No one likes to lose their convenient neighborhood schools. But when money is tight, the quality of education inside classrooms is more important than how close they are to home.
That’s why Oakland parents and school board trustees should consider the seriousness of the district’s financial mess and set an example for kids by supporting responsible fiscal management — which includes closing costly and inefficient small schools.
On Tuesday, the school board will consider closing over the next two years eight of the district’s 80 schools, merging four and eliminating grades 6-8 at two elementary schools. It’s about time.
Opponents argue that school closures will prompt a student exodus. In fact, parents who can afford it have been pulling their kids out of Oakland schools for decades, not because of the distance to neighborhood campuses but because of the substandard quality of education.
After 20 years of reckless spending, the district is at a crossroads: Trustees must choose between quality education or perpetuating a system of underutilized schools. They can’t have both. There isn’t enough money.
Alameda County Superintendent of Schools Karen Monroe warned in November that the Oakland school district might not meet its financial obligations for current and subsequent fiscal years. An analyst for the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team reported in January that the district has a structural budget shortfall of more than $60 million annually.
One cause of the fiscal quagmire is the number of campuses, as district Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell explained to the board in January. The average enrollment of Oakland schools is the lowest of California’s 50 largest districts. Keeping open small schools creates wasteful administrative and maintenance costs.
It also requires more teachers. That’s because the extra schools spread students over more campuses, leaving the district with fewer students to fill classrooms in each school. As a result, Oakland must hire more teachers across the district to serve the same number of kids.
That inefficiency, in turn, is one reason that Oakland, although one of the best-funded of the top 50 districts in the state, has the lowest average teacher salary and consequently attracts the most-inexperienced instructors.
To be sure, closing small schools alone will not cover the district’s structural budget shortfall. The belt-tightening must also include districtwide staffing reductions to match income to expenditures.
Most districts reduce staffing levels and close schools when student enrollment, and the revenues that come with it, declines. Not Oakland. Even though enrollment has been steadily dropping for the past decade, school-site staffing levels have increased.
Yet the mention of closing schools has been met with protests and school board political paralysis. Parents and trustees even blame the California Department of Education and Alameda County Office of Education for forcing the district to make cuts.
But that conveniently ignores that state and county oversight were part of two deals to save the district from insolvency. The district still owes money from a $100 million loan in 2003, when it was unable to meet its financial obligations. And the district took tens of millions of dollars more from the state after it was approaching bankruptcy in 2017.
Now the district is headed for a fiscal cliff again. Clearly, district officials are unable to responsibly manage money on their own. Rather than welcome the needed financial oversight that serves as a backstop against insolvency, they have fought it. Fortunately, they haven’t been successful.
It’s been clear for more than a decade that school closures must be part of the financial solution. But parent outcry has left trustees unwilling to make tough calls.
School closures are abrupt and immediately noticeable, whereas deterioration of education is gradual. Parents politically mobilize to keep schools open, but they fail to make the same impassioned demands for quality education, even though Oakland test scores lag far behind the rest of Alameda County or the state.
It’s time to reset district priorities. Precious funds should be spent to improve education — even if that means some kids must travel farther to get to school.
