GOODBYE TO HIGHLAND?

Like a train on a one-way track, the Oakland Unified School District is barreling down what seems to be a pre-determined course, with the faces of worried passengers appearing at every window, wondering where all of this is supposed to end up.

The end-up, my friends, appears pretty obvious, and should have been from the moment we left the station.

This week, a neighbor stops me in the driveway as I am getting out of my car, asking me if I will sign a petition to save Highland Elementary, our neighborhood school in our far East Oakland community. The petition is something put together by the community organization ACORN, asking State Senator Don Perata to intervene to stop the Oakland school closures. “They’re going to close Highland,” my neighbor tells me, in some anguish. “Where are we supposed to send out kids?”

Where, indeed? Only recently renovated with the money of Oakland taxpayers, Highland sits across 86th Avenue from our houses, the only elementary school within any reasonable walking distance (to get to any other schools, kids would have to pass liquor stores, open air drug markets, and daytime working prostitutes). Highland is also a neighborhood institution.

When I started at Highland we had to walk past a long-demolished paint factory to get to school, a reminder of an era when residential environmental protections were often nonexistent in these outskirt areas.

When I started at Highland, the Italian family across the street kept a wine cellar, the next door neighbor–from what we surmised in later years–buried his wife in their front yard in the Old World way after she passed away of natural causes, and another family just down the street–another group of Old World immigrants–had a full truck farm with rows of cabbage and lettuce where industrial buildings now stand. East Oakland was a different world when I started at Highland.

When I started at Highland, many of my fellow students were Navy brats, living in military housing on 85th Avenue left over from the old World War II-era projects. But then, of course, that is hardly unusual, as I started at Highland only eight years following the end of World War II.

When I started at Highland, a catacomb of creeks ran open and free-flowing through our streets, and a kid could walk the creekbanks from the foot of the hills to the estuary, collecting pollywogs and salamanders along the way, without ever having to go up on the streetside.

When I started at Highland, we played baseball in the middle of the street throughout the weekend and summertime days, and rarely were bothered by the passage of cars.

When I started at Highland, we knew the names of all the neighbors in the blocks surrounding. Now we know almost nobody.

When I started at Highland, Allen Temple was just a little shack of a church, a refuge for black Southern immigrants, huddled across the street from the school. Allen Temple, of course, is now a full-block religious compound, one of the centers of black religious and political life in the city, where big-time politicians–the governors, the congressmembers, the presidential candidates–and big-time preachers come to spread their words, where funeral services are held for historical icons like Huey Newton.

Highland saw all of that. Highland watched our little neighborhood roll over from white to black to Latino-and-black and then Latino-and-Southeast-Asian-and-black, educating the children of each. It is not just the local school. It is also the repository of the neighborhood’s history, an anchor tenant that has remained through all the flux and flow. A block from some of International Boulevard’s rawest spots, buffetted between open air drug corners, our neighborhood wavers on the brink of disintegration. The closing of Highland School could push it over the edge.

But, then, I wouldn’t expect state-appointed Oakland School Administrator Randolph Ward nor his boss, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, to know anything about the history of the little neighborhood surrounding Highland School or, if they knew, to care. The preservation of Oakland neighborhoods is not high on their list of concerns.

Meanwhile, we learn that despite operating with a balanced budget, Oakland Unified’s 25-30,000 student adult education program is in danger of being closed down by Mr. Ward, an interesting social experiment in a time when Oakland is struggling to get adults off the streets and into meaningful positions. In announcing his reasons for the closure, Mr. Ward cites the high price of teacher pay, and says, "I will not allow adult ed to take away from K-through-12 education." I suppose being a jealous warden, he reserves that particular task for himself.

The rounds of Oakland school shufflings and school closures are beginning to whirl faster and faster at dizzying speed, the next round announced before we have caught our breaths over the last, so that we can hardly remember the names of the schools on the chopping block list, much less the stated reasons for the cuts. And perhaps that is purposeful from Mr. Ward’s perspective, the idea being that the community cannot stop what is coming by too fast to see.

But two things are becoming clear in the crumbling away of the Oakland Unified School District, if they have not been clear to some all along.

The first is that by the time Mr. Ward is finished, the Oakland Unified School District is going to be a very different entity from what it was when he took over under state seizure, though we cannot yet be certain of what that new entity will look like. And this is a very different vision from what we were led to believe Mr. Ward’s mission was when he took over. We were led to believe, back then, that he was merely to correct the budget overspending that took place under the watch of former OUSD Superintendent Dennis Chaconas and the old school board.

Instead, under Mr. Ward, the district is rapidly unraveling, like a ball of twine destined to wind down to nothing but the end of the string.

The second thing that is becoming clearer and clearer about Mr. Ward’s tenure? As far as I can tell, he has yet to propose a plan and a timetable to pay back the state line of credit so that the Oakland schools can be turned back over to the people of Oakland. Where there is no plan, friends, one can only conclude that there is no intent. We are stuck with this rock in our shoe, apparently, until we reach down ourselves and fish it out.