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  • Study of Oakland Unified’s parent tutors finds exciting possibilities and challenges

    Study of Oakland Unified’s parent tutors finds exciting possibilities and challenges


    Susy Aguilar, a literacy tutor recruited by the nonprofit Oakland REACH, meets with this small group of students for 30 minutes daily, providing science-based literacy instruction at Manzanita SEED Elementary in Oakland Unified.

    Credit: The Oakland REACH

    Initial findings from a study of a closely watched Oakland Unified program that recruits parents and neighbors as tutors show intriguing potential for other low-income school districts struggling to teach kids to read.

    By training recruits in phonics and structured literacy and assigning them to K-2 classrooms, the initiative offers Black and Latino parents and others a direct stake in seeing their neighborhood children achieve the skills to read. 

    “Oakland provides a key example of how tutors can complement and make more manageable broader efforts to dramatically improve literacy outcomes,” concluded a research report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education based at Arizona State University. 

    Through a partnership with The Oakland REACH, an innovative nonprofit serving low-income Black and Hispanic families, the district has been able to mine what the study calls a “pool of untapped talent” —parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, “many of them poorly served by public schools themselves and now brim with passion for addressing systemic problems in public education,” author Travis  Pillow wrote in an accompanying analysis. 

    “People within our own community as a whole make the best tutors because we connect directly with the children,” Susy Aguilar, a tutor at Manzanita Seed Elementary, which her daughter attends, said in a video about the program. “Just believing in the children and making them believe in themselves is one of the most important things for me.”

    Irene Segura, a literacy coach with Oakland Unified, said students look forward to meeting with their tutors, and the feelings are mutual.

    “When their students have those light-bulb moments of putting those decodable sounds together and putting that into words, it makes them happy and more determined to continue their work,” she said.

    The Oakland REACH was highlighted this week in a separate report that summarized effective tutoring practices. Accelerate, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand high-impact tutoring programs into public schools nationwide, cited The Oakland REACH’s tutor recruitment efforts and its partnership with Oakland Unified. 

    The Oakland REACH is one of 31 grantees whose tutoring work Accelerate has funded. In 2022, The Oakland REACH received an unrestricted $3 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to continue its work. 

    The research by the Center for Reinventing Public Education also documented significant obstacles facing the program, concluding that paying the tutors a competitive wage to retain them in high-cost Oakland will be difficult. And gains in reading scores in the first year were uneven among schools and between kindergarten and first and second grades. Figuring out why is the next step.

    The district, through a literacy training nonprofit, FluentSeeds, trained the tutors in the district’s phonics-based curriculum and gave them a specific goal: work in small groups with every child struggling with the elemental skill of decoding for a half-hour each day, at least three times each week. In its smoothest form, teachers communicated daily with tutors, who worked regularly with coaches, when they weren’t pulled aside to substitute teach.  

    The analysis of 84 tutors employed by Oakland Unified found considerable variability in student improvement. The first-year study, in 2022-23, found positive outcomes in a district where only 33% of students overall, 23% of Hispanic students, and 18% of Black students scored at standard in English language arts on the 2023 state Smarter Balanced test. The initiative is still a work in progress.

    Gains made by students who were tutored in small groups were comparable to gains by students who were taught the same curriculum by classroom teachers, as measured by progress on the iReady reading assessment in the 2022-23 school year.

    Students who received tutoring from an early literacy tutor made statistically significant gains on the iReady test compared with students who did not receive any instruction from the tutoring curriculum. The difference was nearly a year’s worth of reading growth; students without the training made less than half of a year’s standard reading achievement.

    But the large gains in kindergarten between tutored and nontutored students were not matched in first and second grades on the iReady reading assessments. With 100% reading improvement, the expected rate of yearly gain, improvement ranged from 79% to 188% among low-income schools. 

    “Their average growth is lower than we would expect or hope for. But growth doesn’t just reflect the impact of tutors,” said Ashley Jochim, consulting principal of the Center for Reinventing Public Education and co-author of the study. “Tutors are only one part of the literacy instruction puzzle.”

    Factors in and outside the school affect results, she said, including students’ chronic absences, which were among the highest in California since the pandemic. The number of tutors within a school, how they were deployed, the size of tutoring groups and scheduling are among the variables. 

    Another factor is the uneven support of principals, Jochim said. Among tutors responding to a survey, only half reported daily communication with classroom teachers, and fewer said they were in regular communication with school staff leading the literacy work. 

    “There are gaps; this is where greater attention to quality and fidelity in tutoring is important,”  Jochim said. 

    Added Lakisha Young, founder and CEO of The Oakland REACH, “We’ve helped the district add a bunch of tutors. But if we don’t work on these other conditions to bring everything into alignment, then it’s going to make the work harder.”

    Jochim said that the center will spend the last year of a two-year grant collecting better and more data to determine how differences among schools affected outcomes. The range of reading skills widens in first and second grades, complicating the ability to compare the progress of tutored students and nontutored students, she said. 

    The secret of success

    Jochim said the most instructive lesson from the pilot is that having more adults in the classroom allows for differentiation of instruction.  

    “For so long in this country, we have assumed that a single teacher working alone in their classroom could sufficiently differentiate instruction for kids in literacy and math,” she said. That’s difficult, she explained,  in a kindergarten class where some students are reading for comprehension while others are struggling to decode one-syllable words.

    Jochim said there is “no question that this project is the right approach.”

    “My thinking has evolved,” she said. “Differentiation of instructions is the ticket to better outcomes — if we can figure out the specifics.”  

    Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University education researcher and authority on tutoring, is bullish as well.  The Oakland REACH’s partnership with the district and FluentSeeds matters, she said, because it treats tutoring as “part of a broader and coherent approach to improving literacy, not simply an ‘add-on’ program.” 

    “I’m excited,” she added, “what this systemic approach can offer for communities across the country.”

    Dilemma over adequate pay

    The level of pay may also determine if the tutoring initiative succeeds. The district pays tutors $16 to $18 per hour, plus benefits, which Young had to lobby the district for. Tutors who responded to the survey cited low pay as the biggest disincentive to the job, and it is likely a factor in why only five of the 11 tutors placed last spring returned to the job this fall.

