The Oakland Unified School District has for the first time acknowledged that multiple instances of one-sided instruction on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “numerous” displays of pro-Palestinian content in its schools over the past two years created a “discriminatory environment” for American and Israeli Jews, both students and staff.
The district released its findings in a Dec. 12 report in response to a series of complaints filed since November 2023 by Marleen Sacks, an attorney for the Oakland Jewish Alliance, a grassroots advocacy group.
“The numerous pro-Palestinian postings in District classrooms and school grounds, as well as the pro-Palestinian teaching that lacked multiple perspectives, communicating only a pro-Palestinian ideology, resulted in a discriminatory environment,” according to the OUSD’s Dec. 12 report sent to Sacks, who shared it with J.
OUSD did not immediately respond to J.’s request for comment.
In the past, the district has acknowledged that some incidents violated district policies, including about teaching “controversial issues,” and contributed to a “divisive and unwelcoming environment.” However, until now, only the California Department of Education (CDE) has described some of the incidents in OUSD as having “contributed to a discriminatory environment.”
Since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and start of the Israel-Hamas war, the district has received 28 complaints from Sacks alleging incidents of antisemitic discrimination, most of them centered around the district’s treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Oct. 7 attack and the war.
Starting with the second complaint, which she filed in December 2023, Sacks has requested that the district treat each as part of a broader allegation of discrimination against Jewish students and staff.
J. has reported on many of these incidents, including a Palestinian flag flying from a flagpole at Fremont High School in November 2023; an unauthorized anti-Zionist “teach-in” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in December 2023; a Montera Middle School teacher who displayed “divisive” posters outside of his classroom that Jewish students and faculty found “shocking”; maps of the Middle East excluding the state of Israel that were repeatedly distributed by the school district; and an Oakland High School assignment that falsely stated as a fact that Israel is “committing genocide in Gaza.”
The district had already responded to seven of Sacks’s complaints independently, but had stopped short of describing any incident it investigated as “discriminatory.”
Sacks appealed each of the district’s findings to the CDE, which determined this fall that on six occasions, the district failed to acknowledge the discriminatory nature of the incidents.
In its Dec. 12 report, OUSD sought to resolve 16 additional complaints en masse.
One of those complaints alleged that a Palestinian flag was flown from the flagpole outside of United for Success Academy in early October 2025. The OUSD report confirmed the allegation about the middle school and that “when alerted, the school removed it,” as J. reported in early November.
The report also acknowledges that several Jewish families left the district in the middle of the 2023-24 school year. In May 2024, J. reported that more than 30 families had applied to transfer their children to the Piedmont Unified School District after Oct. 7.
Families cited “the reason for the transfer as a discriminatory environment and fear of antisemitism for their children due to their Jewish and/or Israeli identity,” the Dec. 12 report said.
In response to the incidents, the district’s new report lists a series of trainings it intends to give its faculty and staff as its corrective actions.
However, Sacks sees that response is insufficient.
In particular, the district confirmed several allegations about “pro-Palestinian propaganda” on display at school campuses and inside classrooms. In a new appeal that Sacks filed with the CDE on Dec. 17 over the district’s latest response, Sacks noted that the district did not specify how it will handle such displays moving forward.
“If you make a finding that the presence of these images all over the district contributes to a hostile environment, then at a minimum, you would expect the district to commit to taking all of that stuff down and doing it immediately,” Sacks told J. “But that was very notably absent from their corrective actions.”
In March, Sacks and the Oakland Jewish Alliance filed a lawsuit against the district in the Alameda County Superior Court alleging widespread antisemitic discrimination in the district. Sacks said she is currently in settlement talks with the district on behalf of OJA.
The ultimate goal of the lawsuit, she said, is to “fix all of the problems we outlined in the complaint, so that those findings don’t happen again. To ensure the district does timely, thorough, and accurate investigations, stops the discrimination and harassment that is leading to Jewish families leaving the district, take down the posters and flags, and stop the politicization of classrooms.”