Twelve Oakland public high schoolers spent the first four months of this year embedded in our newsroom, thanks to a grant from the Stuart Foundation. They pitched stories, did the research, conducted interviews, and earned real bylines working alongside Oaklandside reporters.
This week, we’re highlighting some of what they found. You can read about the stories below, listen to the conversation above, or find it on Apple, YouTube, or anywhere you get podcasts.
A free bus pass that isn’t always free
Oakland doesn’t run its own school buses. Instead, public school students ride AC Transit, and Alameda County has offered them free bus passes for a decade. On paper, every OUSD middle and high schooler is eligible.
In practice, fellow Cesia Gonzalez and her co-reporters found families waiting months, sometimes years, for a pass to actually arrive.
One family’s wait became the throughline of the story: Oakland Tech sophomore Stephan Myers has commuted 11 miles from deep East Oakland since middle school, paying full fare or biking the whole way because his pass never came. AC Transit’s records show a card was delivered to his middle school back in 2022 — it just never made it to him.
Just over 31,000 students across the county are enrolled in the program, and Oakland accounts for more than 14,000 of them, but the agencies running it have only a handful of staff to process applications.
After Cesia’s reporters told the Transportation Commission about Stephan’s case, his pass came through — which the students say proves the point about what it actually takes to get one.
Read the story: A free student bus pass is great — if you can get it
School fights are spreading on social media
Cesia also worked with fellow student reporters Nathan Fuentes and Ashley Martin Chales to track down at least eight Instagram accounts posting fight videos filmed at Oakland Tech, Skyline, and Castlemont — including footage of a classroom attack and a parking lot brawl surrounded by teens recording on their phones. It’s unclear who runs the accounts.
District officials say the pages likely fall under OUSD’s cyberbullying policy, and the school board will consider updated discipline rules this August for students who film and post fights.
The reporting also surfaced a troubling detail connected to last November’s shooting at Skyline: a photo of a student involved in the incident, posing with a gun, had circulated on social media about two weeks before the shooting happened.
The district says it’s relaunching an upgraded anonymous tip system before the new school year, but a recent student survey found only about half of respondents said they feel safe at school.
Read the story: As school fights spread on social media, OUSD struggles to keep up
One school’s answer to the AP gap
Skyline High offers 17 AP classes, spanning subjects from biology to computer science. Nine other OUSD schools offer zero — a gap that also breaks down along racial lines, with Black and Latino students enrolling in AP classes at roughly half the rate of white and Asian students districtwide.
Castlemont High School has taken a different path entirely.
Rather than focus solely on an AP program, Principal Joseph Blasher’s team has deliberately leaned into dual enrollment, where college professors teach college-credit classes right on campus — no fee-based exam required to earn the credit.
Education reporter Ashley McBride sat down with Blasher to talk through the reasoning behind that choice, what makes dual enrollment different for students day to day, and whether he could be a model other Oakland schools could follow.
Read the story: Skyline High School has 17 AP classes. 9 high schools have 0. OUSD has a serious college prep gap
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