The Oakland Community School is regarded as one of the nation’s first community schools – a model in which public schools partner with community organizations to provide comprehensive support services alongside traditional academic instruction. Many of Oakland Community School’s practices formed the blueprint for community schools today.
2. They established one of the most successful food programs
Many people are familiar with today’s free and reduced lunch options for students from low-income, but there was a time when free school meals were not common. “Children were expected to go to school and learn without any food,” Huggins said. This wasn’t due to parental neglect, she added. Many parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet.
One of the most significant contributions of the Black Panther Party was its free breakfast program. Launched in 1969, this program provided thousands of underprivileged children with free meals before school. When the Oakland Community School opened, it extended this support by feeding students and staff three meals a day at no additional cost to families.
Although the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts starting in the mid-1960s, the program only gained traction in the early 1970s — right around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975, the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it helps feed over 14.57 million children before school.
3. They used restorative practices and alternatives to discipline
Teachers at the Oakland Community School integrated mindfulness practices into the school day. Students practiced yoga and were encouraged to do yoga poses if they misbehaved in class. “We didn’t believe in sitting anybody in a corner or in a dungeon or in a basement or ostracizing them from class and making them sit alone,” Huggins said. “We believed that you just need to recalibrate.”
For instance, a student might be asked to do a tree pose — standing on one leg with arms extended — if they were unfocused. Difficulty with the pose indicated a need for better concentration. “We reached a point where students would say, ‘I’m not feeling focused. Can I go get myself together and come back?’” Huggins recalled. After lunch, students of all ages meditated for 3 to 4 minutes. Huggins said that former students often remember these meditation sessions fondly, even decades later.
4. Their motto was “the world is a child’s classroom”
Oakland Community School did not use traditional grade levels. Instead, children worked in groups based on their abilities in different subjects, according to LeBlanc-Ernest. The school operated on the belief that “the world is a child’s classroom,” focusing on teaching students how to think rather than what to think, she said. “They learned traditional academic information that was expanded and broadened because of the interests and the intentions of the staff.” Students engaged with the community through field trips to music performances and museum exhibits.
The curriculum went beyond U.S. History to include international topics. For example, students learned the capitals of every African country — a practice that was groundbreaking at the time. The curriculum emphasized the brilliance of students’ own cultures and others. “We wanted them to know about history. We wanted them to know about themselves as people coming from great ancestry no matter their race or ethnicity,” said Huggins.
5. The students and teachers at their school celebrated diversity
Huggins described those who worked at Oakland Community School as a “rainbow staff” that included teachers who left public schools to work at the so-called Panther School.LeBlanc-Ernest noted that the staff was diverse, with equal numbers of men and women.
Students came from various Bay Area cities, and while the majority were Black, the school also included White Asian, and Latino students. “We didn’t ever turn away a student because they were not Black,” Huggins said. Many are surprised by this diversity, she noted. “I said, ‘Why are you shocked? We were the Black Panther Party’ and they have to think about what they’ve been told.”
The school closed in 1982 after operating for 10 years, around the same time the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense officially dissolved in part due to government surveillance and attacks. “The principles, mottos and schedule of this school could be replicated today if someone chose to take it on,” Huggins said. With thousands of community schools in the United States, some may draw on the legacy of the Oakland Community School, even if indirectly, to address the needs of students and families. “It wasn’t easy. I want everybody to understand that,” said Huggins. “ The reward was in the faces of those parents and grandparents and aunties and uncles, the faces of the staff and most importantly, the lives of the children.”
In 2017, LeBlanc-Ernest started and directed The OCS Project where she preserves and shares the history of the school through recorded conversations with former party members and digital media. She has interviewed former students who have become teachers, changemakers, and culture bearers in the Bay Area and beyond. “[The Black Panthers] created a foundation for the students, for the parents, for the educators, who then took that with them into the different spaces that they moved into,” LeBlanc-Ernest said. “And I think that’s a lasting legacy.”
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Nimah Gobir: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir. The 1960s was a decade of social and cultural change. There was the civil rights movement…
[Martin Luther King, Jr. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood].
Nimah Gobir: Women’s liberation…
[May Craig question to John F. Kennedy (clip): …for equal rights for women, including equal pay…]
Nimah Gobir: Vietnam war…
[President Nixon Vietnam speech (clip): There were some who urged that I end the war at once… this would have been a popular and easy course to follow…]
Nimah Gobir: A moon landing
[Neil Armstrong (clip): …one giant leap for mankind].
