district can ever have to take. Yet if the need was clear in 2022, it is even more so now, with the percent of Black and Latinx students reading by third grade in OUSD shockingly low, a looming $100 million deficit, and no available funding to devote to urgently needed raises for our educators.

As Board president in 2024, I tried to coax my colleagues to take this difficult vote, with the support of then-Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell, but we were ultimately stymied by a vote taken in closed session directing me not to agendize the full list of closures and consolidations that was in Kyla’s draft plan. Instead, we only considered merging schools on five shared campuses, a lackluster proposal which was neither popular nor would save much in the way of resources, so it died without even a motion or a second.

The urgency has only increased, and it is now very likely too late to move forward a plan to save OUSD from receivership. Under our district’s policies, it takes time to close schools, because school communities deserve a full year of planning time after the closures are announced. It also takes time to realize the resource benefits, since as Oakland has seen in the past, there can be short-term enrollment drops due to many families temporarily leaving the district when several schools close. These numbers always recover after a year or two, but Oakland doesn’t have that kind of time with its current finances—it would have been way better to use the influx of one-time funds post-pandemic to realize the needed changes a couple of years ago.

However, at some point very soon OUSD will need to put the interests of future generations ahead of those invested in the infrastructure of the past. There are a dozen micro schools in Oakland at the elementary level, two very small middle schools, five very small alternative high school programs, and at least a couple of additional elementaries in North Oakland and the Hills that should be merged or closed given Oakland’s urgent need to use its resources more efficiently in the interests of children.

Our kids are confronting an uncertain future in this country as it is, and here in Oakland they shouldn’t have to wait any longer for our district’s leaders to take the obvious next steps in their best interest.

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