1,000 more students leave Oakland schools each year than transfer in 18%
By Ashley McBride0%
7/16/2026, 8:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Self-Serving Bias, Negativity Bias, and Optimism Bias, with Ambiguity (Equivocation) as the most egregious example at 14.2% saturation with 236 hits. Analysis detected 1,919 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,662 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 33.1% and a BS Rank of 18% (14,074 of 17,000 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 82.80% of the article peer group.
Over the last five years, Oakland Unified School District has invested millions of dollars in stabilizing enrollment, by allocating funds to hire more enrollment staff, help schools market themselves, and carry out social media and advertising campaigns encouraging parents to enroll their children in OUSD.
An Oaklandside analysis shows that Piedmont, Berkeley, and San Leandro are pulling in large numbers of Oakland students.
OUSD enrollment has still been ticking up.
Yet another threat has been quietly growing.
“We continue to face enrollment pressure from competing systems,” Kilian Betlach, OUSD’s executive director of enrollment, told the board earlier this year, including from private schools, charter schools, homeschooling, and interdistrict transfers.
His April report included a flyer from Piedmont Unified School District — a small but moneyed enclave in the center of Oakland — encouraging families living outside of Piedmont to apply to the district through the interdistrict transfer process.
In California, state funding is tied to attendance — the more students who show up each day, the more revenue the district receives.
So if fewer kids are enrolled, state funding will inevitably decline, deepening the districtʻs chronic budget crises.
District leaders have settled on maintaining enrollment and increasing attendance as a key part of the district’s plan to reach financial sustainability.
And OUSD faces several challenges in hitting those goals.
OUSD does not make its transfer data public-facing.
So The Oaklandside sought 10 years of interdistrict transfer data from the district through a public records request.
The district said it didn’t even track those records until the past few years, and initially turned over only four years of data, going back to the 2022-2023 school year.
During that time period, we found, 5,603 Oakland families requested a transfer and 4,232 were granted.
The number of approved requests has increased each year, with the 2025-2026 school year seeing a 60% increase in approvals over 2022-2023.
During those years only 46 students total requested to transfer into OUSD from other districts.
Eleven of those transfers were approved.
The contrast between the thousands of outgoing students and 11 incoming students seemed incredible, so we wrote to Geri Baskind, the district’s public records custodian to clarify whether the data we received included all incoming transfers.
“If they list Oakland as the requested district, then they would be incoming,” she said.
Betlach, the enrollment director, said those who enroll in OUSD through the transfer process don’t have to submit a new request each year; that’s a process required by one nearby district, Berkeley, which could slightly inflate the outgoing numbers there, which made up 938 of the total transfers out.
He added that OUSD is also in the process of cleaning up previous poor data management on incoming transfers.
Much of the data we received was imperfect, with misspelled district names, ambiguous acronyms (for example, listing AUSD as the requested district without clarification about whether this refers to Albany, Alameda, or Antioch Unified), incomplete fields (such as leaving the required “request reason” blank), individual schools listed for requests rather than districts, or other errors.
Our analysis doesn’t include 261 entries that were in the data but did not list a transfer decision or the destination district was not discernable.
Over the last few years, OUSD has transitioned from a paper-based transfer application process to a digitized one.
The data we analyzed was from after the district’s transition to digital; the district later also turned over additional data from 2017 to 2022, data was based on the handwritten documents, which is not included in our analysis.
In its response to The Oaklandside’s request, the district’s public records office wrote, “All of this data was manually entered in the past before district digitized the IDT [interdistrict transfer] process.
As such, district cannot vouch or attest to the accuracy of those records, but is producing them as they are and as district maintains them.”
Betlach, who took over the enrollment office in 2022, said he drove the switch to a digitized system.
“When I started in this role four years ago, we had families carrying pieces of paper back and forth between districts,” he told The Oaklandside.
“Instead of having this piece of paper we created an online form that made it a lot easier for us to track and families to interact and get responses back.”
Betlach told The Oaklandside that OUSD receives roughly the same number of requests to leave as it does requests to come into OUSD.
“We have a really high number of folks who don’t live in Oakland, or used to or wanted to, but Oakland’s become an extremely challenging, financially difficult place to live,” Betlach said.