Nimah Gobir: It was a time when the very fabric of society was being questioned, and people were having big ideas about how people think and how people are taught. It was also when the black power movement was getting traction.
[Malcolm X (clip): We are oppressed. We are exploited. We are downtrodden. We are denied not only civil rights but even human rights].
Nimah Gobir: The emphasis wasn’t on being free or access to white spaces, it was about empowerment and self-sufficiency even as widely accepted racist practices were trying to keep Black people down. It was during this era, in1966 that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense started in Oakland. They believed in Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense against police brutality.
Ericka Huggins: The first thing that drew me to the Black Panther Party that I always remember about it, it said the Black Panther Party for Self-defense and Self-defense, people get their hackles up about that.
Nimah Gobir: This is Ericka Huggins. She joined the Black Panther Party in 1968.
Ericka Huggins: People think that self-defense is physical. It can be and needs to be when necessary. However, this was about supporting people who live poor and/or oppressed.
Ericka Huggins: We said you cannot continue to kill us. You can’t break down our doors to our homes and shoot at us. You cannot arrest us, wrongly incarcerate us and beat and murder us while we are incarcerated. You cannot deprive us of food, housing, clothing and peace.
Nimah Gobir: Some of the more popular images of the Black Panthers are photos of armed men in berets looking out from behind these dark sunglasses. Or women – like Ericka – with afros waving flags and raising their fists. Even the United States FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover saw the Panther’s stance on protecting and empowering themselves as dangerous.
Ericka Huggins: J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panther Party is the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.
Nimah Gobir: The Black Panthers had a reputation as a militant group but they did way more than challenge the police and protest against racist policies.
Nimah Gobir: If you look up pictures of the Panthers– yes you’ll see guns and berets, but there are other images too. And the one that sticks with me is this photo of a Black Panther Party member putting down plates of food in front of young children. It’s a photo of their free breakfast program
Ericka Huggins: Children were expected to go to school and learn without any food. We knew because we were those children.
Nimah Gobir: They had a founding charter which included a 10 point platform. I won’t go into all of the points but it basically said that our people – Black people– need to be able to eat, find work and feel safe. This episode we’ll talk about point 5, a focus on a fulfilling and effective education system
[Bobby Seale Speech at Oakland Auditorium (clip): We want decent education for our Black people in our community that teaches us the true nature of this decadent racist society and to teach Black people and our young Black brothers and sisters their place in this society because if they don’t know their place in society and in the world, they can’t relate to anything else].
Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: Education was always important in the party.
Nimah Gobir: Angela LeBlanc-Ernest is a documentarian and community archivist from Texas. She has studied and written books about the Panthers pursuit of education.
Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: Whether it be the study sessions they had reading the different books by revolutionaries – political education classes is what they would call them – that were required, or whether it was party members tutoring kids in the local community.
Nimah Gobir: She told me the idea to create a school came about when party members saw how their own kids were mistreated in mainstream schools
Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: You had to start envisioning what society needed to look like for your child if they survived. Right? There is a sense so many of them didn’t think they would survive
Nimah Gobir: Party members started to conceive of a community-based alternative to the poor educational experiences they had as children. They were often disciplined harder and discouraged from asking questions. Their schools lacked supplies and books, and the curriculum rarely included stories of people who looked like them.
Nimah Gobir: So in response to this they opened the Intercommunal Youth Institute in east Oakland in 1971
Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: It was an old church that they converted into a school and so it was a small space. They decided that they wanted to start with the number they had, which was 50 students.
Nimah Gobir: Gradually, other people noticed that the students and families were being treated well at this scrappy little home school where they used mindfulness practices and restorative justice. Students were engaged, respected, and learning in an environment that valued their heritage and experiences.
Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: When the community approached the Black Panther Party, when it was just the insular home school to say, “Hey, can you make this available to the community, to children in the community?” That was a prompt for them to think more broadly.
Nimah Gobir: As new people joined from outside of the party, they began outgrowing the space and so they had to look for something more permanent. They changed the name to Oakland Community School and Black Panther Party member Ericka Huggins became the director.
Ericka Huggins: We opened the Oakland Community School in the school year of 1973-74.
Nimah Gobir: Students were ages 5 -12, so it was basically an elementary school, but there were no grades. They were grouped according to their academic abilities. They also had childcare for kids who were younger than five.
Nimah Gobir: Many of the students came from the Oakland area but some were coming from the greater bay area too.
Ericka Huggins: We had more than party members on staff. Not only did the people take their children out of public school, the public school teachers left, too, to work at… as it used to be, nicknamed the Panther School.
