Oakland district embraces community schools model in ambitious reform plan
Jun 17, 2013
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Daniel Hurst, who until the end of this school year was the principal
of Fremont High School in Oakland, Calif., discusses his district's
approach to community schooling. The Oakland Unified School District
has started a campaign for full-service community schools, equipped
with staff trained to support students’ social, emotional and
health needs, as well as their academic growth.
Credit: Noah Berger/For The Center for Investigative Reporting
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Sitting behind his desk at Fremont High School in Oakland, Calif., Principal Daniel Hurst fiddled with a plastic cigar wrapper he had confiscated from a student.“They take the cigar paper and fill it with weed,” he said. Hurst knows Fremont’s problems well: He joined the school 28 years ago as a teacher. Two years ago, he said, a teacher was robbed at gunpoint before the first bell. “The school gets regularly burglarized,” he added. “Teachers’ cars get broken into. Laptops and cellphones get stolen.”
Fremont’s campus in gang-entrenched East Oakland is three blocks away from International Boulevard, famous for its booming sex trade. The school is known for abysmal test scores and low graduation rates. In the 2011-12 school year, it had the most suspensions of any school in Oakland, according to school officials. Many local families have had enough. Of roughly 600 possible freshmen living in the neighborhood this year, about 200 chose to attend Fremont. Even those who do register often leave.
“There’s a perception of violence and safety issues and marijuana use,” said Nidya Baez, a Fremont graduate who is now an administrator at the school. “We constantly have kids transferring out.”
Fremont’s problems might be extreme, but other schools in the Oakland Unified School District are suffering as well. Enrollment in traditional Oakland public schools has plummeted by more than 16,000 students since 2000, according to district officials, as foreclosures have forced families out of the city and charter schools have siphoned off students. During the same period, the district has cycled through six superintendents and narrowly avoided bankruptcy only through a state takeover that ended in 2009.
Now, under growing public pressure to improve student safety and achievement, the district is attempting to reinvent itself by turning its 87 schools – including Fremont – into what are known as “full-service community schools,” equipped with staff trained to support students’ social, emotional and health needs, as well as their academic growth.
The concept is one that has been around for decades but is now gaining traction in districts across the U.S. as other reform efforts run up against problems related to poverty. The embracing of community schools is a stark shift from the “no-excuses” movement, which held that schools should be able to push all students to success no matter what their background. That idea dominated education reform for much of the past decade.
Community schools are just the opposite. At its core, the concept represents an explicit acknowledgement that problems with a child’s home life must be addressed to help the student succeed academically.
“There’s actually a lot of agreement that we need to work on both improving schools and addressing poverty,” said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank based in Ohio and Washington, D.C. “Particularly, as reformers get into the work of trying to run schools and make the system work better, they see in black and white just how important addressing the larger social problems is.”
Marty Blank, director of the nonprofit Coalition for Community Schools, which connects organizations and school districts doing community school work, estimates that at least 50 school districts around the country are launching similar initiatives. Chicago is home to more than 175 community schools. Portland, Ore., has 67 and Tulsa, Okla., 31. New York City, with the nation’s largest school system, has 21 community schools, and that number might grow soon, depending on this year’s mayoral election; the United Federation of Teachers is pushing for the city’s next mayor to adopt the strategy.
Students gather during the lunch period at Fremont High School. To combat fighting on campus, the school has started a program called Upstanders Challenge. When students stop a fight from occurring, the whole campus gets an extra 20 minutes for lunch the following Friday.
Credit: Noah Berger/For The Center for Investigative Reporting
There’s no one model for community schools. Advocates say each school reflects the particular needs of its students and parents. The goal is to handle whatever issues students bring to school that might affect learning: trauma, abuse, neglect, violence, gang tensions, immigration problems and a wide range of other physical, sexual and mental health issues.
“It’s so daunting,” said former Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith, who pushed for community schools when he took over the district four years ago, just as the state takeover was ending. He saw community schools as the most promising model for grappling with the intergenerational problems students face in a city that had an 11.8 percent unemployment rate in March and the highest violent crime rate in California.
