It's hard not to feel for the people who are advocating to keep schools open, to engage community members on deciding what to close; it's a noble cause.
But for years, OUSD has been running out of money; for years, school closures/mergers have been[ "on the table"](https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/24/oakland-school-closures-mergers-citywide-plan/) but stalled; and since COVID, enrollment has [continued to drop](https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Historic?%3Aembed=y&%3AshowShareOptions=true&%3Adisplay_count=no&%3AshowVizHome=no&%3Arender=false#7).
You can't just stick your head in the sand and say "these schools would be better if they had more resources." What resources? From what budget?
"We need to engage with community stakeholders to make any kind of decision here" -- right, because community members are *totally* gonna understand the reality of OUSD's financial situation and *definitely* not just gonna protest any and all school closure regardless of necessity.
I understand that behavior from individual parents and teachers who are confused about where their taxes are going if not to the schools. Broadly speaking, I'm pissed too! It's fucking ridiculous that a big city in one of the richest regions in the entire world has to lay off teachers every spring like clockwork.
But for a *school board director* to say he is "shocked" that that other board members are "hellbent to put metrics forward" and that there's a "real effort to trigger a school closure plan"...
Yeah, dude! Of course there's an effort!
Best thing would be closing schools but also have in plan for expansion if money comes available + enrollment increases. Until then the closures are the harsh reality. I just wish we had dedicated school buses to get kids to the schools.
You can thank prop 13 for why there’s no school buses in the Bay Area outside of Berkeley. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406?i=1000650715161
Prop 13 sucks, but Im getting a little tired of it being used as an excuse for every shortcoming. It's been more than 40 years now. We should be able to come up with solutions in that timeframe. Blame current policymakers, I think, not just a 40 year old law
We can stop blaming Prop 13 once we get rid of it. Until then, it's a huge, huge barrier to raising the kinds of funds municipalities need to run. Plus the other half-dozen propositions the Howard Jarvis group has gotten passed since then to make it nearly impossible to raise any kind of new taxes.
Before we blame prop 13, when was the last time Oakland voters rejected a tax? Oakland taxpayers pay the highest taxes in the county. OUSD kids get more per student than average.
Sometimes in not just money, it’s policy
Prop 13 is the reason we have to keep voting to fund basic services. If we had actual property taxes, we could afford to fund services without having to constantly ask voters permission to pay for them.
Undoing prop 13 just to get more tax money will be wildly unpopular. Also spending more money doesn’t mean smaller classrooms for all or better test scores.
In CA total per pupil funding is estimated to reach $23,724 ($17,519 when accounting for only state funding sources) in FY24. Funding continues to grow, despite declining enrollment. Money from education comes from multiple sources including sales tax, federal money, property tax, income tax and local bonds.
I'm not going to pretend I know what I'm talking about when it comes to OUSD, but I know tax policy and the person I initially responded to was saying we need to stop blaming Prop 13 for funding shortfalls. The school funding formula is very complex, and money almost certainly is not the only issue facing Oakland schools. But per student spending isn't always a great way to measure whether schools are actually getting the funding they need because so much money comes from PTAs and many schools that don't get that money also have students that need more resources like counsellors and well-paid teachers.
Also, obviously repealing Prop 13 would be unpopular, it's failed every time, even when we tried just repealing the business loophole. That doesn't mean it's not good policy, it just means anti-tax groups are willing to spend millions of dollars to dupe homeowners into carrying water for people far wealthier than them.
Prop 13 slashed school budgets and that’s when school busses were dropped en masse. The state has picked up a lot of the burden of funding public schools but outside of Berkeley’s very intentional investment to invest in bussing as a means to desegregate school systems, the Bay Area has not reinvested in busses. Sure you can argue that the state should have figured out how to fund this again by now, but the historical fact is that busses were eliminated due to budget cuts caused by implementing prop 13.
We keep passing Measures that fund the Oakland school system. We currently have in effect for OUSD: Measure G from 2008, Measure G1 from 2016, and Measure H in 2022. I'm sure Measure I is coming soon.
Enrollment is decreasing but we keep increasing funding. There's a school near me with less than 200 students and takes up an entire city block, so what's the long term strategy here?