Nimah Gobir: This school is special for a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons is that it was one of the earliest versions of community schools in the country.
Ericka Huggins: The school was community based, child centered, tuition free, parent friendly and we paid special attention to children whose families had trouble with clothing and food.
Nimah Gobir: Nowadays when we talk about community schools, we’re talking about schools like this one, that provide for the whole child beyond academics. Often these schools have the things that families need located at or provided by the school. Oakland Community School provided groceries to families in the community and food throughout the school day.
Ericka Huggins: Three meals a day and I said it was tuition free. The meals were also for the students and staff of the school.
Nimah Gobir: If parents couldn’t afford the city bus. A bus from Oakland Community School would come pick their kids up. They used curriculum that actually reflected the students that were going to the school
Ericka Huggins: Our motto was “the world is a child’s classroom.” Which is a little different than the United States is the center of the universe.
Ericka Huggins: We talked about the enslavement of Africans. We talked about the indigenous people. We talked about the resilience and brightness of our ancestors and our generations up to them and how beautiful and bright they are. We always affirmed the children. We wanted them to know about history. We wanted them to know about themselves as people coming from great ancestry no matter their race or ethnicity. We didn’t ever turn away a student because they were not Black.
Nimah Gobir: Students at the so-called Panther school were Black –but they were also Latino they were white students they were Asian students and biracial students
Ericka Huggins: When people see this, they’re shocked, like, oh, why are you shocked? We were the Black Panther Party and they have to think about what they’ve been told.
Ericka Huggins: We were just brave and committed because it wasn’t easy. I want everybody to understand that it didn’t just appear itself as one community school with all angels floating around making things happen. No, it was hard work and. But the reward was in the faces of those parents and grandparents and aunties and uncles. The faces of the staff. And most importantly, the lives of the children.
Nimah Gobir: After about ten years of operation, The school closed in 1982 — This was around the time when The Black Panther Party officially dissolved after years of government surveillance and attacks. The free breakfast program is believed to have paved the way for expanding the government’s School Breakfast Program, which still exists today. And the Black Panther legacy is still in Oakland. For one thing, many members of the Black Panthers are alive today and physical sites across the city bear the Panthers’ name.
Nimah Gobir: Now, if we fast forward 40 years, what are Oakland Schools doing with that legacy? We’ll get into that after the break.
Nimah Gobir: Let’s jump ahead to present day Oakland. Angelica was enrolling in 10th grade at Oakland International High School.
Nimah Gobir: She was 18 years old and so nervous. Originally from Guatemala, she didn’t speak a word of English.
Angélica: Mi hermana me inscribió en esta escuela porque ella estuvo en esta escuela y se graduó aquí y pues me sentí nerviosa porque pues no sabía nada del inglés, nada, no entendía nada, nada.
Nimah Gobir: But her sister, who she was staying with at the time, was adamant about her going to school.
Angélica: Tienes que estudiar. Tienes que aprender. Es te necesito que tú llegas a otro nivel más que yo.
Nimah Gobir: Shortly after enrolling, circumstances for their family changed. All of the sudden, Angélica’s sister was providing for her kids,2 nephews, and Angelica. It was too much.
Angélica: Mi hermana ya no podía con muchos gastos porque ella tiene hijos también y ella tuvo que tuvo que mantenerme a mí y a mis dos sobrinos. Pero luego ella me dijo tú ya estás grande y pues ya no sé qué voy a hacer contigo y así lo siento mucho. Y pues ella se mudó y yo me quedé sola
Nimah Gobir: Her sister moved away and Angélica had to support herself, which meant she had to make a choice that so many students make: should she keep going to school or should she leave school to work?
Angélica: Tuve que salir de la escuela, tuve que irme y no tenía otra opción más que como mantenerme a mi misma.
Nimah Gobir: She decided to work. She didn’t feel like she had much of a choice. According to a report by the Urban Institute, nearly a third of students ages 16-19 are working and not in school.
Nimah Gobir: I want to take a moment to zoom out on Angelica and talk about the school district she’s in. Oakland Unified School District. It’s credited with being the first full service community school district in the nation. That means in all of their public schools they don’t just going to focus on academics, they provide other services students and families might need like food and social services. Is this starting to sound familiar?
Nimah Gobir: The superintendent Tony Smith who rolled out the plan for the community school district said that it has echoes of the Panthers and their deep care for kids. There are great examples of how Oakland Schools are drawing on the Panther legacy. And one of them is Oakland International School. The school that Angelica goes to.
Lauren Markham: Oakland International High School is a public school in the Oakland Unified School District that serves all newly arrived immigrant students, all of whom are English language learners.
