Neighborhood Schools

 It's been a pretty dark spring around my house. Our schools are being closed. As documented here on many and several occasions, Horace Mann Elementary where I have been employed for lo this past quarter century, is on the list of proposed consolidation/closures. The Oakland Unified School District which has hemorrhaged money as long as I have worked here has decreed that all of that financial difficulty can be solved on the backs of the students, staff and families of these schools with declining enrollment. 

Meanwhile, just a mile and a half up the road from my desk at Horace Mann, lies Mills College. My wife's alma mater. The reason she moved to Oakland all those years ago and ostensibly the reason I followed her out to the left coast since her roots here included better furniture than mine. It was her connection to her school that brought her back to document the 1990 student strike protesting a move to make this historically women's college co-ed. Inside The Mills Revolution became a touchstone, a relic of a bygone age as Mills' administration changed course and chose to keep the college one of the very few remaining for women only. 

Now, all these years later, the powers that be at Mills are attempting to merge with Northeastern University to, in the words from their web site, "to create a bicoastal university powered by Northeastern’s global experiential learning." What does not appear on that page is the dire financial straits that purportedly drove Mills' administration to this brink. The reality is not as stark nor as bleak as President Elizabeth Hillman would have us all believe. Ultimately the plan is to turn over this rare bird of an institution to an east coast beast to be absorbed and consumed. 

It's all about money. Resolving the financial burdens of an institution by closing it down? Sounds like it would take a lot of community outreach and discussion first. For some reason, it seems that transparency is not currently a highly valued commodity in Oakland. Never mind how Oakland Unified School District or Mills College came to find themselves in such desperate financial shape, we can fix it by closing neighborhood school or selling out the students who chose to go to a college because of its distinct character and environment. Never mind those disappointments. This is a chance for Oakland to make money! The charm of closing a public school in favor of opening a charter school is a financial one. All those Mills women who came hoping to find their futures and dreams, but had their school engulfed and devoured and their majors disappeared in the name of progre$$. 

The privatization of a community's educational institutions is a crime against that community. This is not something that should be sold to the highest bidder. Budgets should not be balanced or enhanced on the backs of black, brown, low income, women or any other group. It belongs to all of us.