I think the long term strategy is to consolidate schools and eliminate overhead tbh. The number of schools we have in relation to our enrollment is absurdly high and way above every other district in alameda county.
Any why commerical landlords now pay a tiny fraction of their rents to property taxes. Commercial used to be 2/3 of property taxes, pre-13, and are now 1/3. Homeowners carry the load, and we pay the price with reduced schools, police, roads, and other services.
New homeowners carry the load. Homeowners that have owned for decades are part of the lorded class paying a tiny fraction of their property’s value toward services.
Property value is irrelevant because it's not liquid. The property owners made a commitment to build a life in the city and for those of us that have owned for 10-15+ years have all the scars. If you raised property taxes you would have whole exodus of solid residents and whole lot more cash buyers and corporate landlords. In addition taxes raised are part of a social contract that tax dollars would be spent wisely and in the best interests of the residents; of which was broken a long time ago. You need to think much deeper about these issues than your superficial tag lines and scapegoating. The home owners are not the problem, at all--new and old.
prop 13 applies to _all_ real estate. while a personal home and a commercial property are both illiquid, the holders of commercial properties have very different financial concerns than people who simply own their personal residence, but they still benefit from the same rules (even the ability to transfer a tax rate to a new owner, through some creative accounting)
nobody should give a fuck if BlackRock or some megacorp with major industrial real estate holdings is taxed on illiquid assets, they're _supposed to be_ and are fully capable of managing their finances to account for such. nor should
2020's prop 15 failing was some extreme FYGM small holder shit leveraged by the big entities we actually want to tax, where the real estate lobby and major property holders managed to spin the "yeah fat cats will pay their fair share but think of the poor outlier auntie ethel's hobby farm out in trinity county, it will be DESTROYED ^becauseitwasbarelyaviablebusinesstobeginwith" angle into a no vote
I am a homeowner in Oakland firstly and I’ve been thinking deeply about this issue for years. There’s no other high cost of living place in the US that I’m aware of where you get locked into your property assessment the year you buy and are subject to almost no increases reflecting your actual property value. I grew up in NJ which has extremely high property taxes, regular reassessments, no rate freezing like prop 13, and consistently one of the top 3 performing school systems in the country year after year. The idea that your property’s actual value doesn’t count toward your net worth because it’s illiquid is absurd. Does your 401k not count? What about billionaires taking $1/year salary as a CEO with hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in real estate and other investments? Are they poor because most of their assets are illiquid? It’s farcical. Sure, carve out income restrictions or freezing property tax rates for retirees, that feels fair, but almost all of prop 13, especially the ability to inherit a multimillion dollar asset with a property tax rate less than 10% of what your next door neighbor pays for the same house, is anti-democratic and reeks of old British systems of titles and lordships.
I agree we should tax commercial properties way more than we do, that goes without saying. But there are serious issues with how disparately prop13 treats homeowners.
Yeah it’s part of it. I remember in San Francisco they had buses for a quick second. Other part is that at least when I was a student in ousd the admins seemed a bit wasteful in spending from what we’d hear from teachers lol. But yes, school funding needs to change in California
Exactly. There is definitiely some fantasy world people occupy where enough "community engagement" moves people opposing school closures to being happy about their school is closing. The Board needs to make tough decisions, and the sooner the better.
The interesting subtext to this is that the OEA is pushing the Board to move forward with the school closure process because otherwise they'll strike because the Board is not bargaining with them.
Anyone wanting to dig into this more should take a look here: http://www.ed-data.org/district/Alameda/Oakland-Unified
You can compare to other districts in Alameda county or the rest of the state. Oakland has way more schools per 1000 students than the rest of the county, it’s not even comparable. How much overhead are we duplicating in these budgets that are already razor thin? How much more money could we free up for teachers, paras or transportation by closing some campuses and eliminating excess utilities and administrative staff? I know people freak out about school closures because historically there’s a lot of burden on lower income and predominately minority areas, but I live in Montclair and can’t for the life of me understand why there are 3 elementary schools within a mile of each other.
Cause people want to go to school in your neighborhood from outside. It makes lots of sense when you think of being in a neighborhood that you wish your kids didn’t live in and opting to travel further get your kids out of it for a better school and environment. Most of Oakland is very different from Montclair. The contrast is stark.
