I’m glad to see that school close. It was a terrible learning environment. Any good teacher quit and those who stayed well they were the worst. The teaching experience was something akin to what was described in Marty Nemko’s educational blog:

http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2009/06/white-teacher-speaks-out-what-is-it.html

Perhaps your investigative skills could be used to answer some concerns. Our principal left suddenly after 7 years on the second day of school (professional development day), gleefully accepting a position at East Oakland Pride. Our long neglected school yard is in the process of a close to $700,000 renovation (including a new fence), and as you posted we are now on the short list for closure. It this a fait accompli? Is our school finally getting spruced up for resale to a charter?

Sankofa shares our boundary, and they seem to have got on the exclusionary bandwagon of declaring they will expand to a K-8. Is that really necessary if Claremont Middle School will be staying open (per the vow of our Superintendent)? If Claremont is closing, wouldn’t it make sense to convert another neighborhood school like Santa Fe to a K-8? This was never offered to the staff as an option, though our well connected former principal was obviously aware of the value of doing so.

Should Claremont stay open, what is the need for a K-8 at Sankofa? If we close, we will undoubtedly provide the balance of students to fill a K-5 Sankofa.

Sankofa is also within blocks of Peralta, so wouldn’t it make sense to have their kids come on over to our newly refurbished school, allowing some to peel off to Peralta? That would make much better sense geographically, and that seems to be the stated purpose of the restructuring criteria.

Please do what you do best, and ask the questions we are all asking, which have yet to be answered.

Thank you in advance for your due diligence.

This statement, for me, couldn’t be further from the truth. I went through the so-called “options” process, visiting 12 different elementary schools last year. I then filled out the options form, listing the top 6 that I thought would be a good fit for my son. They assigned him to our local school, which wasn’t on our so-called options list, and then got re-assigned to it again after appealing. There’s a great school in walking distance to our house, actually closer to the failing school he kept getting assigned to that’s on the list above. I have him in a charter school now, but would’ve preferred that he got into any one of those 12 OUSD schools I visited. The no-options process is a joke. The only schools that have low enrollment are the ones that are known to be severely under serving their students, what kind of loving parent is anxious to send their kids to a failing school?

Sorry that I didn’t communicate to you that my point was about Skyline and not Oakland Technical. If you are picking as criteria neighborhood density of school children attending neighborhood school then how does a school in the hills and the outer limits of a city end up with the same score as a school in the heart of the city?

There is numberous criteria that could be used to differentiate one school from another. But, if the criteria is number of children in the neighborhood that attend that school the same score for both high schools doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe I am misreading the score or maybe the score doesn’t reflect the criteria that is suppose to be applied.

Closing schools is a very difficult proposition. It is one of the many reasons that the concept of charter schools doesn’t work because even if they are unsuccessful in doing what they promise, it is very hard to close a charter school because as in the case of any school closure you are impacting the lives of parents and children.

Jim Mordecai

I dont quite get your comment that you “just don’t get Oakland Technical High School”. Are you saying that my school is not up to your standards of being one of elite schools? The reason we are ranked so high, is because of our many prestigious programs that allows my school to send its students to well-known colleges all around the world. Ever heard of the Paideia program or Engineering Academy? That is the reason why we why receive multiple visits from college professors like MIT and Stanford. SO before you go on ahead to make assumptions that my school is not up to par with that rank, then you sir are gravely mistaken.