Oakland Schools Need to Improve. Now.
As a resident of Oakland, I am feeling increasingly inclined to write about this. I attended a city council meeting on February 5, 2019, and what I saw shocked me. Oakland's school district, OUSD, is quickly falling apart. They have a $30 million deficit and the school board is scrambling to find a way to recover from this. Meanwhile, Oakland schools are not seeing much improvement. Two weeks ago, OUSD voted to close Roots Academy, a small middle school of ~100 students in East Oakland. This is a horrible, inequitable disaster. Many of Roots Academy's students will have to find a new school for next year, and Roots Academy is located in one of the less wealthy neighborhoods. Not everyone has the ability to get too far for school, due to various financial and personal reasons, and we should not be closing down schools to save money, for we need all of them. OUSD's policy is as follows: they want to close down schools to save money while also decreasing class size...