Oakland School for the Arts
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Oakland School for the Arts is a charter school in Oakland, California.
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[edit] Founding and history
Oakland School for the Arts is a college preparatory, arts high school. It was founded in 2000 via charter from the Oakland Unified School District. It received 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in October 2001. In September 2002 OSA opened its doors to its first freshman class, the class of 2006. The school was the dreamchild of Mayor Jerry Brown and its first director was Loni Berry.
The school started at the Alice Arts Center building in downtown Oakland. It was moved to portables near the Fox Oakland Theatre during the 2004-05 school year. Mr. Loni Berry was director of the school for the first four years but was asked to leave by the school's board of directors the summer before the 2006-07 school year. Mr. Saul Drevitch replaced him in fall 2006. San Francisco School of the Arts principal Donn Harris replaced Drevitch in December 2007. Under special arrangement, Harris is leading SFSOTA half time and governing OSA half time until June 2008. Drevitch resigned because of "differences" between him and Jerry Brown and the School Board.
The first graduating senior class, the class of 2006, graduated with 100 percent of the class accepted to four year colleges. Graduates of '06 were accepted to a variety of institutions, both academic and artistic, including:Le Cordon Bleu California Culinary Academy Columbia University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, Middlebury College, Carnegie Mellon University, Wesleyan University, Mount Holyoke College, The Theatre School at Depaul University, Barnard College, Spelman College, Howard University, Berklee College of Music, Pratt Institute, California College of the Arts, Boston Conservatory, Fordham University, Texas A&M,Fresno State University, San Francisco State University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, California State University East Bay, Texas Southern University, and many others.
[edit] Overview
In the morning, Oakland School for the Arts students take academic classes like English, Romance Language, Science and mathematics. Oakland School for the Arts curriculum has met the requirements of all UCs. There have been some problems keeping a steady Physical Education program due to the great amount of focus on the arts classes.
Currently, there are five emphases at Oakland School for the Arts: Dance, Instrumental Music, Theatre, Vocal Music and Visual Arts. For the first three years of OSA's existence, there were eight emphases: Acting, Arts Management, Dance, Literary Arts, Instrumental Music, Theatre Design and Production, Visual Arts and Vocal Music. During the 2005-06 school year, Theatre Design and Production was merged into Visual Arts. OSA was faced with budget cuts during summer 2006 and chose to merge Acting, Arts Management, Literary Arts and Visual Arts and Design into one emphasis called Theatre. This arrangement, for Visual Arts, only lasted a year and administration has promised that Literary Arts will become its own emphasis in the 2008-09 school year. Oakland School for the Arts has currently implemented a 1 to 1 student to laptop ratio in the high school. The students and faculty are encouraged to utilize the technology throughout the curriculum.
OSA has been plagued by notoriously high faculty and student turnover and other management problems.
Some fallout hit the school after Jerry Brown made a novel arrangement to provide it with extra funding. Brown had a large, lighted electronic billboard with rotating ads installed at the busy toll plaza on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge, with the proceeds benefiting OSA. [1] The billboard became controversial in 2007 because it was so bright that motorists complained it impeded their vision at night, and some residents around the bay objected to its high visibility even from San Francisco and Marin.
In another minor controversy, Brown sent out letters to Oakland families recruiting them to apply to OSA in 2007 -- after he had become California state Attorney General, and using his title and the state seal. [2] Some questioned the legality of the letters, but the designated official to rule on their legality would be -- the California state Attorney General. Brown deemed the letters legal.
[edit] Location
OSA is located in a former parking lot, a temporary campus next to its future home, the Fox Theatre, which is in the midst of being renovated.
[edit] Middle School
Oakland School for the Arts first opened with a ninth grade class and added another high school grade each year. For the 2005-06 school year, though, a middle school was added. Administration went through great lengths to keep the "middle school" and "high school" separate, giving the middle schoolers a different entrance/exit and shorter school hours. Middle schoolers are only given one show a year (excluding the traditional all-school musical).
The middle school was given more privileges at the beginning of the 2006-07 school year, but they are not issued laptops or eat off-campus.
[edit] Performances
In the five years of its existence, OSA has produced a variety of different productions including A Midsummer's Night Dream, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Every year, students from each grade are welcome to audition for the all-school musical. The first of these was written by the school's first director, Loni Berry, and was based on the classic play Our Town. It was named "Your Town" and was performed four years later by the middle school. The other musicals that have been produced are The Wiz, Little Shop of Horrors, The Wild Party, Footloose, and The Sound of Music.
[edit] Ranking
OSA continues to excel on standardized tests. In the 2002-2003 school year, OSA received a score of 8 (out of 10) on the STAR test (the highest in OUSD) and in the 2003-2004 year, it received a 9, again the highest score in the district. While there was a significant drop in test scores during the 2005-06 school year, the school rebounded with improved scores for the 2006-2007 school year. It should be noted though that, due to the exceedingly low number of enrolled students at OSA, there is a high possibility of test score inflation.
