Well said! I agree fully especially about the part of Mr. Abdel being a dedicated educator. The man has served East Oakland for 10 years as assistant principal and now principal and is committed to East Oakland and those students.

I urge a school board member to fully investigate situations with individuals involved before putting someone on blast on a blog. I hope that we can all be better than that.

Encouraging schools to take more students, but then not compensating them
for it, seems questionable.

My point wasn’t to make a fuss about overcrowding — I think school choice is good for kids and parents. But I also don’t think a small school that is successful should be closed simply because it is not pulling huge crowds.

For a lot of these kids, homelessness and jail are very real possibilities — if a small neighborhood school is changing the game for them, then it needs to be nurtured, even if it means a bit of extra cash. Society will save loads of cash in the long run if they turn out to be productive citizens instead of a drain.

Then the balance should go to the other campuses.

I don’t get why this is a problem and why it’s so hard to manage.

However, there needs to be some check on people just blurting out opinions when they are uninformed.

History of small schools movement is that originally just a FEW small schools and academies, inspired/helped by the national Coalition of Essential Schools and its Bay Area branch, were organically and carefully developed — and have been generally been successful. For example, ASCEND, Urban Promise Academy, etc. Others didn’t fit with OUSD’s college prep academics-first vision and were later beaten down or closed — Oasis, for example.

But when the state takeover happened, “small schools” was transformed from a grassroots effort to a wholesale roll-out of DOZENS of small schools all at once. Some thrived, some died, but in general many of the keys to “essential schools” success were simply not present — especially a committed, stable faculty with a clear vision. The only thing the schools really got was a small size.

Generally, the small schools were able to offer a safer environment, but the academics were often just as weak as in the “large” school. And unable to provide as many extras, especially at the high school level, and combined with the Options open enrollment program, kids flowed away from the small schools in the flats to schools located in better neighborhoods.

Now you have the bizarre situation where even the successful small schools, like Media Academy on the Fremont campus (scores have gone from 440 to 580 since the old academy was cut out into its own school) are about to be refolded back into a “big” school because of declining enrollment. Meanwhile, at Skyline and Tech, the campuses are overcrowded with kids, many of them failing every class, who are there for the freedom, the socializing, the sports and the performing arts.

It seems that rather than making sweeping changes, administrators should be carefully making case-by-case decisions based on what is working and what is not. But it seems the commentators on here would be just as rash…

And boy, Alice Spearman — you should proofread what you write or run it through spellcheck; I don’t want to be a spelling Nazi, but jeez, you are on the SCHOOL board! And that you don’t know the diff between A-G and AP is really kinda scary, when combined with your super strong opinions on everything. Actually, not that you don’t know, but that you don’t have the humility to have somebody on your “staff” or kitchen cabinet who can vet your thoughts before you come roaring out of the gate in public calling “Off with their heads!”

Ms. Spearman, you have the power and responsibility to investigate issues like this. Why didn’t you do that before calling out Principal Abdel on a blog? You ask, rhetorically, why a VP was hired instead of AP classes, but instead of posting here you could actually be finding out what Mr. Abdel’s logic was, and then answering the question for us!

He’s a dedicated and caring educator who has made a world of difference for his students. No one is perfect, but he certainly deserves more respect than you have shown him.