Ryan Phillips, Oakland North

OUSD school board member Jumoke Hinton Hodge offers support to Learning Without Limits’ application to become a charter school at the meeting Wednesday night.

Oakland will have a new charter school in the fall, but two schools that wanted to leave the Oakland Unified School District to become charters will have to stay. Meanwhile, two charter schools that already exist within the district will be around for at least five more years after the school board renewed their charters Wednesday night.

The school board members spent more than seven hours in a contentious meeting Wednesday night discussing the fate of five charter school applications. The meeting was standing room only, with a large number of people watching on video in a room next to the meeting. Parents, teachers, students and community members from each school packed the room and applauded loudly, and then filtered out when their school’s application was approved.

The board voted to approve the application of 100 Black Men of the Bay Area Community, a charter school aimed at African American young men that is slated to open in the fall. The board also renewed the charters of Lionel Wilson College Preparatory and Arise. The schools are five-years old and received five-year renewals. Each of those decisions was made unanimously.

But the board voted 5-1 to deny an application from ASCEND, a K-8 school in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, to leave the district to become a charter school. And board members also voted 4-2 to deny an application from Learning Without Limits, an elementary school also in Fruitvale. Both schools are two of the highest-performing in the district.

Mari Rose Taruc, a parent of an ASCEND second grader, told the board that the school is applying to become a charter because teachers and parents want more control over the curriculum.

“We’ve been succeeding but have been constrained at our school,” Taruc said. “This is why we have some problems between our school and the district.”

Superintendant Tony Smith recommended denying both applications and the majority of the seven-member board followed it. Smith said that if the schools left the district at this time, it would “diminish both our fiscal and academic capacity to serve all children well.” 

In Smith's recommendation, he also noted that ASCEND's building was completed in 2006 and if the school became a charter it would cost the district $3 million. Separately, the district would lose $2.6 million in federal funding if Learning Without Limits became a charter, Smith said.

“Having quality schools in Oakland is what we’re shooting for,” Smith said. He said ASCEND represented "the best in the district" and Learning Without Limits is “one of the most needed schools in the district.”

But school board director Noel Gallo (District 5) broke ranks to vote in favor of both ASCEND and Learning Without Limits charter application. He said the cost to the district, or of the new building, shouldn’t be a reason to deny the charter application. Gallo said the building is "for that neighborhood to serve those kids in that neighborhood, bottom line." He also noted that if the board denied ASCEND's application, the school could apply to the county and state for charter approval.

“And then (we) have lost all control,” he said. He encouraged the school to “not quit” and not give up its application to become a charter.

At the same time, Smith recommended to approve the charter application of 100 Black Men of the Bay Area. He said the school is “investing in a population that is not being served, invest in children whose needs haven’t been met.” He called the district’s performance in serving African-American boys “unacceptable” and said “everybody must do something different.”

The application from 100 Black Men of the Bay Area was opposed by the Oakland Education Association, because,  the teacher's union was being “asked to consider some very critical waivers to our existing collective bargaining agreement, specifically around granting autonomies in staffing and scheduling,” said OEA president Betty Olson-Jones.

In the meeting, the school board also renewed the charters of two schools that already exist within the district, which will be around for five more years. The board quickly moved to renew the application of Lionel Wilson College Preparatory Academy, a 6-12 high school in South Oakland. Director Gary Yee (District 4) praised the school, which has about 450 students, for “setting a benchmark” for charter schools in the city.

But the discussion around renewing the application for Arise High School, in Fruitvale, was much more contentious. Arise was identified as one of the district’s lowest performing charter schools by Gail Greely, the coordinator for the district’s Office of Charter Schools. She recommended that the petition be denied.

"Based on this analysis, we’ve concluded the school is not an academic success story,” said Greely, who added that Arise "provides an unsound educational program.”

Arise's petition was the last to be heard, and occured around 11 pm, but the room was still packed with vocal supporters. More than two dozen people - mostly students, parents and teachers - signed up to speak in defense of the school.

Arise focuses on students who have been rejected from other schools in the district. About 27 percent of its students have been expelled from other schools, and 1 in 10 are involved in the juvenile justice system, school officials said. 

Arise principal Romeo Garcia said the school’s test scores improved over the last year, and the school deserved the chance to continue to serve kids that other schools in the district reject.

City councilmember Libby Schaaf (District 4) also spoke in favor of the school’s renewal petition, breaking down for a moment as she talked about the need for a school that serves at-risk youth in Oakland.

After the motion to approve the charter’s renewal was approved, the crowd applauded loudly, hugged and filtered out of the auditorium, with some of many of the school’s supporters showing tears on their faces.

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