    Young acknowledged that pay appears to be the biggest obstacle to sustainability. It is a difficult issue because, under the district labor contract, bumping up the pay significantly will run into the pay level for a para-educator, which requires more education than a high-school degree. Young is exploring other options to fill the income gap, such as a retention bonus.

    Roots in the pandemic

    The Oakland REACH incubated the concept of community-trained tutors in the Covid summer of 2020. Parents frustrated by the failures of remote learning had cited reading instruction as their top need, so Young hired the first group of tutors. Buoyed by their success, she began working closely with the district to make early-grade reading tutoring its priority as well once schools reopened.

    The Oakland REACH recruited the first group of 16 “literacy liberators,” handing out fliers on school grounds and going door-to-door in the fall of 2022 and partnered with FluentSeeds to train them in early 2023. Many had to be convinced they could do the job; the minimum requirement was a high-school degree. 

    According to the report, the first recruits included a young man who had seen family members struggle with reading comprehension and a retired teacher who “expressed alarm” that he had mistaught young readers and wanted to make amends through the science of reading — instruction grounded in structured literacy and evidence-based practices.

    Oakland Unified hired 11 of them to fill tutoring vacancies and placed them in the classrooms last spring.

    “Six months into the school year, Oakland had still not filled tutor positions in schools that served the most marginalized students. Oakland REACH was really critical to filling the gaps and ensuring the kids who most need this help are able to get it,” Jochim  said.

    A second cohort of 20 tutors began work in the fall of 2023.

    Extra training with leadership skills

    FluentSeeds gives all of Oakland’s K-2 literacy tutors a four-day course in SIPPS — Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words — the district’s early-stage intervention program. The subset of tutors that The Oakland REACH recruited for “literacy liberator fellowships” took an additional eight, two-hour sessions that provided background in the science of reading and focused on building student mindsets and tutors’ roles as leaders and advocates.

    “We bring in a social-emotional component of what it means to be a teacher in Oakland teaching students that are behind, and how does that make them feel?” said Emily Grunt, program director for FluentSeeds, who has led the Oakland training.

    One tutor characterized the fellowship as “life-changing.” The report described a session, offered by Decoding Dyslexia CA, in which fellows attempted to read a passage from Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild,” in which letters were changed to simulate the experience of a child with a learning disability. The passage became unreadable.

    “Maybe you’re just not trying,” the trainer told the fellows, projecting the hurtful response that many students with dyslexia are told.

    A model for other districts?

    Interest in the program is spreading. The Oakland REACH held a conference on the tutoring model that attracted representatives from 14 nonprofits nationwide. Another conference is planned for the spring. The Oakland REACH has created a readiness assessment to determine if groups have the leadership capacity, organizational strength, funding and strong ties with the community.

    “We only can work with people who have a certain level of readiness to be able to push this forward because it’s going to be really tricky,” she cautioned. “If you’re not used to working with your district at all, your head’s going to explode starting this out.”





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  • Going police-free is tough and ongoing, Oakland schools find

    Going police-free is tough and ongoing, Oakland schools find


    Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, stops a student while they are walking to class and asks how their day is going.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Across the Oakland Unified School District, the mantra for school staff is to call city police only as a last resort. If a disturbance occurs, they should rely first on in-house staff who don’t carry guns and can’t arrest anyone.

    Since voting in June 2020 to disband its police department, Oakland has pursued one goal — to defuse conflict and avoid bringing in police and exposing students to the possibility of arrest. Oakland’s preference is for restorative justice, which emphasizes circle-of-trust interactions to improve how students treat one another. 

    “Most of the time, it’s just having conversations with them (students),” said Eddie Franklin, a former security guard who is now part of the district’s new police-free staffing. “Let them authentically be themselves, and the goal becomes to chip away at the rough edges they might have.”

    It’s a strategy credited by the district with drastically reducing the 911 calls to city police from 2,128 during the 2019-20 school year, the last year the Oakland district had its own police department, to 200 in 2022-23.  

    But an EdSource analysis of data from the police shows a higher number of calls from just eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools in half a year. The period from January to June 2023 shows those schools made 225 calls, with 105 considered “serious” for reasons including assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.

    The Oakland data was part of a statewide investigation of school policing across California. EdSource gathered nearly 46,000 police logs of calls from and about 852 schools.  The data collection was designed as a representative sample of California schools.

    Police track all calls from and about eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools, while the district’s data captures calls made to police from all 106 schools.

    Misha Karigaca, Oakland Unified’s director of student support and safety, could not fully reconcile the differences between the police call logs and the district’s record of internal calls to police for the same time period.

    “If a 911 call comes from a cell phone and the call doesn’t get reported to my department, we will not have information about the call which can also account for significant discrepancies,” he said.

    Karigaca and Board President Sam Davis acknowledged that while staff are trained when not to call 911 and to report any calls that they make, it doesn’t always happen. “We don’t capture every call in our data as (school) sites are required to notify us if law enforcement comes on campus; but we know of times when this hasn’t always happened,” Karigaca said.

    Davis said it’s also possible other staff are calling 911 for nonemergent reasons because “a lot of people reach the end of their rope for all sorts of reasons.”

    The Oakland schools included in EdSource’s data are McClymonds, Castlemont, Fremont, Oakland, Skyline high schools and Montera, West Oakland and Westlake middle schools.

    “We’re not in a place where we can have completely police-free schools. That is our goal and what we’re working towards, but unfortunately, there are times when we do need police support,” Karigaca said. “It was our conditioning, whatever we needed they (police) would respond. It’s almost similar to our communities and our society — there’s not many other options. Anything that revolves around safety, we’re conditioned to call police.”

    In place for two school years, the new police-free plan is being evaluated locally and nationally on whether it is achieving what it set out to do.

    The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, in describing its study, put Oakland on the “leading edge of an emerging violence-reduction practice” happening in schools across the country, according to Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the institute. Study results are expected in August.

    Not everyone supports the decision to disband the district’s police department.

    Board member Clifford Thompson said it was wrong for Oakland to disband its police department. “There’s little benefit to not having police at schools,” he said. “Totally eliminating the force without having a backup for those who need that type of force, it might not have been the best thing to do.”