Nimah Gobir: Here is Lauren Markham, one of Oakland International’s founding members.
Lauren Markham: Not all, but a lot of our students are coming from conditions of poverty. We have the highest poverty rate of any Oakland high school.
Nimah Gobir: When I walked through the school I could hear a bunch of different languages all at once. Spanish and Arabic are the ones you’ll hear most. It reminded me of the way Ericka Huggins from the Black Panther Party talked about the diversity of students and educators at the Oakland community school
Lauren Markham: We have students from about 20 different countries. I often describe our school as a delayed mirror of world events.
Nimah Gobir: What she means by this is that if something happens in a country far away. For example, if there’s political turmoil in Central America and it leads to a lot of refugees or asylum seekers, Oakland international will have an influx of these students a year or so later.
Nimah Gobir: More refugees arrived in the United States in the first eight months of 2023 than any year since 2017. Many schools across the country are trying to figure out how to accommodate an influx of migrant students.
Lauren Markham: Newcomer students fail at wildly disproportionate rates throughout the country. And we know that when any one population is failing, it’s a function of the system and not the students.
Nimah Gobir: The community school model is what enables Oakland International to support their diverse student population.
Lauren Markham: School Is not just a place where like learning and education and academics happen, but that all of these services that are around the classroom, that that connect to and support students lives, be it mental health services or health care or immigration legal services, which are all things that I think we do particularly well and that are particularly vital at Oakland International.
Lauren Markham: I always use this example, but like if someone has an abscess tooth, they’re not going to be able to focus on math. Right? And if somebody has a pending deportation hearing coming up and they don’t have an immigration lawyer, like, yeah, they’re not working on their group project.
Nimah Gobir: Working with newcomers makes the community school model really necessary
Lauren Markham: Because so many students are coming with limited not all, but a number of our students are coming, not necessarily entering like established communities or having like established social networks and therefore like don’t necessarily know where to go to get X, Y, Z thing, or the language that they speak isn’t represented at the social services office where they would apply for Medi-Cal or Cal Fresh.
Madenh Ali Hassan: Everybody’s taking what they need and nobody feels ashamed. I think sometimes there’s a stigma. Like, it’s free food, I don’t need to take that. But food scarcity is real.
Nimah Gobir: That’s Madenh Ali Hassan Oakland International’s Community School Manager, which means she oversees all the services the school offers in addition to academics. When I asked her what the school does really well. She said giving students and families food is their jam.
Madenh Ali Hassan: It’s a little bit of creative chaos but if you come out and see it it’s always just kind of sweet because everyone’s just taking what they need.
Nimah Gobir: In order to offset skyrocketing food prices, the school offers two separate food banks once a week.
Nimah Gobir: Just like how The Panthers saw a need in their community and provided free meals to children and families. Today we see Madenh and Oakland International doing something similar.
Madenh Ali Hassan: We typically set up right in front of the school. And so this is open for the public. So when the community sees it, there’s a line around the block.
Nimah Gobir: They also want to make sure they are serving their current students, so they have another food bank set up in the cafeteria. That one is just for their students.
Madenh Ali Hassan: Everybody’s taking what they need and filling their bags and students are doing the same in the cafeteria.
Nimah Gobir: Students who have dropped out of Oakland International also come to the weekly Food Bank. It’s relatively common for a newcomer to turn 18 and leave school to work. Oftentimes, working is necessary to pay back the people who helped them migrate to the US or to help out their families.
Lauren Markham: We understand, like this is the reality of your life and you have to tend to that.
Nimah Gobir: This is Lauren again, talking about students who drop out.
Lauren Markham: I also think that it’s reflective of our school, sort of not. Like understanding that what’s happening now is not a student’s fate forever.
Nimah Gobir: If a student needs help translating a document about a court hearing or filling out a paperwork. They know they will still be supported at Oakland International. Angélica felt that way too. When Angelica dropped out of school she got a job making sandwiches.
Nimah Gobir: Even though her circumstances made it so that she to work closing shifts. She knew she didn’t want to work in the same sandwich shop forever. So she had a conversation with her boss who let her work closing shifts so she could attend school again during the day.
Angélica: Entonces. Y mis maestros también se alegraron mucho porque yo había. Yo había ido cuatro meses y ellos me ayudaron también. Con todo. Todo. Animarme.
Nimah Gobir: When she returned to school she was welcomed with open arms.
Nimah Gobir: I found it really fascinating the way that staff and teachers at the school hold on to these two distinct realities. One being that students do better when they’re in school and the other is that some of them can’t make the decision to be there.
