Enrollment Freeze Signals Trouble at Mills College Children's School, Parents Say

For almost 100 years, the Mills College Children’s School has been educating kids on the grounds of its leafy campus in East Oakland while also serving as a training ground for the next generation of educators.

Katrina Roundfield decided to send her 4- and 6-year-old boys to the private school last year because she saw it as an oasis in a neighborhood with slim choices for preschool. She appreciated that the school gave generous financial aid to ensure cultural and socioeconomic diversity among its nearly 90 preschool to fifth-grade students while also offering a low ratio of students per teacher.

“When you walk into the school, you see all kinds of beautiful ways that they represent the embracing of many different cultures,” Roundfield said.

The school is on the campus of Mills College at Northeastern University, which gives the children access to the college’s lawns, trails and facilities, and allows them to participate in research projects led by professors and students.

“And it’s a really wonderful thing to be able to bring your child to a setting that’s that stunning and, you know, just open their mind about what’s possible as a kid growing up in East Oakland.”

But lately, Roundfield and several other parents tell KQED they’re concerned about the school’s future after the school canceled tours in the middle of admissions season and stopped enrolling new students for the 2025–26 school year.

The parents worry these two things — on top of observations that enrollment hardly grew this year — signal the potential dismantling of a beloved institution. They sought more information from university officials, but their request for a meeting has gone nowhere.

Instead, Dean Beth Kochly told them by email that the college had no plans for closure in 2025 and would provide “a definitive plan” in the next few weeks after completing an analysis of the Children School’s current operations.

Kochly and a spokeswoman for Boston-based Northeastern University, which merged with Mills College in 2022, would not answer questions about what prompted the review. Debra Brown, the longtime head of the Children’s School, turned down a request for an interview.

Lindsay Schaeffer, a teacher and one of the leaders of the campus staff union, said the administration’s lack of transparency had left her with an unsettling impression.

“I’m in a lot of meetings like bargaining for the contract, so a lot of information that does come out I’m pretty aware of,” she said. “And there’s just been nothing.”

She said during a recent open house, she met multiple parents searching for a new school because a nearby charter school called Urban Montessori, which enrolls 300 students, is closing at the end of this year. The closure presented an opportunity to grow enrollment at the Children’s School, Schaeffer said, which is why she was perplexed to learn the school stopped enrolling new students for next year.

Schaeffer has a lot at stake: she earned her teaching credential and master’s degrees from Mills. After a stint teaching middle school for the Oakland Unified School District, she came back to teach at the Children’s School. This year, her daughter is a student in her combined fourth- and fifth-grade class.

She said she hopes administrators take into consideration the Children’s School’s role as a cutting-edge laboratory where researchers, college students and young kids learn from each other.

Last fall, students in her class participated in a study that found their use of artificial intelligence in a debate project helped build their reasoning skills. The education professor who designed the study told Northeastern’s news site that he wants to next investigate how working with an AI partner might boost those students’ literacy skills.

Schaefer’s students are also experimenting with a video game designed by graduate students in Northeastern’s new game science and design program.

“In the face of the uncertainty and fear that people have, myself included, around education in general right now, the last thing we need to do is close a place where kids can be creative, and adults can be creative, and we can teach to question and challenge things,” she said.

Correction: This story has been updated to include the proper spelling of Lindsay Schaeffer’s name.