In one of the more closely watched races this election season, the president of the Oakland Unified school board faces a challenge from a new OUSD parent who decided to jump into the race while her child was in kindergarten last year. 

Jennifer Brouhard, a retired teacher and a four-year veteran of the board, argues that the district has turned a corner under her leadership: a more solid budget, more collaboration between the board and the district’s senior leadership, and forward motion on academics. Arielle Fleisher, an OUSD parent and transportation policy manager, has a starkly different take. She believes the district is experiencing a crisis of leadership, academics and finances. 

OUSD’s District 2 stretches from Chinatown to neighborhoods east of Lake Merritt and north to Lakeshore and Crocker Highlands.

This year, the school board will be tasked with continuing to streamline its budget to avoid falling back into state receivership, hiring a permanent superintendent, and monitoring and improving outcomes for the district’s 34,000 students. 

Jennifer Brouhard: the incumbent

Credit: Courtesy Jennifer Brouhard

Brouhard was first elected to the school board in 2022 in an open race, after the District 2 incumbent, Aimee Eng, decided not to run for re-election. Brouhard came into office with a slate of anti-school closure candidates.

Earlier that year, the school board had released a plan to close or downsize up to 11 schools — including La Escuelita, where Brouhard was a teacher — prompting a wave of protests against school closures. Parker Elementary and Community Day School were ultimately closed and RISE Community School and New Highland Academy were merged into the Highland Community School. The following spring, after Brouhard and two other new members were elected, the board voted to reverse five additional closures that were slated for 2023. 

“I don’t think we can talk about the [district’s] footprint until we have resolved these budget problems and resolved our staffing problems, particularly at the central office and particularly with upper management,” Brouhard told The Oaklandside recently. “When we have resolved those problems, I think then we can look at our schools. But I think we have to be really clear that closing a school doesn’t save money.”

A recent Stanford University study looking at California districts found that closing schools did not substantially improve the financial standing of school districts. The study, by assistant professor of education Francis Pearman, found that closures led to enrollment losses, negating any savings the closures produced. 

One faultline in the school closure conversation is that OUSD has often targeted predominantly Black and Latino schools for closure — institutions that have been historically under-resourced and understaffed — which Brouhard said raised serious equity concerns. She noted that a decision to close a school has far-reaching consequences, including what happens with the vacant building. 

“When we close a school, we do have to offer it to charters,” Brouhard said, referring to Proposition 39, the 2000 state law that requires school districts to make empty facilities available to local charter schools. “We have 10 vacant sites where we’re still trying to decide what to do, which is a huge amount of property for us. These are not quick fixes.”

One alternative to closures, Brouhard said, would be for underenrolled sites to share their buildings with community organizations, health service, or adult education programs.

Disagreements over school closures became a significant point of tension between the school board majority ushered in after the last election and then superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell. A few months after Brouhard became board president in January 2025, the board separated from the longtime superintendent years before her contract expired. The board sought a bigger role in choosing an interim superintendent, Brouhard said, which would be facilitated by Johnson-Trammell’s departure.

The board never offered a full public explanation for Johnson-Trammell’s departure, but the decision to renegotiate her contract was mutual, Brouhard told The Oaklandside.

“I think we the board just saw things differently than the superintendent,” Brouhard said. “I have respect for the work that she did and I would have hoped that it wouldn’t have been as messy as it was when she left. My intent as board president was to allow her to renegotiate the contract and allow her to move on and go out with the credit for what she’d done.”

Tensions between the board and district staff have marked Brouhard’s tenure. Last spring, Brouhard and vice president of the board Valarie Bachelor introduced a resolution to cap spending in various areas, including contracts. When staff applied the cap, contracts with afterschool program providers were among the cuts, prompting outcry from students, families and community organizations. 

“I can admit that mistake, but I think what we tried to do with that is really rein in our contract spending, and what we got met with was resistance,” Brouhard said. “There wasn’t collaboration with the CBO [chief business officer] and then-superintendent.” 

There’s been additional high-level turnover during Brouhard’s tenure as board president. Last year, chief business officer Lisa Grant-Dawson resigned and chief of staff Dan Bellino was fired after then interim superintendent Denise Saddler brought forward a budget proposal without their input. 

Brouhard said she believes that she’s made progress with the current leadership of the district, including Saddler, whose title is now superintendent, and the senior leadership team. 

“When you can work together, you can begin to mold that vision together, which is what I think we’re able to do right now with Dr. Saddler,” she said.

Brouhard rejects the notion that the board under her leadership hasn’t grappled with difficult budget decisions, pointing to the hundreds of layoffs the board approved last spring. Those layoffs cut critical school site roles such as attendance specialists, literacy tutors and case managers as well as managerial roles in the central office. 

