Oakland School Closures Are Back on the Table, Less Than 2 Years After Plan Was Axed

Updated 11 a.m. Thursday

The Oakland Unified School District could soon consider a list of schools to close or merge, less than two years after a controversial plan to do so was overturned by the school board.

School board president Sam Davis said he expects board members to be briefed next week on the superintendent’s proposal to close the district’s $174 million budget deficit, which could include plans to close or merge school sites.

Like in San Francisco, where a similar plan to shutter schools was recently paused, Oakland has grappled with declining public school enrollment, leading to less funds for the district.

“Our only option is to cut costs, and so this is part of a very big package and the goal is not to strip every school of all the resources and shutter a whole bunch,” Davis said. “It’s about having better-resourced campuses, but in order to have better-resourced campuses and not be spread too thin, we have to have fewer of them.”

A first reading of “recommended school changes” is expected on Nov. 13, and a vote on the list could come as soon as Dec. 11, Davis said in last week’s Board of Education meeting.

Not all of the district directors believe a closure list will make it to the board. Director Mike Hutchinson said he was confident that Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell would not bring forward a plan this year that includes school consolidations, apart from the possible mergers of five pairs of schools that already share campuses.

“Anything beyond that should not be coming forward,” he told KQED. “We have not done the work as a district yet to produce any plans further than that.”

OUSD spokesperson John Sasaki said district staffers plan to bring several cost reduction options to the board in November, which will likely include plans to decrease the number of school sites. The specifics are still being decided, he said.

“Almost 85% of our funds go to pay teachers, school staff, and all support staff across the district,” Sasaki said via email. “Because so much of the budget is dedicated to people, there are limited other options for closing the gap, which is one reason this situation is so challenging.”

The possibility of closing schools isn’t new for Oakland Unified. In 2021, a plan to close 11 campuses spurred a hunger strike and led to outrage from many parents and educators, who believed it would have disproportionately affected low-income and underrepresented students. The plan was approved in February 2022 but overturned by a newly elected school board — led by then-President Hutchinson — in January 2023. Davis and Board Director Clifford Thompson voted against rescinding the closures.

The district ended up closing two schools, merging one and eliminating middle-school grades at another.

OUSD’s budget challenges are also ongoing. The district was taken over by the state in 2003, though it is expected to regain full local control in two years.

District officials have said it needs to “reduce its footprint” because it has far fewer students than it used to.

Enrollment has been declining in Oakland schools since 2002 when the district had more than 50,000 students. It now has just over 34,000, and earlier this month, the district projected it could lose 20% of its students between 2022 and 2032.

In February, the board approved a budget-balancing resolution, which called for the development of possible cuts as well as “restructuring schools” in alignment with a new state law that requires districts facing financial challenges to perform an equity impact analysis before proposing any possible closures.

Davis said this analysis was requested by the board in June and is still underway.

“The very first time it was on our agenda was actually my first meeting as president [at the start of the year],” he told KQED. “It’s been something we’ve been talking about all year long.”

The district currently has 77 school sites. Though an analysis geared only toward efficiency suggested the district should only operate 46, Davis said the true number that OUSD should maintain, considering equity and other factors, likely falls somewhere in the middle.

Addressing the budget this year and reducing the number of schools OUSD operates could allow the board to focus more on curriculum and other educational advancements, Davis said.

“As a board member, I feel like our board meetings are budget, budget, budget, austerity, austerity, austerity,” he said. “At some point, that’s not what any of us got elected to [and] want to do. We want to be able to talk about the future and planning for the future and student outcomes and instructional strategies. Until we get past this, we’re not going to be able to do that.”

KQED’s Sara Hossaini contributed to this report.