In most places, individual schools adopt the model. Smith’s goal of transforming the entire district makes it among the nation’s most ambitious efforts. (Smith unexpectedly resigned his post in April to help care for an ailing family member in Chicago. The district has named Gary Yee, a veteran Oakland school board member, as Smith’s interim replacement. Officials say they plan to continue developing community schools throughout the district over the next three years.)
District officials say that 27 schools have a designated employee to coordinate the implementation of the community schools initiative and that the goal is to turn every school in the district into a community school. Some schools say they haven’t seen any changes yet.
Despite the district’s ambitions, the community schools efforts seem, at times, like a piecemeal attempt to increase services without any dedicated funding. With little federal or state money available specifically for community schools, Oakland has spent much of the $40 million it has won in competitive public grants during the past five years on services to help students with nonacademic problems.
Money to support community schools now comes from a combination of private fundraising and collaborations between individual schools and Bay Area nonprofits that provide services to students. These partnerships vary; sometimes nonprofits foot the bill, and other times, the school does. The district also has reworked its budget, in part by consolidating and closing schools, to have an administrator, like Fremont High’s Baez, at many schools to coordinate these efforts.
“There will never be enough money coming into public schools to accomplish this,” said Curtiss Sarikey, Oakland’s associate superintendent for family, school and community partnerships. “We don’t have any illusions that we’re going to wait for any grant funding to make this real.”
Providing student resources
At the heart of many community school efforts are campus resource centers. Unlike traditional guidance offices, the centers are one-stop shops for any social, emotional or health need. Students can get confidential counseling from nurses, therapists and social workers or get referred to other organizations for help. Fremont’s center, which opened this school year, is called ASAP – for Academic Excellence, Social Responsibility, Accountability and Proactiveness. Students choose to drop in, or teachers can refer them when they’re having trouble in class. Fremont pays for two full-time employees at a total cost of about $75,000. Other mental health providers work in the center but are funded by Alameda County.
Hurst, who stepped down as principal at the end of this school year, said these new services have reduced suspensions, including a two-thirds drop in the number of ninth-graders kept out of class. But teachers give it mixed reviews. Some have complained that they send students to ASAP just to see them return quickly, along with their disruptive behavior. Many teachers are concerned – even angry – about their diminished power to suspend kids who keep other students from learning.
“That sentiment is going on, no question, to varying degrees with everybody,” Hurst said. “There’s a sense that punishment is needed.”
Inside the center on a school day last fall, an 18-year-old named Darrell checked in with counselors. Darrell said he did not want his last name to be used because he doesn’t want people to know he is seeking counseling. He has been a chronic truant, and it was his last day at Fremont. He didn’t want to leave but said he had no choice because he wouldn’t graduate on time unless he transferred to one of the district’s continuation schools, designed to help older students make up missing credits. Darrell said he would miss ASAP; there isn’t a similar center at his next school.
“If I’m having a rough day, I come through,” he said. “I’ve been trying to change my bad habits and be a better student.”
Darrell had some success in his English class at Fremont, which was based on community school principles and used literature to explore social and cultural differences. “It’s less like an academic situation and more like a family,” he said. “If we could get the whole school on that program, the whole community, it would be great.”
Some studies have shown that community schools can improve student performance. Cincinnati, one of the pioneers of the current community schools push, has seen higher test scores and graduation rates since beginning its Strive Together initiative in 2006. Community schools in New York, Chicago and some California cities demonstrated improvement on test scores, better attendance and reduced dropout rates compared with traditional schools, according to the Coalition for Community Schools.
But the Fordham Institute’s Petrilli cautioned that the body of evidence supporting community schools is not yet conclusive.
“I think it’s worth trying,” he said. “But we certainly don’t have evidence that this is going to make a huge impact on student learning.”
