In late January, on the morning of their son’s 11th birthday, Jeff and his wife, Lisa, received bittersweet news. Their application to transfer their fifth-grader out of his Oakland school and into the Piedmont district was approved, and they had to move quickly. It wasn’t necessarily the kind of news they would have chosen to share on their son’s special day.
“You gotta start next week, or else you lose your spot,” was the message they needed to convey, gently, knowing their son would be sad to leave his Oakland classmates just months before fifth-grade graduation.
The couple broke the news that same day. (They asked not to be identified to protect their family’s privacy. J. is using pseudonyms.)
“He’s like, do I still get to play Oakland Little League?” Jeff, 45, recalled. Jeff, who coaches the baseball team, noted that his son’s best friends from Oakland schools all play together on the team. “I said, ‘Yeah, of course you do.’”
The following week, the 11-year-old made the move to his new fifth-grade class in Piedmont.
The family was part of a sizeable cohort of Jewish families in the Oakland Unified School District who applied to transfer out midyear, feeling their children were no longer safe in their schools and the matter couldn’t wait. For many, the decision was connected to a string of harshly anti-Israel statements presented by the teachers union in October and November, followed by an unauthorized teach-in in December about the Palestinian struggle that included misleading and incorrect information. The teach-in prompted the U.S. Department of Education to open an investigation of possible discrimination on the basis of national origin, or “shared Jewish ancestry,” in the OUSD.
“They’re just lying to these kids, or they’re telling them half-truths, one-sided stuff, and it’s like, I don’t want my kid part of it,” Jeff told J. “So we applied to Piedmont, and it’s been great so far.”
To examine the volume of Jewish families that switched schools midyear, J. filed public records requests with the Oakland and Piedmont districts. The released documents showed that between October 2023 and February 2024, 33 Jewish students within the Oakland school district, pre-K through 12th grade, sought and received approval to exit OUSD and transfer to Piedmont.
Not all 33 students applied to Piedmont schools immediately. Some families chose to wait until after March 1, the application period for the next school year.
Between March 1 and May 8 of this year — a little over two months — 261 transfer requests were received by the Piedmont district, driven in part by Jewish families seeking to leave Oakland schools. By comparison, between March 1 and Aug. 24, 2023 — a little under six months — the Piedmont district received just 86 transfer requests.
Leaving OUSD: A difficult decision
Each of the 33 applications from Jewish families seeking a transfer out of OUSD cited student “health and safety” concerns and included written statements from the Jewish parents, with identifying information redacted.
In one such request from November 2023, the parent of a sixth-grader wrote that “just last week, our daughter experienced a frightening moment when a friend took a classroom globe and began scratching Israel off the map, stating that her mother is a teacher in OUSD and is teaching her students along with this child that Israeli people do not deserve to exist.”
A Jewish parent of two 10th-grade sisters at Skyline High School applied to transfer out in December, describing how one of her daughters was changing in the girls’ locker room when “someone put her Jewish star necklace in the garbage.”
Several of the families who got approvals and decided not to switch midyear told J. they chose to wait and reapply to transfer in August, a less disruptive transition.
Jeff and Lisa also submitted transfer applications for their two older children — their daughter in middle school and son in high school. Due to limited space in the high school class, only their daughter got into the district, Jeff said; she will start in Piedmont next fall.
Sarah, a parent of two Glenview Elementary students in kindergarten and third grade, declined the opportunity to send them to Piedmont schools next year after getting approval. She asked J. not to use her last name because she works for OUSD.
“We decided for now our elementary schoolers are ‘safe’ enough and the transition would be pretty rough on them. We are going to revisit in 2 years when our son needs to pick a middle school,” she wrote in a text message to J. “We are much less comfortable with the climate in OUSD middle and high schools right now.”
When Betsy Block toured the Piedmont elementary school her fourth-grade son was about to transfer into after winter break, she was overcome with emotions.