    Getting to police-free

    The Black Organizing Project, a Bay Area community organization focused on racial, social and economic justice, has been advocating for the end of the police department since 2011. It finally happened in June 2020 with a unanimous vote of the school board.

    Oakland has had a fraught and violent history of racism and police abuse of Black people for nearly 80 years, which factored greatly into the final push to disband the department following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.

    The city’s Black population increased dramatically during World War II when slave descendants migrated west from Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Police officers from those states were quickly recruited and stationed in Black neighborhoods. In 1950, a civil rights leader told the state Assembly that Black people lived “in daily and nightly terror” of Oakland police, according to a 1950 State Assembly report. The police department in Oakland Unified was born in 1957.

    After more than 60 years of having an embedded police department in Oakland schools, educators, city officials and community partners are working to untangle the decades of policing culture and running its own police department.

    There’s no contract or memorandum of understanding with the Oakland Police Department, but the district shares what staff are taught about when to call 911 and how to interact with police. 

    Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention recently reported to a joint council-district committee on the plan’s progress. The city of Oakland invested $2.4 million in the 2022-23 school year to address violence in schools by creating a School Violence Intervention and Prevention Program and hiring life coaches, violence interrupters and gender-based violence specialists to four comprehensive high schools and three continuation high schools. 

    Gender-based violence specialists are unique to Oakland, Jannetta said. The specialists have workshops about dating violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault and commercial sexual exploitation.

    Through surveys, officials found these extra staffers have more relatability to students, can focus on individual needs, and alleviate some of this work from teachers.

    It’s too early to evaluate whether it is working, but the district is going in a positive direction, said Jessica Black, director of administration for the Black Organizing Project.

    Getting to a police-free school environment also faces challenges. City and school officials say violence especially among 14 to 18-year-olds in the city bleeds into the school district. 

    During the 2022-23 school year, there were more than 600 high school suspensions and two shootings at OUSD high schools, according to the report. One of last year’s shootings was at Skyline High School, and just last month, another shooting occurred during the high school’s graduation that injured three people.

    The city’s analysis of school violence puts some of the blame on the heightened crime in the city. According to the report, there’s been an increase in violence on campuses “that is related to community conflicts as well as an increase in instances of non-students showing up at school campuses with weapons to fight students.”

    Despite the challenges, the school board has not considered reinstating the district’s police department, Davis confirmed. Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell declined to comment through a district spokesperson.

    When to call police

    One of the Black Organizing Project’s goals was to “uproot the security structure,” said Jasmine Williams, development director. With community support, the project pushed to restructure campus police, including getting rid of badges or anything that emulates the police and installing new titles, training, and redesigning the shirts they wear.

    “The district is not coming up with this stuff on their own,” the project’s Jessica Black said. “We’re literally pushing the district to think differently.”

    Oakland administrators can call for “nonviolent de-escalation support” from staff known as culture and climate ambassadors when there are fights, a student is causing harm to themselves or others, or unwelcome visitors are on campuses, according to the School Administrator Guidance to Police Free Response. There’s a nonemergency line administrators can call to dispose of firearms or illegal drugs, when there’s suspicion of a crime, or during lockdowns. For mental health crises, administrators also have different people to reach out to depending on the situation. 

    Students can still be disciplined, including suspended, but that’s rarely the first option, Karigaca said. Most of the time, interventions take place.

    “It’s offering a conduit of other opportunities, such as a restorative session, once both parties are in a place to have a restorative session,” Karigaca said. “Sometimes it’s going to take a walk or going to a different office; sometimes it’s calling parents or connecting with a community resource.”

    District police-free guidelines give a variety of reasons when calling 911 is appropriate: active shooters, fire, medical emergencies, a person with a gun or explosive, bomb threats, serious injuries, hostage situations, abduction or kidnapping, violent crimes, death at a school site, emergency evacuations, or any situation posing danger to health or safety. 

    Students can be arrested for some of these incidents, Karigaca said, but usually students aren’t arrested as a result of staff calling 911. There are about four to five arrests every school year, and it’s typically because police are arresting students for something they did outside of school, he said.

    The district partners with organizations for alternative support, but sometimes they can’t immediately respond, Karigaca said. 

    “When we call CPS (Child Protective Services) or any other mental health crisis response folks, a lot of times their staff is also under-resourced and they aren’t able to respond,” Karigaca said. “Even they will tell us, ‘Call law enforcement.’”

    New titles for security guards

    As Eddie Franklin walked down the hallway of Bret Harte Middle School, it was as if every student knew who he was. Most would fist pump him or shake his hand and he knew every student’s name. 

    Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, shakes a student’s hand while walking down the hallway.
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Franklin has been at OUSD for seven years and used to be a security guard who worked with police and used handcuffs for detaining students. He became a culture keeper four years ago. Now he’s what’s called a culture and climate ambassador.

    Franklin said he brings “an unbiased approach” to every situation even if the student is acting negatively. “Your goal is to actually make them (students) see and critically think about what’s in the best interest of both sides.”

    Security guards were replaced with culture keepers and culture and climate ambassador who have leadership roles and assist culture keepers when needed, Karigaca said. The main priorities for all roles are to de-escalate violence and create positive relationships with students and staff.

    The 63 culture keepers are spread around the district: up to three in middle schools; up to six in most high schools. Five elementary schools also have culture keepers. 

    When Franklin was a culture keeper, he said his day-to-day work evolved into understanding the different personalities on campus to get a better understanding of student behavior.

    “So you don’t overreact when they do some of the things they do,” Franklin said. “But also try to give them an idea of what they can do differently.”

    As a culture and climate ambassador, Franklin is deployed to different schools when extra support is needed, Karigaca said. Most of the time, they roam around different schools building relationships.

    Franklin said he oversees 13 middle schools and does check-ins with staff to talk about what kind of support they need. A big part is building trust, he said.

    When Franklin goes to a school, he said, his goal is “to act like a parent, a positive parent, let them know I actually care about you and support you in whatever you do, and I’m not going to be over the top if I react to something that you did negative.”

    To other districts looking at Oakland as an example, Williams, of the Black Organizing Project, said she doesn’t want the message to be “all you have to do is implement a policy.”