Experimenting with new strategies
Oakland has a history of trying trendy strategies to cope with inner-city problems that spill into the classroom. In 2000, the district was one of many across the country to embrace the idea of breaking down large schools into smaller ones in order to nurture closer relationships between students and faculty, which would, in theory at least, improve academic performance.
Early signs of success – parent satisfaction and better test scores – led the district to extend the small-schools model into a citywide reform effort. Backed in part by a $9.5 million grant in 2004 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major supporter of small schools, the district closed a dozen large schools and opened 48 small ones in their place. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is among the supporters of The Hechinger Report.)
Nidya Baez is the community school coordinator at Fremont High School. Her job is to help recruit and coordinate the work of community-based organizations to provide the help that students need.
Credit: Noah Berger/For The Center for Investigative Reporting
Fremont, with 1,862 students, was broken into five high schools. Nidya Baez, the Fremont administrator, who was a student at the time, was skeptical that small schools would help. “It doesn’t really matter how many schools there are if we’re still doing school wrong,” she said.
When Baez returned to Fremont to teach in 2007 after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, her fears were proven. She found a campus full of disengaged students, an excess of administrators and a cumbersome bureaucracy.
Elsewhere in the district, there was some improvement. Oakland students in small schools had higher standardized test scores than those at large schools, and parents rated them as safer. But middle school and high school performance was still far below statewide goals.
Around the same time, national fervor for the small-school movement began to diminish as national studies showed mixed results. The Gates Foundation, which spent $2 billion from 2000 to 2009 to create small schools, stopped funding the movement in 2009 after admitting the strategy essentially had failed.
The Gates Foundation’s decision left Oakland with too many schools to run and not enough students to fill them. Last fall, the small high schools on Fremont’s campus were consolidated back into one large school. Schools at another high school campus also were merged into one, and five elementary schools were shut down, according to district officials.
When Smith, the superintendent, first began selling the community schools concept around the district in 2009, not everyone embraced his pitch. Hurst and two other principals went to Smith and spent hours arguing against the plan, fearing it would distract teachers from academics by placing such an emphasis on problems outside of school.
“They argued from a place of deep care and concern for kids,” Smith said. “But I said, ‘Is what we’re doing good enough?’ We had to figure out a way to make it better and do it for everyone.”
Hurst eventually agreed that the community schools concept was worth trying. Providing intensive services, he said, is more likely to improve learning than merely punishing bad behavior.
“In the past, we just dealt with behavior,” he said. “But when you do that, it will happen again and again.” Still, he understands that it’s not reasonable to expect quick results. “If you’re dealing with the fundamental cause behind the behavior, it’s going to take some time to see movement on that,” he said.
Baez is hopeful. She said she managed to get a decent education at Fremont, but she remembered that many top students transferred to better high schools. Her job at Fremont now is to help recruit and coordinate the work of community-based organizations to provide the help that students need. “A lot of the services were not here last year, so we just suspended students,” she said. “We needed a way to triage students and figure out what’s up with them.”
Safety on campus
One of the biggest problems is that students don’t feel safe at the school. Even if they are not directly involved in violence, they often are witnesses to it. Baez remembers a morning last year when a group of students from another high school showed up with baseball bats to face off against some students at Fremont. Although no one was seriously injured, she said, punches were thrown and campus staff had to break it up.
Sandra Muniz, Fremont’s 17-year-old student body vice president, said young people in East Oakland are inundated with violence and gang culture from an early age. It’s a culture that breeds distrust of authority figures, even those who just want to help, she said. “Kids in Oakland have that mentality – don’t ask questions, don’t get so close,” she said. “With family and friends, I can let my guard down. In the streets, it’s always up.”
Fighting on campus has been a major problem. To combat it, the school this year started a program called Upstanders Challenge. When students stop a fight from occurring, the whole campus gets an extra 20 minutes for lunch the following Friday. This happened at least a dozen times in this past semester, Baez said.
“Last year, there was a carnival atmosphere around fights with kids standing around and cheering,” Hurst said. “We still have these fights, but the kids are breaking them up before the adults even get there.”