Altogether, in a district with nearly 34,000 students, a total of 705 live outside of Oakland, according to district data.
Many of the families requesting transfers to neighboring districts live near the borders of those districts, Betlach told The Oaklandside.
Piedmont, Berkeley, and San Leandro Unified received by far the most requests over the four-year period we examined.
During the 2025-2026 school year, for example, 457 requests were approved for transfer to Piedmont, 252 requests were approved for Berkeley, and 136 requests were approved for San Leandro.
Oakland schools, by contrast, are at only about 60% capacity, according to the district’s facilities master plan.
Medhekar, who was elected to the Piedmont school board in 2022, emphasized the need for collaboration and advocacy at the state level to improve school funding.
Betlach said having strict city boundaries around enrollment may not reflect changing realities about how people live and work, especially in the Bay Area.
“What do we know about how people live and commute in the Bay?”
Betlach said.
“Are we reflecting those conditions?
Getting to work in the city you live in is becoming a real privilege.”
In recent years, the school board has taken other steps to protect OUSD enrollment and encourage enrollment in the district.
As part of the enrollment stabilization plan, OUSD stopped using a shared enrollment platform with charter schools and stopped including charter schools on district-produced materials, such as district maps.
After a Montessori charter school closed last year, OUSD worked with the school’s leaders to bring the program to a district elementary school, which boosted enrollment there.
The board also updated the district’s enrollment policy in 2023 to ensure that district employees who lived outside of Oakland, or those who were not assigned to a specific school, could enroll their children in OUSD.
Previously, the enrollment priority for district employees only applied to Oakland residents who worked at a school where they wanted to enroll their children.
That ended up excluding district employees who worked at the central office or didn’t have an assigned school site, and any district employees who lived outside of Oakland, Betlach said.
The change, he said, “meant a lot more OUSD staff get their kids into our schools because they’d been priced out of the city.”
A parent’s employment in another city, followed by “continuing enrollment” — when a family has moved to Oakland but wants their children to continue attending their old school elsewhere — are the most frequently cited justifications for requesting transfers out of OUSD.
In California, individual districts are allowed to set their own policies for accepting or rejecting both incoming and outgoing transfers.
OUSD permits outgoing transfers that fall into nine primary categories: childcare, parent’s employment, sibling, health and safety, specialized program, continued enrollment, final year, change in residence, and other, and each request requires documentation.
Several of the categories are fairly objective.
For example, parent employment requires a parent to have their employer fill out a form attesting to the parent’s work schedule and address; a childcare request requires a letter from the childcare provider in another city certifying that they provide the student with childcare before or after school and take the child to or from school.
But other categories, such as the widely used “health and safety” category and the “other” category leave a great deal of discretion to the enrollment team.
For students from other districts requesting to come to OUSD, the enrollment office makes decisions based first on whether space is available and also evaluates the request based on the student’s attendance, behavior, and academics.
Families seeking interdistrict transfers must get approved both by their current district and their requested district.
Families can appeal a rejection to the Alameda County Office of Education.
Betlach maintains that most requests to leave OUSD fall under the more objective categories, but he acknowledged that some families use the process to shop around for what they perceive to be better schools.
“They use the interdistrict transfer process to balance out other outcomes,” Betlach told The Oaklandside.
“They didn’t get into the OUSD school they wanted, or they didn’t get into the private school or the financial aid package, and you see that in the way some of these are written and when families contest decisions and their rationale.”
Betlach said the enrollment office doesn’t consider the financial loss of some 1,200 students leaving the district each year in their decision-making process for transfers.
He and his team view the transfer process as a straightforward one: families who have a legitimate reason to leave will have their requests granted.
“We don’t look at it from the perspective of money,” he said.
“We look at it from the perspective of integrity of the policy.”
A note about the data: The transfer data The Oaklandside received from OUSD included hundreds of entries requesting “PUSD,” which could refer to Piedmont, Pleasanton, or Pittsburg Unified.
The districts was unable to clarify with certainty what districts this referred to.
In order to incorporate this data, we calculated the percentage of requests for each of the three P-districts, and applied that ratio to requests marked “PUSD.”
As 97% of the P-district requests were for Piedmont, we added 97% of the PUSD requests to our Piedmont Unified totals.
Analysis
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