    “It took us 10 years of fighting to get here, and we are still fighting within the district,” Williams said. “It takes community to have even this much progress.”

    EdSource reporters Thomas Peele; Daniel J. Willis and Andrew Reed contributed to this report.





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  • Puppetry is far more than child’s play for young learners in Oakland

    Puppetry is far more than child’s play for young learners in Oakland


    Trevor Aguilar, a 6-year-old, narrates his own story with a puppet while playing with Jacqui June Whitlock, a puppet education specialist at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Puppetry is more than just child’s play at Children’s Fairyland, Oakland’s iconic storybook theme park. Small children have been stimulated by the wonders of live performance at the Storybook Puppet Theater since 1956, but now they will also be exposed to arts education programming specially crafted for preschool learners. A new puppet education initiative, Puppet Playdates, takes hands-on learning to the next level.

    Once upon a time comes alive for a new generation every Thursday after the 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. puppet shows, when children are cordially invited to a nearby meadow to make friends with marionettes after the curtain falls.

    Amber Rose Arthur
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    On a recent morning, Amber Rose Arthur, 5, wasted no time breathing life into the unicorn puppet, its sparkles glittering in the sun. Every so often, she gently nudged other children with the unicorn’s horn to bestow them with magic powers. In the interests of total disclosure: She gave this reporter some enchantment too.

    “They don’t get enough arts in school anymore, so events like this are great,” said her father, Gregory Arthur, watching as the little girl explored the craft of puppetry and social interactions in one fell swoop.  “It stimulates the brain more than a lot of other things. It gets them to think and learn, and it makes them smile.”

    Nestled on the shores of Lake Merritt, this bewitching arts education program invites children to learn the magic of puppetry while immersing themselves in classic fables including James M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,”  Frank L. Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” This program also lays the groundwork for a proposed puppet education program that will pay visits to early-learning classrooms in Oakland Unified School District (OUSD).

    “Fairyland is designed to inspire a young child to have a great imagination,” said Joy Peacock, client and community relations director for the PNC Foundation, the philanthropic arm of PNC Bank, which is partnering on the puppet-based early-learning program. “It’s not all laid out there for you, like in TV. You have to rely on your own imagination. Puppetry is very interactive, it’s very tactile, it’s very creative.”

    Coming out of the pandemic, Fairyland held focus groups with local teachers to pinpoint what kinds of activities would be most beneficial for the preschool cohort, and the takeaway was that children today need more social-emotional learning as well as more exposure to the creative impulse. Enter puppets. 

    “One of the things that actually made me really sad is that the teachers were saying the children are losing their imagination,” said Maria Rodriguez, manager of the puppet theater. “They’re losing their ability to make believe. For me, you know, I can’t imagine life without imagination, so I was just like, oh goodness. We need to help inspire the children to learn how to make believe. We want to help them to light that spark.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ZRaXTZKcM

    That’s basically Jacqui June Whitlock’s calling in life. A former transitional kindergarten teacher with a background in theater and an affinity for puppetry, this is her dream gig. She studied child development in college and the art of shadow puppetry in Bali. She has encountered more than one child who was too afraid to express themselves, until she handed them a puppet. Suddenly they found their voice.

    “For me, this has been like a lifelong career. Incorporating social-emotional learning with puppetry, that’s my bread and butter,” said Whitlock, a puppet education specialist. “Something wonderful happens when you hand a child a puppet. Puppets are a great conduit for storytelling and learning without putting any pressure on the child.”

    Whitlock is a master at teaching through play. Holding court with a cavalcade of puppets, from rabbits and dragons to cats, after a recent performance of “Peter Pan,” she relishes helping children spin yarns of their own. 

    “I’ve been dreaming of doing a program like this for years. It’s amazing that we finally have the funding to do it,” she said. “In America, we tend to think of puppets as simple toys for children, but really there’s so much more to puppetry. Many other cultures think of them as more than that. They can be a very complex tool.” 

    At the play dates, she helps guide groups of pint-sized puppeteers as they learn and play. If a child has a puppet pretend to bite her, for example, she inquires whether the puppet is hungry, opening up a dialogue with the child. But she always wants the kiddo to lead the way. 

    “They weave their own story,” said Whitlock, who crafts a lot of her own puppets by hand. “You’re not really telling them what the story is, they’re telling you.”

    Empowering children to express themselves is particularly critical right now, experts say, because this generation missed out on so many formative experiences because of school closures and other pandemic disruptions. The arts can be an effortless way to boost special emotional learning, she says, through the kind of make-believe games that children are naturally drawn to. 

    Jacqui June Whitlock, a puppet education specialist at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, teaches through puppet play and imagination.
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    “Teachers were saying that they were seeing a lack of imagination or a lack of pretend play happening in their classrooms, noticing that children weren’t interacting as much,” she said. “And puppets are an excellent tool for cultivating that pretend play, also just communicating with each other, it’s sort of like a conduit for your personality … It just makes it so easy for them to communicate with each other and break down that barrier.”

    Puppets can play a role in helping children communicate on a deeper level, experts say, by externalizing their emotions onto the inanimate object. The puppet becomes a proxy that helps kids process hard situations, grapple with fears and explore their feelings through metaphor.

    “One of my favorite things that I’ve observed is that puppet playtime creates a lot of interaction between the grownup and the kiddo,” said Whitlock. “It’s like time slows down for them. Also, I put in a bench recently, so now I’m also seeing a lot of elders, and I love the interactions between grandparents and their littles. It’s very nurturing.”

    Of course, puppetry can also fuel expressions of pure escapism, encouraging little children to create their own big adventures. 

    “Children and puppetry go hand in hand, because kids have no trouble suspending their disbelief, and endowing the simplest props with life,” said Carey Perloff, former artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and a longtime puppet proponent. “Puppets are a direct conduit to the imagination. Because they can be realistic or totally abstract, they invite audience members to project their own idea of character and circumstance onto a piece of fabric or some papier mache, and thus to transform it into something magical.”