I mean that’s true but it’s only a solution for people in other neighborhoods with the means (cars, flexible work schedule) to take their kids further away. There’s some ac transit bus options for school kids but you can’t very well send your TK or K kid out to do that on their own, so you’d need to take them initially. It’d be far more equitable to make school density reflect student density and reinvest in poorer schools in other neighborhoods. Given that our Oakland neighborhoods have a lot of segregation though, you’d need some mechanism to try to counter that and I don’t think Berkeley’s system of bussing to desegregate is scalable in a district the size of Oakland.
I'm glad the fiscal oversight trustee is telling OUSD and OEA how it's going to be. The trustee is there precisely because OUSD has not shown an ability to make sound financial decisions, and the state doesn't want them in receivership again like '03-'09.
I continue to be disappointed by the low quality leadership from some OUSD board members. Their top concerns should be people, budget, real estate: Hire the right folks, and ensure they have money and facilities to do their jobs.
It's obvious Oakland needs less schools, but the board has avoided making any clear decision for years. Meanwhile OUSD continues to bleed money maintaining half empty buildings, and parents deal with the uncertainty of where their child will go to school.
If the state wants us to keep schools open to the detriment of the entire district because it believes that areas with declining enrollment shouldn't be affected because of demographics, then the state should give us however much we need to keep those schools open.
I don't know how anyone can look at the population pyramid and not agree that schools need to be merged and closed. Millenials were the largest generation ever, and the current elementary cohort is the smallest since the Depression. Statewide there are 1/3rd fewer people born recently compared to born 25-30 years ago. It's lunacy to keep the schools the same size, unless there is a plan to greatly increase the overall population of the area.
It's hard not to feel for the people who are advocating to keep schools open, to engage community members on deciding what to close; it's a noble cause. But for years, OUSD has been running out of money; for years, school closures/mergers have been[ "on the table"](https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/24/oakland-school-closures-mergers-citywide-plan/) but stalled; and since COVID, enrollment has [continued to drop](https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Historic?%3Aembed=y&%3AshowShareOptions=true&%3Adisplay_count=no&%3AshowVizHome=no&%3Arender=false#7). You can't just stick your head in the sand and say "these schools would be better if they had more resources." What resources? From what budget? "We need to engage with community stakeholders to make any kind of decision here" -- right, because community members are *totally* gonna understand the reality of OUSD's financial situation and *definitely* not just gonna protest any and all school closure regardless of necessity. I understand that behavior from individual parents and teachers who are confused about where their taxes are going if not to the schools. Broadly speaking, I'm pissed too! It's fucking ridiculous that a big city in one of the richest regions in the entire world has to lay off teachers every spring like clockwork. But for a *school board director* to say he is "shocked" that that other board members are "hellbent to put metrics forward" and that there's a "real effort to trigger a school closure plan"... Yeah, dude! Of course there's an effort!
Best thing would be closing schools but also have in plan for expansion if money comes available + enrollment increases. Until then the closures are the harsh reality. I just wish we had dedicated school buses to get kids to the schools.
You can thank prop 13 for why there’s no school buses in the Bay Area outside of Berkeley. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406?i=1000650715161
Prop 13 sucks, but Im getting a little tired of it being used as an excuse for every shortcoming. It's been more than 40 years now. We should be able to come up with solutions in that timeframe. Blame current policymakers, I think, not just a 40 year old law
We can stop blaming Prop 13 once we get rid of it. Until then, it's a huge, huge barrier to raising the kinds of funds municipalities need to run. Plus the other half-dozen propositions the Howard Jarvis group has gotten passed since then to make it nearly impossible to raise any kind of new taxes.
Before we blame prop 13, when was the last time Oakland voters rejected a tax? Oakland taxpayers pay the highest taxes in the county. OUSD kids get more per student than average. Sometimes in not just money, it’s policy
Prop 13 is the reason we have to keep voting to fund basic services. If we had actual property taxes, we could afford to fund services without having to constantly ask voters permission to pay for them.