Nimah Gobir: When I went to Oakland International’s open house — it’s an event where they open up the campus to educators who are interested in seeing how they run things — I heard Lauren say something at the Open House assembly that I thought was profound.
Lauren Markham at the Open House assembly: A lot of what we do here is like, okay, we see the perfect version. We can whine for a little bit about not having that, but how do we get how do we approximate? That’s what we do as educators. How do we get closer to that given the resources that we have? And that’s the sort of scrappiness that is built into education.
Nimah Gobir: As someone who reports on education and talks to a lot of teachers and worked in education, this felt true and this reminds me of the panthers too in a sense. Because schools are essentially a group of people that are committed to striving for a really hard to get ideal.
Nimah Gobir: Many of the students who went to Oakland International come back to work there as adults because they see the way the community school model helps them support students better.
Nimah Gobir: Yasser Alwan came to Oakland international as a student in 2010
Yasser Alwan: We immigrated from Yemen, right before the conflict, the revolution, known as the Arab Spring.
Nimah Gobir: Now he’s a Newcomer assistant. It’s a position that started at Oakland International, where they’ll have specific people who are in classrooms like paraprofessionals to help students who are struggling. When I asked him why he came back and why he stays he said yeah sometimes there are really hard days.
Yasser Alwan: But I, I remember mostly the good ones. And for the most part it was mostly good days. And it’s just like that community is very strong and you’re like, very welcome in and like. I’m like, happier when I’m not around. And I think that’s what brings me back. Even through challenging times, I remember the good days. And I’m like, there’s going to be more good days.
Nimah Gobir: Karen Moya came to Oakland International as a student in 2010 also.
Karen Moya: We came from El Salvador.
Nimah Gobir: As an adult she joined the staff as a case manager
Karen Moya: I’m basically supporting students and their families to navigate the new systems in the country.
Nimah Gobir: When she is overwhelmed, She returns to something a colleague told her.
Karen Moya: Something that one of my colleagues said it’s like you can do anything and … You might feel that you’re not doing anything because you’re not seeing the results, but you are actually doing something. You are impacting their lives, you know, and helping them navigate the, the, the systems and the struggles of being, you know, an immigrant in this country. So I take that with me. And, and I think about it sometimes too, when I’m like, I’m helping this student and I don’t see the results that I want to see on my way, but I’m doing everything that I can in my hands to better support them and their families.
Nimah Gobir: Prior to this episode we did two other stories about community schools.
Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: I’m Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí and I’m the community engagement reporter at KQED.
Nimah Gobir: So Carlos is someone who has been with me throughout my community school reporting at KQED. He was with me during interviews translating Spanish. We’re coming to the end of our community school reporting this season and I wanted to reflect what it was like to really sit in these stories
Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Angelica was a little a little shy at first, a little nervous, which I, you know, completely normal reaction. The thing that stuck with me for just the whole day was just her, her, just like the like that she for her this whole, you know, like her leaving school and coming back. This decision. She really made it for herself. She understands the value of education. The things she was repeating again and again was like, I wanna learn English. When I first came to the U.S., you know, the first place that we came to was Oakland and I think that, when you’re in a school that sees a lot of kids come and go, you kind of feel like you’re, you know, you’re kind of like in the fight by yourself.
Nimah Gobir: I was talking to the community school coordinator and then also, one of the founders, and they were saying, like, it’s such a weird thing to do at a school where you like, see kids leaving, but you understand that, like, their realities are things that they have to deal with. And so you have to kind of let them go. But your job is just to be like when you’re ready to come back, like, come back here and like you’ll be okay. And it seems like they do a really good job of that versus like a school that would either be like, don’t leave and then like as soon as the student leaves, it’s kind of like, yeah, if I see you, i see you.
Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Totally, yeah. And that’s why, I really loved being able to accompany you on these trips because it just shows many ways you can interpret the community model. Where it could be a thousand factors that could, you know, change the outcome.That goes to the point we’re making that there is no perfect quote unquote perfect community school. There’s no perfect way to establish or create a community school.
Nimah Gobir: Thank you for talking to me Carlos.
Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Yeah, Thank you Nimah, this was awesome.
Nimah Gobir: it’s really always a pleasure to work with you.
Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Likewise.
Nimah Gobir: Whether a school is based in Oakland pursuing the legacy of the Panther School or elsewhere, educators can relate to the desire for systems that serve young people better. In the meantime, they keep tracking down quick-fixes, proven strategies and those hard-to-find sustainable solutions.