    Trevor Aguilar finds joy in using his imagination with a dragon puppet.
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Trevor Aguilar, for one, celebrated his sixth birthday by weaving a tale of intrigue with his new fuzzy friends. He narrated an adventure in which the grandmother puppet saved the townspeople from the evil machinations of the fire-breathing dragon puppet. The last child at the puppet play date, he didn’t seem to want the fun to end. 

    Indeed, some children become so enamored of the marionettes that they make a point of paying a visit to Whitlock and her buckets of puppets every time they visit the park. 

    “I’ve got my regulars, which is so great,” said Whitlock. “They know exactly what they want. ‘OK, I’m here. I’m getting the raccoon puppet today.’ ”





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  • Berkeley, Oakland teens cast first votes in school board elections

    Berkeley, Oakland teens cast first votes in school board elections


    A poster at Oakland High School encourages 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in the school board election. These posters are displayed throughout the campus.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    While the upcoming presidential election crowds voters’ minds, a new demographic will be casting their ballots for the first time this November. Both the cities of Berkeley and Oakland announced in August that 16 and 17-year-old constituents are now eligible to vote in local school board races.

    Berkeley voters approved Measure Y in 2016 by just over 70% of the vote. In Oakland, Measure QQ — which indicates similar youth voting stipulations as its Berkeley counterpart — was approved in 2020 with 68% of the vote.

    Years after the approval, continued community advocacy from organizations like Oakland Kids First has helped push the Alameda County Registrar of Voters to finalize a system to register 16- and 17-year-old voters.

    At a school board candidate forum on Oct. 22 hosted by Fremont High School and organized by Oakland Youth Vote, students, teachers, administrators, organizers and school board candidates from Oakland Unified School District gathered to register voters and learn more about the candidates running in local school board contests.

    Nearly all the school board candidates from districts 1, 3, 5 and 7 were present, and each was given a chance to introduce themselves and discuss their priorities and platforms within a time-limited format moderated by students from Fremont High School.

    After the student moderators and administrators gave introductions and explanations on registration, voting and the school board, the moderators emphasized the importance of voting in making student voices heard. They cited the efforts of community organizations like the Oakland Youth Commission and Californians for Justice in their success.

    Organizers and candidates spoke to students at the Oakland Youth Voting Forum on Oct. 22.
    Credit: Emily Hamill / EdSource

    “Your vote has the power to bring us closer to your vision and make your dream a reality,” said a student moderator. “This makes history, but it was only possible because we have been fighting for the last five years. We have earned this — it is a right.”

    Forum presenters highlighted what they considered the most important issues to Oakland students — access to health and wellness, community-centered schools, and essential life skills — all of which outlined concerns from over 1,400 student survey forms gathered from across the district. 

    The remainder of the forum consisted of the student moderators asking the candidates questions about how they plan to represent student concerns for equitable resource distribution, holistic mental health and wellness checks, school safety and budget deficits.

    Oakland Tech senior Ariana Astorga Vega and sophomore Amina Tongun, both members of the All City Council, or the ACC, attended the forum and emphasized the importance of students using their newfound voting rights, which are limited to the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD board races. The ACC is made up of 11 peer-elected high school students to represent student concerns to OUSD.

    “Even though I can’t vote yet because I have not turned 16, I’m here as a part of the ACC to support the local youth vote,” Tongun said. “I feel like it’s really special because we get to vote as young people and our voices are being heard. That’s one of the main reasons that I joined the ACC, because I really believe in advocating for young people and helping their voices be heard.” 

    Vega echoed Tongun’s opinion about the new voting rights, and her appreciation for being able to be “a part of that change.” 

    The two have also been involved in the ACC’s efforts to encourage youth voting, including streamlining social media posts about it and putting up fliers reading “Breaking News: 16-17 year-olds can now vote!” across district’s schools. 

    Although they have run into obstacles, like student disinterest due to not knowing how to vote and what the implications are, Vega and Tongun hope their community’s continued efforts to raise awareness and education will motivate their peers to take action.

    Maya Rapier, an organizer with Oakland Kids First, who also attended the forum, has been committed to the purpose. By helping distribute voter registration forms, spread awareness about the forum, and even implement a new voting curriculum into OUSD schools, Rapier said the organization has helped the district register over 1,000 student voters.

    “I genuinely feel like Oakland is such a beautiful place with such a beautiful community of voters who deserve so much, but there’s a history here of students being underserved and under-resourced,” Rapier said. “Students know their own experiences best, so for them to be able to be in the schools real-time, notice an issue, take that to the representative, and know that they have the power to bring attention to it, means a lot.”

    Rapier added, “I’m a former student of OUSD, and I’m really inspired by the students here and the work that they’ve been doing.”

    Fremont High School Principal Nidya Baez echoed these sentiments, expressing that her student body “feels responsible” for representing families and community members who cannot vote. She has worked to help “eliminate (obstacles like) the fear factor” by partnering with local coalitions to organize class presentations, lunchtime tabling and events like the candidate forum. 

    At Berkeley High School (BHS), students, with faculty help, have spearheaded youth voter registration and education. On Oct. 8, students from the BHS Civic Leaders Club organized a school board candidate forum with assistance from John Villavicencio, the director of student activities. The students invited the candidates to speak at the high school and allowed time for students to ask questions. 

    Villavicencio added that other BHS student organizations have led efforts in encouraging students to register to vote and done the groundwork by taking mail-in voter registration forms to classrooms. He also noted efforts from Josh Daniels, a former member of both the Oakland and Berkeley unified school district boards, who organized a weekly Zoom call between student leaders, student organizations and nonprofits in support of the youth vote to discuss efforts in their respective school districts. 

    During one weekly meeting, Oakland Youth Vote shared a curriculum members had put together detailing what the school board does, introducing the OUSD school board, emphasizing the importance of youth voting and assisting in registering students to vote. 

    After hearing about the curriculum Oakland Youth Vote created, Villavicencio encouraged Berkeley to create something similar. BHS teacher librarian Allyson Bogie offered to help, and created a shortened two-day curriculum tailored to Berkeley Unified. After review from the superintendent’s office, student leaders, teachers and administrators, the curriculum was shared with teachers who could use it in their classrooms. 