As she passed by a winter holiday display recognizing different cultures, she noticed that a book about Hanukkah was included. “I cried,” she said, feeling a sense of acknowledgment that was absent from her family’s experience at OUSD.
“It’s nice to be somewhere where my kid matters too,” Block said.
In January, Block’s son joined his new class at Piedmont and the transition went smoothly.
“His two best friends from Sunday school happen to be in the class he got into,” Block said. “That’s just luck.”
Anti-Israel actions at OUSD
A number of incidents contributed to the decision of many parents to transfer their children out of OUSD. On Feb. 28, two Oakland schools participated in walkouts in solidarity with Palestinians a few days after an unauthorized teach-in organized by Oakland educators and labor union leaders.
One of the walkouts saw dozens of students from Westlake Middle School making their way through downtown Oakland toward Frank Ogawa Plaza and Oakland City Hall, led by a teacher chanting “From the river to the sea.” Some students carried signs reading “Ceasefire” and “Free Palestine,” while others held the Palestinian flag. A girl wearing a gray sweatshirt and ripped jeans waved a Pan-African flag of red, black and green that is also known as the Black Liberation flag.
Oakland Technical High School students also reportedly participated in a pro-Palestinian walkout that day.
Three days prior, the meeting and teach-in that inspired the walkouts were scheduled at Westlake Middle School, but participants showed up to find the school locked. They migrated to the nearby Oakland Peace Center, later referring to “Zionists” and others trying to prevent the event from taking place.
Three groups that publicized the walkout on social media — Jewish Voice for Peace, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, and Bay Area Labor for Palestine, which is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America Bay Area chapter — referenced an “attempted repression of our collective movement.”
Stephanie Mamane, a Jewish parent whose son graduated from an OUSD middle school and is now in private school, showed up along with a handful of other Jewish parents as observers, she said. She estimated that roughly 150 people came to support the teach-in.
Lara Kiswani, the executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, gave opening remarks. As Kiswani spoke, Mamane held a sign that read “Promote peace, not hate.” She told J. that she and other Jewish parents were pushed back from the gathering.
“There were people that were assigned to block us with other signs and create a barrier for us to not be able to move much,” Mamane said.
The Jewish parents left, Mamane said, so she was surprised hours later to read an email from Bay Area Labor for Palestine thanking teach-in participants for the successful gathering “despite efforts by the Oakland school district and Zionists to prevent us from meeting. … The staff and the students are not taking the attempted repression of our collective movement sitting down. The Westlake community has organized a walk-out … followed later in the day with a standout at the OUSD School Board Directors meeting.”
The pro-Palestinian teach-in and subsequent walkout stunned one Jewish father of an eighth-grader in OUSD. He asked not to use his name due to concern for his family’s safety. “The use of the school that day crossed the line for me,” he said.
He fears that the facts and history of Zionism are not being taught in schools and said Jewish students are being labeled as Zionists in a derogatory way.
“Ultimately I’m worried about it creating an environment for students not to feel safe in classrooms,” the father told J. in February.
His eighth-grade son will attend a private high school next year for a variety of reasons, he told J. recently, noting that the climate around Israel and antisemitism was “certainly a factor.”
Messages from OUSD
An email from OUSD recognizing Arab American Heritage Month went out to all district parents on April 1. Included was a resource guide that depicted a map of Arab countries that showed the geographic outline of Israel, but labeled it as Palestine. There was also an image of a pro-Palestinian mural depicting protesters holding signs, one of which read “Zionism is racism.”
Multiple Jewish parents wrote to J. to express their shock and outrage over what they perceived as an erasure of Israel from the map, and the anti-Zionist message of the mural.
Meanwhile, two Jewish parents later told J. that they appreciated OUSD’s email in early May recognizing Jewish American Heritage Month, which highlighted notable local Jewish leaders and educators and affirmed the district’s commitment to stand “firmly against antisemitism and united against all forms of hate.”