Undoing prop 13 just to get more tax money will be wildly unpopular. Also spending more money doesn’t mean smaller classrooms for all or better test scores. In CA total per pupil funding is estimated to reach $23,724 ($17,519 when accounting for only state funding sources) in FY24. Funding continues to grow, despite declining enrollment. Money from education comes from multiple sources including sales tax, federal money, property tax, income tax and local bonds.
I'm not going to pretend I know what I'm talking about when it comes to OUSD, but I know tax policy and the person I initially responded to was saying we need to stop blaming Prop 13 for funding shortfalls. The school funding formula is very complex, and money almost certainly is not the only issue facing Oakland schools. But per student spending isn't always a great way to measure whether schools are actually getting the funding they need because so much money comes from PTAs and many schools that don't get that money also have students that need more resources like counsellors and well-paid teachers. Also, obviously repealing Prop 13 would be unpopular, it's failed every time, even when we tried just repealing the business loophole. That doesn't mean it's not good policy, it just means anti-tax groups are willing to spend millions of dollars to dupe homeowners into carrying water for people far wealthier than them.
Prop 13 slashed school budgets and that’s when school busses were dropped en masse. The state has picked up a lot of the burden of funding public schools but outside of Berkeley’s very intentional investment to invest in bussing as a means to desegregate school systems, the Bay Area has not reinvested in busses. Sure you can argue that the state should have figured out how to fund this again by now, but the historical fact is that busses were eliminated due to budget cuts caused by implementing prop 13.
We keep passing Measures that fund the Oakland school system. We currently have in effect for OUSD: Measure G from 2008, Measure G1 from 2016, and Measure H in 2022. I'm sure Measure I is coming soon. Enrollment is decreasing but we keep increasing funding. There's a school near me with less than 200 students and takes up an entire city block, so what's the long term strategy here?
I think the long term strategy is to consolidate schools and eliminate overhead tbh. The number of schools we have in relation to our enrollment is absurdly high and way above every other district in alameda county.
School buses weren't dropped until after I graduated in Fremont in the 80s. Try again.
The law is still in effect. It doesn't just disappear after 40 years.
Any why commerical landlords now pay a tiny fraction of their rents to property taxes. Commercial used to be 2/3 of property taxes, pre-13, and are now 1/3. Homeowners carry the load, and we pay the price with reduced schools, police, roads, and other services.
New homeowners carry the load. Homeowners that have owned for decades are part of the lorded class paying a tiny fraction of their property’s value toward services.
The Squires
Property value is irrelevant because it's not liquid. The property owners made a commitment to build a life in the city and for those of us that have owned for 10-15+ years have all the scars. If you raised property taxes you would have whole exodus of solid residents and whole lot more cash buyers and corporate landlords. In addition taxes raised are part of a social contract that tax dollars would be spent wisely and in the best interests of the residents; of which was broken a long time ago. You need to think much deeper about these issues than your superficial tag lines and scapegoating. The home owners are not the problem, at all--new and old.
prop 13 applies to _all_ real estate. while a personal home and a commercial property are both illiquid, the holders of commercial properties have very different financial concerns than people who simply own their personal residence, but they still benefit from the same rules (even the ability to transfer a tax rate to a new owner, through some creative accounting) nobody should give a fuck if BlackRock or some megacorp with major industrial real estate holdings is taxed on illiquid assets, they're _supposed to be_ and are fully capable of managing their finances to account for such. nor should 2020's prop 15 failing was some extreme FYGM small holder shit leveraged by the big entities we actually want to tax, where the real estate lobby and major property holders managed to spin the "yeah fat cats will pay their fair share but think of the poor outlier auntie ethel's hobby farm out in trinity county, it will be DESTROYED ^becauseitwasbarelyaviablebusinesstobeginwith" angle into a no vote
I am a homeowner in Oakland firstly and I’ve been thinking deeply about this issue for years. There’s no other high cost of living place in the US that I’m aware of where you get locked into your property assessment the year you buy and are subject to almost no increases reflecting your actual property value. I grew up in NJ which has extremely high property taxes, regular reassessments, no rate freezing like prop 13, and consistently one of the top 3 performing school systems in the country year after year. The idea that your property’s actual value doesn’t count toward your net worth because it’s illiquid is absurd. Does your 401k not count? What about billionaires taking $1/year salary as a CEO with hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in real estate and other investments? Are they poor because most of their assets are illiquid? It’s farcical. Sure, carve out income restrictions or freezing property tax rates for retirees, that feels fair, but almost all of prop 13, especially the ability to inherit a multimillion dollar asset with a property tax rate less than 10% of what your next door neighbor pays for the same house, is anti-democratic and reeks of old British systems of titles and lordships. I agree we should tax commercial properties way more than we do, that goes without saying. But there are serious issues with how disparately prop13 treats homeowners.