    “I wanted to make sure any teachers who wanted a tool to talk about youth voting, and getting kids registered, and the history of it, had something really easy to use,” Bogie said. “I believe it’s important for kids to vote, and I want to support the teachers, and that’s part of my role as a librarian.”

    According to Villavicencio, there have been several hurdles to overcome in convincing students to register, and to understand why this opportunity is special. Some students did not know their own Social Security numbers, complicating the registration process, while others have never heard of the school board or don’t know what the school board does, making it difficult to teach students about the impact of their vote.

    Villavicencio said they could “easily reach 1,000 pre-registration” out of about 1,800 potential BHS students who could register to vote. As of Oct. 22, 491 students were registered, leaving him “slightly disappointed,” he said. 

    “(Some students) are very passionate about activism and also engaging in the community,” Villavicencio said, but the overall sentiment is “lukewarm.” Bogie noted that she doesn’t think students view it negatively but has noticed a lot of students who also “aren’t that interested.” 

    Looking forward, Bogie hopes to see “continuing student momentum” for future elections. 

    “It’s commendable, what’s being done,” Villavicencio said. “And it’s crazy to say that there could be a lot more done.” 

    Emily Hamill is a third-year student at UC Berkeley double-majoring in comparative literature and media studies and minoring in journalism. Kelcie Lee is a second-year student at UC Berkeley majoring in history and sociology. Both are members of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.

    California Student Journalism Corps member Jo Moon, a junior at UC Berkeley studying political economy, gender and women’s studies and Korean, contributed to this story.





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  • Oakland Unified wrestles with lead in water. Most California schools are in the dark

    Oakland Unified wrestles with lead in water. Most California schools are in the dark


    Oakland students rally for lead-free drinking water in their schools in front of city hall Monday, Sept. 30, 2024.

    Monica Velez

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    Oakland student Hannah Lau said she only discovered there were elevated lead levels in her school’s drinking water this year through her teacher. There wasn’t an announcement from the principal, nor was there an assembly to notify students.

    “I was really shocked and scared,” the 13-year-old said. “How long have we been drinking this water? Is it really bad? Is it in my body? How poisoned am I?”

    The Oakland Unified School District is one of the few districts in California that has continued to test lead levels in drinking water years after it was no longer required by state law. In 2017, an extension to the existing law (AB-746), also known as the California Safe Drinking Water Act, required districts to sample water from at least five faucets in every school and report the findings to the state by July 1, 2019.  State funding for lead testing ended after the deadline.

    The law resulted in school districts getting a snapshot of lead contamination in their drinking water at that time. But because of the one-time requirement that districts test only a small sample of faucets, and exemptions for charter and private schools, there are no statewide records that offer an accurate representation of lead presence in California schools currently.

    Seven years after the law went into effect, school districts and communities, including Oakland, are still grappling with how to keep lead out of drinking water.

    “We know there’s lead in the plumbing, and even if it is a low value (of lead concentration), we know it’s persistent,” said Elin Betanzo, a national drinking water expert and founder of Safe Water Engineering. “If a kid is drinking water every day at school, that lead is always there. That lead can get into any glass. The studies show that the low-level exposures have a disproportionately high impact on the brain.”

    An EdSource analysis of school district data of lead concentrations in Oakland Unified water in 2019 and 2024 shows many inconsistencies. In some cases, the same water fixtures that were tested both years yielded completely different results, with lead concentrations below the state’s threshold of 15 parts per billion (ppb) in 2019, and in 2024, some fixtures reached triple digits. 

    “We know that this happens,” Betanzo said. “We have extensive records of data that if you sample the same tap at a school you can get a low value that would appear safe one day and could get an extremely high, concerning level the next day.”

    Lincoln Elementary School, between downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt, had some of the highest levels of lead in Oakland Unified after the district tested there earlier this year. 

    A drinking fountain at Lincoln with the highest lead concentration tested at 930 ppb in June. That same fountain was tested in 2019 at 2.1 ppb, which is under the state and district threshold for safe water. The Safe Drinking Water Act only required faucets that tested above 15 ppb to be fixed. However, Oakland Unified adopted a stricter policy in 2018 that says if levels are higher than 5 ppb, the issue requires remediation.

    California’s lead action level was set at 15 ppb following the recommendation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s lead and copper rule. On Oct. 8, less than a month before the Nov. 5 election, that limit was lowered to 10 ppb by the Biden administration to ensure that drinking water is safe throughout the country. Some states, but not California, had already adopted lower limits prior to the change.

    Without the district’s follow-up testing in 2024, Oakland Unified officials wouldn’t have discovered the faucet that was once deemed safe is dangerous. It’s not an isolated incident. Another drinking fountain at Lincoln tested 3.3 ppb in 2019 and in June tested at 410 ppb. 

    “This happened in my children’s elementary school,” Betanzo said. “So it does happen. It is normal. We know all about it. And yet the requirements that states have put together for school drinking water don’t acknowledge the science of this.”

    The release of lead in water is sporadic, and testing results from the same fixtures are often inconsistent, Betanzo said. 

    “Schools have been doing these one-time samples, and if they get a low sample (value), they say, ‘Hey, the water is safe,’” Betanzo said. “And that’s not true. We have lead throughout our plumbing,” referring to school districts in general.

    In schools, water doesn’t run for long periods on weekends and during breaks, Betanzo said, and it doesn’t allow the corrosion control that is more common in houses. There needs to be a constant turnover of water for corrosion control to work, she said. 

    Faucets with elevated lead levels have been taken out of service, according to Oakland Unified spokesperson John Sasaki. Often, the faucets are fixed by replacing filters and are retested before they are back in service. 

    “With regard to inconsistencies between lead levels found in 2019 … and now, our estimation is that because most of our schools are relatively old, and the features including the plumbing are old, there has been degradation of some aspects of the systems since 2018, which has led to the elevated levels we have recently found,” Sasaki said in an emailed statement.

    The inconsistencies in lead samplings aren’t unique to Lincoln. Similar examples occurred in Edna Brewer Middle School, Cleveland Elementary, Crocker Highlands Elementary, Horace Mann Elementary, Bella Vista Elementary, and Fruitvale Elementary. The lead levels recorded in 2019 were all either under 5 ppb or 15 ppb at all of these schools and higher in 2024.

