It’s School Principals’ Day, unbeknownst to Jimmie Brown, and De’Von Maynard’s fourth-grade class has a presentation for him. One student sings “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Another student shares their appreciation for him in Arabic and another in Punjabi. The entire class gives him handwritten cards. In the transitional kindergarten class, students present him with a poster with handprints all over it. The poster reads, “Hands Down You’re the Best Around.”
It’s a different sight than what Brown, the head of school at North Oakland Community Charter School, encountered when he first got here. An Alabama native, Brown worked to turn around schools in New Orleans and Atlanta before joining NOCCS in 2022.
“I remember first coming through those doors and there were a lot of kids having meltdowns … it was chaotic,” Brown told The Oaklandside about his first visit to the school. “God just spoke to me and told me, ‘You can do this.’”
Brown survived that first year, but now the school community is facing its biggest hurdle yet.
One of Oakland’s longest-standing charter schools, NOCCS is at risk of closing its doors this year, following years of enrollment decline, leadership changes, and financial difficulties.
Now, school leaders and families are resisting the voluntary closure agreement outlined in a contract the previous head of school signed with Oakland Unified School District, its charter authorizer. School and parent leaders want an opportunity to renegotiate the memorandum of understanding, given the academic gains they’ve made, new school leadership, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on all schools.
They want an opportunity to finish out their charter term, which expires in 2028. They’re preparing to mount a costly legal fight and have sent OUSD a notice of intent to sue if they aren’t given the opportunity to renegotiate the contract terms.
“We’re asking for the school board and office of charter schools to sit down with us at the table and review the old terms and see if they make sense,” said Shae’Onna Muhammad, a NOCCS parent. “We feel that the direction we’re taking, if we can get through this storm, we’ll have an opportunity to have higher enrollment and a more balanced budget.”
Muhammad first enrolled her eldest son at NOCCS more than 10 years ago when he was in second grade. Now her daughter is in second grade there, and she’s the NOCCS school board chair. She’s seen how the school has evolved over the years, how it pivoted during the pandemic, and how things have improved since hiring Brown.
An agreement with Oakland Unified requires the school to close if certain test scores aren’t met
The memo in question was first signed in December 2019, during the school’s renewal process. At the time, D.M. Kloker was in his second year as the head of school. While he was experienced as a principal, Kloker had not led a charter school before, so he was somewhat unfamiliar with the charter renewal process. While he felt the school had good foundations, there was a lot of room to improve, he told The Oaklandside in an interview last week.
The initial agreement was signed in December 2019 by NOCCS leadership and approved by the OUSD board in January 2020. It noted the school’s declines in academic performance and granted a five-year renewal on the condition that NOCCS close its middle school and improve scores on the Smarter Balanced assessments in math and reading overall and for specific student groups during the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years. The contract was amended in December 2020 to extend the timeline to the 2022-2023 school year because standardized tests were interrupted during the pandemic. If OUSD determined that NOCCS had not met those standards and breached the contract, the school would voluntarily close.
“Essentially my argument was that I think the bones are strong here, and with some good leadership and really intentional work we could turn this situation around,” Kloker told The Oaklandside. “If the pandemic hadn’t happened, I really do believe that everything that was written in the MOU was feasible.”
At the time, Kloker felt the biggest gap was in instruction. But the upheaval of the pandemic forced his priorities to change. With the school’s budget strained, Kloker said he tried to stress that running a single-site charter school was not financially sustainable. He suggested to the district and board that the school take a different direction—perhaps merging with a district school, similar to Roses in Concrete Community School, a charter that merged with Howard Elementary in 2020 to form Oakland Academy of Knowledge.
“The biggest thing for me was that it then became really hard to envision what success was going to look like, given the budget deficits we were facing and there was no magic pot of money,” Kloker told The Oaklandside. “If the pandemic hadn’t happened, if I could’ve kept 100% of my energy on what we needed to do—hire and train really effective educators—I think we would’ve done it. But that clearly wasn’t what happened, and in March of 2020 I had to go into a very different mode as principal.”
Kloker left NOCCS in 2022. Since taking over as head of school, Brown and his staff have added a social and emotional learning block and have teamed up with Reading Partners for literacy support. Staff morale is at an all-time high, said Cennie Scott, Brown’s executive assistant, who joined the staff the year before Brown did. They’ve introduced a peer mentoring program, where fifth-grade students partner with younger students and check in with them daily. They launched Saturday academies to help students in math and reading, incorporate music and arts every day, and held an all-day readathon with parent volunteers.
Last month, NOCCS was recognized by Families in Action for making double-digit gains in English and language arts proficiency among Black students: From the 2021-2022 school year to the 2022-2023 year, the proportion of Black students who met grade-level standards in reading rose from 7% to 38%. The certificate is proudly on display at the school’s front entrance.
School leaders recognize there’s room to grow: Overall, 40% of NOCCS students are at grade level in reading, and 12% are proficient in math, according to test scores from the 2022-2023 school year. Another focus is increasing enrollment–and thus increasing school revenue. In 2017, 226 students were enrolled. Last year, there were 119. School and parent leaders believe that, if they’re given the opportunity to stay open, they can continue the turnaround.
At the same time, NOCCS leaders say the school’s performance during the pandemic mirrors that of Oakland schools more broadly. In the 2018-2019 school year—the last complete year of testing before the pandemic—33% of Oakland public school students met grade-level standards in reading and 27% met them in math. In the 2022-2023 school year, the latest for which data is available, 33% of Oakland students were proficient in reading and 25% were proficient in math. Between 2017 and 2023, OUSD has seen an 8% decline in enrollment.
“It is unconscionable that the Oakland Unified School District is enforcing this contract based on the academic performance of NOCCS during a worldwide pandemic when families and students in this community were suffering the most,” said Jaime Colly of the California Charter School Association. “This contract offers no due process for the NOCCS school community, and CCSA is unaware of any other public school in Oakland that is being targeted in this manner.”
North Oakland Charter School community members say they’re asking for compassion
In March, the OUSD board voted to send a letter to the NOCCS board saying the school had breached the agreement and must voluntarily close by June 30. Five school board directors approved the notice, while directors Jorge Lerma and Clifford Thompson abstained. The school board’s president, Sam Davis, told The Oaklandside he sees similarities between what NOCCS is dealing with and the issues affecting Oakland Unified.
“It’s a strange role reversal where I feel like what I’m saying to the leadership of NOCCS is the same thing that Alysse Castro is saying to Oakland Unified,” he said, referring to the Alameda County superintendent. “What I see is a school that has declining enrollment, that’s been deficit spending and relying on its reserves, which are dwindling. All the dynamics you see here in OUSD you see in this very small school.”
In the approved budget for the 2023-2024 school year, the deficit was about $17,000, leaving the school with $446,000 in its reserves. Over the next two years, the fund balance is projected to grow to $593,000 and $724,000. The school is starting a fundraising campaign for the possible legal fight that is projected to cost up to $125,000. The NOCCS board is expected to vote on the closure by June 30.
Muhammad, the board chair, admitted that the school is still recovering from pandemic setbacks in academics and said its supporters are asking for compassion. At a recent town hall meeting, parents tossed around ideas for fundraising and making their case to the board. They plan to show up to school board meetings to speak during public comment and hope to ramp up recruitment efforts. A few months ago, the school had 75 interested families, Muhammad said.
“We have family members rolling up their sleeves, painting the walls, and asking for help. We’re trying to operate in a way that we don’t deplete our cash,” she said. “We’re spinning our wheels with a small group of people against a big entity. If only people knew how hard that feels.”