While Fremont’s community school rollout is well underway, other schools have yet to see any changes. Those involved with community school efforts around the country stressed that communication and collaboration are crucial to launching a successful initiative. While Oakland is attempting to roll out the program across the whole district, many started in a small number of schools before expanding.
“You just have to go slowly. You can’t do it all in a day,” said Ellen Pais, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Education Partnership, which helps run several community schools. But she praised Oakland’s ambition, adding that it “sends a great message about the vision that they have.”
At Oakland’s Cleveland Elementary School, in a quiet neighborhood near Lake Merritt, teacher Mary Loeser didn’t think the community schools concept changed much for her students; the school worked to fill in gaps on its own.
“Our PTA paid for a retired psychologist to work part time with our kids,” she said. “We have so many troubled children at this school – and this is a high-performing school. These children are in transition: divorce, immigrating, people moving around because of the economy.”
Abigail Griffin, the mother of three former Cleveland students and former president of the school’s PTA, also was frustrated. In April, Griffin and her family moved out of the district, in part because she was concerned about the quality of education in Oakland.
“No one (from the district) has come to do a needs assessment with us about what our families could use,” she said. “When I try to talk to anybody at OUSD and say, ‘Please meet with us and let’s discuss ways we can fix this,’ no one returns our calls.”
Curtiss Sarikey, the assistant superintendent, acknowledged the challenges of reaching every school and getting staff across the district to take part in the new approach. “We have a lot of work to do with communication,” he said, adding that posters have been put up in every school in the district advertising the initiative.
Sarikey came to Oakland in 2011 from the San Francisco Unified School District, where he worked on comprehensive student health programs. A former social worker, he moved to Oakland after hearing Smith talk about his plans for Oakland.
“Just halfway through the second year of implementation, we’ve actually exceeded some of our goals,” he said.
Principal reaches out
Sankofa Academy is one school that has managed to offer a range of crucial services without much help from the district and without dipping deeply into its own funds. A pre-K-8 school in North Oakland, Sankofa was almost closed four years ago before Principal Monique Brinson took over and began writing her own grant proposals and reaching out to nonprofits around the Bay Area for help. As a result, her school has two full-time mental health professionals from a neighboring children’s agency and two organizations running after-school tutoring and enrichment programs five days a week.
“We were doing this before it became the initiative of the district,” Brinson said. “And if you’re consistent, people want to work with you. There’s really no magic to it.”
Teacher and resource specialist Jonathan Hasak came to Sankofa three years ago. He also has worked at Peralta Elementary School, just five minutes away. While Peralta is one of the top-performing schools in the district, Sankofa has long struggled with high absenteeism and low test scores.
“The conversation at Peralta is, ‘What’s your favorite state?’ ” he said. “Here, you’re talking to kids who, what they’re sharing is, ‘I don’t know who my father is.’ ”
Hasak credits Brinson with wrangling the community organizations that now provide on-campus student services. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have tutors, we wouldn’t have intervention people after school or a science program,” he said. “We just don’t have the money for it.”
Hasak, like many of his colleagues, says he believes progress will come from individual school sites. Despite a shoestring budget for support and enrichment programs, Sankofa’s Academic Performance Index, a statewide measure based on standardized test scores, has risen from 691 to 773 since 2009, according to state data. The index ranges from 200 to 1,000, with 800 as the state goal for schools.
Others in Oakland hope he’s right, especially now that Smith, the primary advocate for community schools, has stepped down. District spokesman Troy Flint called Smith a visionary, adding that he was leaving the district in good shape to see the community schools initiative through.
“I feel the staff at this point has a clear vision of what needs to be done,” he said. “I don’t think we feel adrift.”
Because of the financial crisis in California’s public schools, Hasak said, the administration ultimately has little power to turn around every school. “I don’t know what the district can do besides offer a vision for what type of school district we want to be.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. Bundy is a reporter for the independent, nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, the country’s largest investigative reporting team.
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