    “It’s terrifying at a personal level,” Oakland parent Nate Landry said. “It’s terrifying at a collective level.”

    Failures of the Safe Drinking Water Act

    The state’s drinking water law didn’t require districts to do follow-up testing, which is part of the reason schools that haven’t tested lead levels since 2019 have no way of knowing if students and staff are still being exposed to elevated lead levels in drinking water. 

    The law exempted thousands of private and charter schools on private property from testing for lead levels. Not every faucet or drinking fountain was required to be tested. And schools that were built after 2010 were also not required to test lead levels.

    California has more than 10,000 public schools, including about 1,300 charters, and it’s possible thousands of fixtures have yet to be tested for lead. 

    State law required faucets — not valves — to be changed in fountains with lead levels exceeding 15 ppb, said Kurt Souza, an enforcement coordinator for the division of drinking water at the State Water Resources Control Board, which could be why lead levels were inconsistent between 2019 and 2024. Valves are used to control the water flow and are usually placed under the sink.

    “Never change out an old faucet without changing the valves,” Souza advised.

    Critics of the state drinking water act have said the 15 ppb limit for lead in drinking water was too lenient. Some school districts, including Oakland, have set lower limits. 

    According to the EPA’s website, “There is no safe level of lead exposure. In drinking water, the primary source of lead is from pipes, which can present a risk to the health of children and adults.”

    The EPA has also said the 15 ppb level is not a measure of public health protection, Betanzo said. 

    “15 ppb was selected as an engineering metric,” said Betanzo, who formerly worked at the EPA. “It is an indicator of corrosion control effectiveness. So, if a water system looks at the 90th percentile of its sampling results, and it’s greater than 15 parts per billion, it tells them they have an out-of-control corrosion situation that needs to be addressed.”

    Other districts that have tested for lead levels after 2019 include San Francisco Unified, San Diego Unified, Laguna Beach Unified, Castro Valley Unified, Encinitas Union Elementary, La Mesa Spring-Valley, and San Bruno Park Elementary.

    “Did you find every spot that has a high lead? Probably not,” said Souza. “Some schools probably had a hundred faucets and then we only sampled five of them. I thought it was a really good start, and it showed some schools had problems, which then did more samples and, and did more things to it.”

    There’s currently no directive under the state or the federal Environmental Protection Agency to test lead levels in school drinking water, said Wes Stieringer-Sisneros, a senior environmental scientist for the drinking water division at the State Water Resource Control Board. 

    Since the state requirements for lead testing ended, there have been efforts to pass state legislation that would have required follow-up testing, AB-249, but Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill in 2023. The following year, another bill, AB 1851, which would have created a pilot testing program, was introduced but held in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

    “It was another blow,” said Colleen Corrigan, health policy associate for Children Now, a statewide research and advocacy organization that co-sponsored both bills. “We hope that Proposition 2 will pass, and we really want to make sure that that distribution of money is equitable and accessible.”

    Voters passed Proposition 2 on Nov. 5, and that will provide, among other things school-related, up to $115 million to remove lead from drinking water in schools.

    How Oakland is getting the lead out

    Although Oakland district officials have made progress in repairing faucets since the most recent testing results in the spring, some people have lost trust and confidence in the district. 

    Shock waves burst through the Oakland community at the start of the school year when educators, parents, and students discovered the district was withholding testing results that showed elevated levels of lead in water in dozens of schools. Some lead testing results were available in April and families didn’t start to receive notices until August.

    “The scope of their (Oakland Unified) failure to communicate pretty crucial public health information was shocking,” parent Landry said. 

    District officials did acknowledge they did not properly communicate with families about elevated lead levels. 

    During a rally in front of Oakland City Hall last month, parents, students, educators and community organizers urged the school board and City Council to do more to get the lead out of school drinking water, even though the district is already doing more than most.

    The Get the Lead Out of OUSD coalition, which includes the Oakland teachers union and other community partners, has a list of demands, the first being instating a new, highly ambitious threshold of lead levels of zero parts per billion. Other demands include testing all water sources at Oakland schools immediately and annually, testing all playgrounds, gardens and outdoor areas, facilitating free blood testing for students, teachers and community members, and completing infrastructure repairs.

    District officials also said they will continue to do more lead testing through the end of the year and promise more transparency.

    “We have instituted improved protocols to ensure we are more transparent and more consistent in our communication with our families and staff,” a statement said. “We will inform you before any testing begins at your school.”

    A priority has been to install more FloWater machines, which are filtered refillable water stations, the statement said. Most schools have at least two, and 60 additional machines were installed this school year. The district plans to install 88 more.

    Lau said she and her classmates were given reusable water bottles and told to only drink from purification water stations or bottled water. If a student forgets to bring a water bottle to school, there are extras, but not always, she said. The last resort is asking a friend for a drink from their water bottle or purchasing bottled water.

    “Please fix this issue,” Lau said. “I don’t want to be drinking lead. I don’t want lead anywhere near me. I want to be safe; I want to grow up safe.”





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  • How Oakland Unified is helping immigrant students fill education gaps

    How Oakland Unified is helping immigrant students fill education gaps


    Teacher Shannon Darcey helps a student interpret a graph.

    Zaidee Stavely / EdSource

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    In her home country of Guatemala, Maribel attended a one-room schoolhouse for two years, but the teacher was often absent, causing class to be canceled. She never learned how to read. The school closed during Covid, and she never returned to class until last year, when she moved to Oakland.

    Now 11 and enrolled in middle school, she is learning English and at the same time filling gaps in her education — how to read, interpret graphs and acquire other skills she never learned before.

    Maribel’s school, Urban Promise Academy, is one of four middle and high schools in Oakland trying out a new curriculum developed just for students who did not attend school for years in their home countries. School staff asked EdSource to only use middle names to identify students because they are recent immigrants. There is heightened fear among immigrant students and families because of the Trump administration’s promises to ramp up immigration enforcement.

    In Maribel’s classroom, though, no fear was palpable. Instead, there was joy.