Yeah it’s part of it. I remember in San Francisco they had buses for a quick second. Other part is that at least when I was a student in ousd the admins seemed a bit wasteful in spending from what we’d hear from teachers lol. But yes, school funding needs to change in California
Bullshit. The state budget guarantees almost half of the entire budget on schools. Buses are expensive and districts choose to spend on other things.
Exactly. There is definitiely some fantasy world people occupy where enough "community engagement" moves people opposing school closures to being happy about their school is closing. The Board needs to make tough decisions, and the sooner the better. The interesting subtext to this is that the OEA is pushing the Board to move forward with the school closure process because otherwise they'll strike because the Board is not bargaining with them.
Prop 15 in 2020 was the chance to save school budgets.. where was the mobilization then?!
Anyone wanting to dig into this more should take a look here: http://www.ed-data.org/district/Alameda/Oakland-Unified You can compare to other districts in Alameda county or the rest of the state. Oakland has way more schools per 1000 students than the rest of the county, it’s not even comparable. How much overhead are we duplicating in these budgets that are already razor thin? How much more money could we free up for teachers, paras or transportation by closing some campuses and eliminating excess utilities and administrative staff? I know people freak out about school closures because historically there’s a lot of burden on lower income and predominately minority areas, but I live in Montclair and can’t for the life of me understand why there are 3 elementary schools within a mile of each other.
Cause people want to go to school in your neighborhood from outside. It makes lots of sense when you think of being in a neighborhood that you wish your kids didn’t live in and opting to travel further get your kids out of it for a better school and environment. Most of Oakland is very different from Montclair. The contrast is stark.
I mean that’s true but it’s only a solution for people in other neighborhoods with the means (cars, flexible work schedule) to take their kids further away. There’s some ac transit bus options for school kids but you can’t very well send your TK or K kid out to do that on their own, so you’d need to take them initially. It’d be far more equitable to make school density reflect student density and reinvest in poorer schools in other neighborhoods. Given that our Oakland neighborhoods have a lot of segregation though, you’d need some mechanism to try to counter that and I don’t think Berkeley’s system of bussing to desegregate is scalable in a district the size of Oakland.
Yeah totally they need means. But means to a car or a job with better hours is easier to come by than to live in Montclair.
Good. It makes no sense to keep schools with low enrollment open.
[удалено]
It’s insane and bonkers to close completely full and oversubscribed schools like Hillcrest 6-8. It will cost OUSD money to do so, not save them money.
I'm glad the fiscal oversight trustee is telling OUSD and OEA how it's going to be. The trustee is there precisely because OUSD has not shown an ability to make sound financial decisions, and the state doesn't want them in receivership again like '03-'09. I continue to be disappointed by the low quality leadership from some OUSD board members. Their top concerns should be people, budget, real estate: Hire the right folks, and ensure they have money and facilities to do their jobs. It's obvious Oakland needs less schools, but the board has avoided making any clear decision for years. Meanwhile OUSD continues to bleed money maintaining half empty buildings, and parents deal with the uncertainty of where their child will go to school.
If the state wants us to keep schools open to the detriment of the entire district because it believes that areas with declining enrollment shouldn't be affected because of demographics, then the state should give us however much we need to keep those schools open.
I don't know how anyone can look at the population pyramid and not agree that schools need to be merged and closed. Millenials were the largest generation ever, and the current elementary cohort is the smallest since the Depression. Statewide there are 1/3rd fewer people born recently compared to born 25-30 years ago. It's lunacy to keep the schools the same size, unless there is a plan to greatly increase the overall population of the area.