Oakland Unified School District

Oakland schools chief Tony Smith discusses reform plans

When the federasl Department of Education earlier this week announced the 21 cities that won Promise Neighborhoods grant, there were only two winners in California: Los Angeles and Hayward.

San Francisco and Oakland had applied but lost out. In Oakland's case, the Peralta Community College District and the Urban Strategies Council had lent their cosiderable support to secure a grant after  Oakland superintendent Tony Smith signaled that he was fully behind the effort.

The rejection came four weeks after the Obama administration rejected California's second bid for the $4.3 billion Race to the Top school reform grant contest, which would have meant hundreds of millions of dollars for the districts across the state.

The Promise Neighborhoods grant funds local school districts to replicate the successful Harlem Children’s Zone model in New York City, which links social service providers, public schools, community philanthropists and big corporate donors. In an interview with The Bay Citizen in June, Smith said he had been studying this approach for years and was lining up corporate backers and foundations to provide funding.

The rejection will surely sting Smith, who said at the time that he was confident education secretary Arne Duncan was fully supportive of Oakland’s reform efforts after making a visit to the Bay Area. But he was not counting on it.

“We’ll move ahead with creating full-service community schools whether or not we win” the federal grant, Smith said in June.

Sure enough, local groups behind the effort said this week that they intend to forge ahead.

"We are disappointed that we did not receive the grant,” said Dr. Elnora T. Webb, the president of Laney College, in an email. “The intent of the initiative, to create healthy communities by improving the economic and social conditions of families through the attainment of degrees of higher education, is still very much a priority for Laney, the OUSD, our community partners and Oakland in general." Laney was the lead applicant in Oakland’s application.

Oakland Unified spokesman Troy Flint said that despite the setback, the application process served as a good opportunity to “galvanize and refine” the district’s ambitious plan.

“We were disheartened,” said Flint, “but we remain undeterred.”

Still, there were folks in Hayward who reacted ecstatically to the news. The project there is headed by Cal State East Bay, and the project will target South Hayward, which is home to a diverse population of both new immigrant and African-American families. Educators there have said they appreciated that federal officials are taking a chance on an underdog, as opposed to higher-profile cities like Oakland, their neighbor to the north.

Hayward will receive a $499,406 planning grant, and more funding will come later to implement the proposal after it is approved. The city has until Sept. 30, 2011 to submit its plan, according to a memo sent by the district on September 22.

“The vision of this grant is that all children growing up in South Hayward will have access to effective schools and strong systems of family and community support,” Chien Wu-Fernandez, the executive director of Student and Family support Services at the Hayward Unified School District, wrote in the memo.