    On one recent morning in her English class, Maribel and her peers were analyzing graphs showing favorite colors, favorite foods, favorite sports and home languages among students in a class. They were practicing marking the x-axis and y-axis, pronouncing numbers in English and talking about what the graphs meant.

    “How many students like pizza?” asked teacher Shannon Darcey.

    “Eight students like pizza,” responded a student.

    Teacher Shannon Darcey teaches new immigrant students skills like interpreting graphs at the same time as they learn English.
    Zaidee Stavely / EdSource

    About 3,300 students in Oakland Unified this school year — close to 10% of the total student population — immigrated from other countries in the last three years. Of those, at least 600 had more than two years in which they did not attend school in their home countries. These students are often referred to as students with interrupted formal education, or SIFE.

    The reasons students missed school vary. Some lived in rural communities far from schools, for example. For others, it was dangerous to attend school because of gang violence or war in their communities. Other students simply had to work.

    When students haven’t yet mastered academic reading, writing, or math in their home language, they have a lot more to learn in order to grasp middle or high-school level material, even as they are learning English. But if the materials or curriculum are designed for younger students, it can be boring or seem too childish for teenagers.

    Before this school year, Darcey taught English to recent immigrant students with a huge range of academic knowledge. Some students were reading at seventh or eighth grade level in Spanish, for example, while others could not read at all. She remembers some students being frustrated.

    “I had one kid … Every single day for six months, he was like, ‘I can’t read. Why are you giving me this?’” Darcey said. “He felt like, ‘Everyone else in here knows what is happening, and I have no idea what this is. Why are you telling me to have a book in my hands?’”

    For years, Darcey tried to access curriculum designed especially for students who have had big gaps in schooling. She had heard about a curriculum called Bridges, developed by researchers at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. But when she tried to get materials from them, she was told they were only available for teachers in New York.

    Julie Kessler, director of newcomer and English language learner programs in Oakland Unified, said many teachers she has worked with in Oakland Unified and San Francisco Unified were frustrated at not being able to access the Bridges curriculum.

    “And so it’s like, who’s got a bootleg copy of it?” Kessler said. “And it’s just been inaccessible to the field.”

    She said she has often seen students with big gaps in schooling disengaged in class.

    “They are experiencing sometimes an alternate assignment, sometimes sitting with like a Disney book or a children’s book, when even the scaffolded newcomer curriculum is inaccessible to them,” Kessler said. “We were seeing a lot of that because teachers didn’t have a way to connect them to what was happening.”

    Last year, though, Kessler was able to secure funding from the California Department of Social Services’ California Newcomer Education and Well-Being program, to develop a new curriculum considering the needs of Oakland’s newcomer population and aligned to the California English Language Development standards. She worked with some of the authors of the Bridges curriculum, who now have an organization called the SIFE Equity Project.

    The resulting Curriculum for SIFE Equity is open source, available to all teachers anywhere on the internet. And Kessler said there are teachers in San Rafael, Elk Grove, San Diego and Vista using it, in addition to Oakland. Outside of California, the curriculum is also being used in New York City and Prince William County, Virginia.

    “We’re hearing a lot of gratitude from teachers who are like, ‘Oh my God, finally something that I can use with this group of students that feels worthy of their time, that feels respectful of them and feels like it’s doing the skill building that we know that they need,’” Kessler said.

    The curriculum currently includes about 50 days of instruction — less than a third of a school year. Kessler said the district is now trying to get more funding from the Department of Social Services to develop a full 180 days, so it can be used for a full school year.

    Darcey said the curriculum has made a huge difference. She now has separate English classes just for students who have gaps in their education.

    A student’s “identity map,” used to organize information that will later be used in a slideshow.
    Zaidee Stavely / EdSource

    The class began the school year with a unit on identity. Studens learned how to say their names, how old they are, where they are from, what language they speak. They later put together “identity maps” with their name in the middle, and information about their hometowns, their ages, their responsibilities, families and what they like to eat and do for fun written in spokes all around. Then they created slideshows with the information and added photos.

    Fourteen-year-old Anallely’s map shows that she likes salad, fish and marimba music, that she speaks the indigenous language Mam in addition to Spanish, and her hometown is in the mountains and forest of Guatemala, where it is hot and rainy.

    Anallely only attended school in her hometown until third grade. After that, she stopped going so she could work with her father, planting and harvesting coffee on a farm. 

    She said she had never learned about graphs or maps to organize information before coming to school in Oakland. 

    “It’s very useful, because you can use them to define how many people like something or which is their favorite, or where they are from,” she said in Spanish.

    She hopes to someday become a doctor to help babies and people who are sick. She’d also like to travel the world.

    Most of Darcey’s students are new to reading in any language, so Darcey also works with them in small groups to teach them letter sounds, and how to sound out syllables and one-syllable words like tap, nap and sat, using a curriculum called UFLI Foundations, adapted for recent immigrant students by teachers at Oakland International High School.

    Teacher Shannon Darcey works with new immigrant students on sounding out syllables.
    Zaidee Stavely / EdSource

    Another student, Arturo, never attended school in his life until he enrolled at Urban Promise Academy at 14 years old.

    “In previous years, a kid like that in my class, I would’ve felt like, ‘Oh my God, they’re like totally lost, and it feels like they’re just sitting there 80% of the time,’” Darcey said. But she doesn’t feel that way about Arturo. “He is engaged, he’s trying. Can he read the words on the page yet? No. But he’s still able to follow what’s happening.”

    Darcey is grateful to work with these students.

    “They bring such an eagerness and excitement, a willingness to try new things that maybe other kids their age are not as enthusiastic about,” Darcey said. “They often bring a work ethic that I think can really help a lot of them be successful in school.”

    Giving these students skills to navigate the world is important, Darcey said, because they are already part of our society. 

    “We’re going to prepare them to be successful in their lives,” she said.

    Maribel, the student who only attended two years of school in Guatemala, said she was afraid to come to school in the U.S. at first, but now she looks forward to it.

    “The teacher speaks some Spanish and she always helps us if we need anything,” Maribel said. “I can write some words in English now, and I’m writing more in Spanish, too. And I’m learning to read.”

    A previous version of this article incorrectly named the literacy curriculum Darcey uses as SIPPS. She uses UFLI Foundations.





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