In Farewell Address, OUSD Superintendent Says District Must Make Hard Choices

Oakland’s outgoing superintendent of schools has a message for the district: Don’t go backward.

Kyla Johnson-Trammell, who announced last month that she would make an early exit from the district this summer amid tension with the school board majority, recounted the progress Oakland Unified School District has made since she took the helm in 2017 — walking it back from the edge of a fiscal cliff and out of 20 years of state oversight since it went bankrupt in 2003.

“Since 2017, our overall graduation rate has climbed from 70.7% to 79.5%,” she said at her final press conference on Thursday. “Our A-to-G college completion rate has risen by 14% … our overall attendance is now 92% — up 1.6% — and chronic absenteeism is down 7.7%.

“These aren’t just numbers. They reflect real lives,” Johnson-Trammell continued.

The improvements should be cause for celebration, but low test scores, literacy and numeracy rates and financial stress still sandbag OUSD. There’s a real possibility that whoever steps into Johnson-Trammell’s shoes won’t close and merge schools — the one thing she is steadfast on that the district must do to maintain stability.

“We have absolutely no reason to be in fiscal crisis ever again, and part of making sure that that’s possible is we have to reduce the number of schools,” Johnson-Trammell said to a gaggle of reporters, former school board members and OUSD staff. “Do we need to make sure we’re not putting undue harm on Black and Brown and immigrant families? Yes. But keeping things the way they are hurting those communities.”

The question remains whether anyone with sway in the district will mount that fight.

Families, for the most part, have always been against school closures. Whether district staff that’s been key to previous efforts to reduce the number of campuses, like business officer Lisa Grant-Dawson, will remain after Johnson-Trammell leaves is unknown. Oakland’s teachers union is also staunchly opposed to closing schools — as is the school board majority, which is backed by the union.

Will that board select a superintendent who is willing to consider closures?

“I don’t think so,” former board member and Superintendent Gary Yee told KQED. “But I think that that’s going to surface as an important discussion for the community to make in terms of the composition of a school board.”

Oakland has a touchy history with the debate over its school district’s footprint.

Just three years ago, the school board passed a proposal to close, merge or reduce classes at 11 sites. The plan was met with outrage, protest and even a hunger strike, as parents and community members said it disproportionately impacted campuses with predominantly Black and Brown student bodies. It was reversed by the board the following year, before it took effect.

A more modest plan to merge 10 schools co-located on five campuses last fall also stalled without board support.

OUSD operates 77 school sites — more than other similar-sized districts, and more than the 46 that an efficiency analysis suggested it should.

In the early 2000s, Oakland opened 40 new campuses under the community school movement. But around the same time, OUSD enrollment began to decline in line with many California districts.

For at least the past five years, OUSD’s leadership has been saying that the district’s number of schools needs to be realigned with its student body to improve student outcomes, maximize resources and curb some overspending.

“You see it when parents are coming to school board meetings talking about the low literacy rates, the low numeracy rates,” Johnson-Trammell said. “You see it with how parents are voting with their feet … People are leaving Oakland. We’ve got to adjust. We have to evolve.”

One unlikely leader who seems ready for the conversation is board member Mike Hutchinson.

He led the effort to rescind school closures in 2023 just hours after being sworn in as board president. But he told KQED on Thursday that as the district leaves state receivership this summer, it is time to have a “community conversation about how our school district will look going forward.”

“We can make it an add-on, not a loss,” he said. “It can become an exciting conversation [about how to best utilize district resources], whereas for 20 years, it has been imposed on us,” referring to state receivership.

School board members — all of whom, besides Hutchinson, were absent for Johnson-Trammell’s remarks — began interviewing candidates for an interim superintendent to take over on July 1 during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday night. They plan to continue on Friday morning.

Current and former district leaders KQED spoke with on Thursday said that they hope to see more transparency and community involvement in that process.