“It was very hard to make those cuts and layoffs, but we stood by it,” Brouhard said. “We knew we had to do it if we were going to keep our local control.”

Brouhard said she’s expecting a report on the impact of those cuts and a position control study, which would properly align school district roles with the budget.

Last year, the board needed to close a deficit of more than $100 million. Under Brouhard’s and Saddler’s leadership, the board hired consultants to help develop a fiscal sustainability plan and revamp how the district budgets. In June, the school board approved a budget for 2026-2027 that included tens of millions of dollars in cuts along with an intent to cut another $30 million this fall. 

In Brouhard’s view, at the root of the district’s overspending is a habit of dedicating resources to a variety of different programs and initiatives without stopping to evaluate whether they’re successful. 

“We don’t remove things that aren’t working,” she said. “We just keep adding and adding and adding. I think it’s time to do an evaluation of all the different things we offer and all of the programs we’re paying for … I don’t know how effective they are and we really need to have a way to assess them.”

A letter from Alameda County Superintendent Alysse Castro last week noted that the district has made progress in stabilizing its finances, calling the latest budget and fiscal plan a “materially stronger submission than the district has filed in recent years.” But she said there’s still work to do.

In the last year the board settled contracts with the Oakland Education Association (the teachers union) and Service Employees International Union (which represents school support staff), each with substantial pay increases. Brouhard noted that the district began the school year with 99% of teaching roles filled, saying this was a testament to the solid teachers’ contract. 

“I think standing with union workers is often misconstrued as ‘in the pockets’ of the union,” she said. “In my actions, I’m supporting the people who support our students. I want them well paid, I want them to have good health benefits, I want them to have good working conditions. We know that stability in our whole workforce matters to our students.”

Arielle Fleisher: the challenger

Credit: Courtesy Arielle Fleisher

Arielle Fleisher hadn’t always paid close attention to the Oakland school board. But when her daughter started kindergarten last year, she began watching school board meetings on Zoom and paying increasingly close attention to discussions around the budget and the superintendent. When the board was navigating a substantial budget gap and developing a plan to close it earlier this year, she wrote an explainer for parents.  

The more she watched, the more she sensed that the board lacked the kind of policy expertise that she could bring. Eventually, Fleisher decided to run. 

“I mean the capacity to do analysis, to build coalitions, to understand trade-offs, to work towards goals, data-driven decision-making, that’s what I’ve spent my entire career doing,” Fleisher told The Oaklandside. Fleisher works as a policy manager for Waymo and has held positions at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, a policy think tank; the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. She’s also served on the leadership team of the advocacy group Empower Oakland. “At the end of the day, looking at the situation that’s in front of us and feeling like I have the skillset to make a difference, I went for it.”

Fleisher said the school board lacks a vision that she thinks should be centered on students’ academic outcomes. She pointed out that the district’s last strategic plan ended in 2024 and the board and superintendent lacked work plans. Without a plan, the board has made decisions that appear haphazard, Fleisher said, such as cutting literacy specialists during a reading crisis and laying off attendance specialists and slashing the enrollment department while setting a goal to boost attendance and enrollment.

“I don’t know what the priorities are for our school district right now, and they should be getting our kids to read and write on grade level and graduating college and career ready,” Fleisher said. “Obviously there is a financial crisis, but everything to me is derivative of our student outcomes.”

Asked about what she thinks underlies the district’s structural deficit, Fleisher pointed to a few causes: enrollment being down over time, in part due to lower birth rates and families leaving Oakland, but also because of families not choosing OUSD and one-time COVID funding being spent down. She would like to see the board admit the gravity of the situation, and then lay out a vision to guide all of its budgetary decisions. 

“We need to look at this with fresh eyes,” she said. “What are the biggest drivers of our costs? Where can we try to increase revenues? How do we do the base staffing models and what can we centralize? What are the different programs that we run? Are those programs accessible? If we’ve evaluated them, what’s working and what’s not working? Why?” 

In developing that vision and budget, she said, everything should be on the table, including closing schools. She acknowledged that OUSD school closures have been traumatic in the past, and said district leaders need to hold onto those experiences and learn from them. Being a good leader means wrestling with uncomfortable topics, Fleisher said, rather than taking them off the table, as the current board has done with school closures. 

She cited a letter signed by a majority of OUSD’s school principals and sent to the school board in April, which stated candidly that the district operates too many schools for the number of students it enrolls. Fleisher also said in considering any closures, the board needs to reflect the community’s values and incorporate community input.

Ultimately, Fleisher said, the question of whether OUSD runs too many schools is the wrong one. 

“The [right] question is, ‘How do we organize our schools around the guarantees we want to make to every kid?’ — reading on grade level, doing math on grade level, graduating college and career ready,” she said. “I really want to refocus the conversation around our students, around their needs, and working backwards from that goal.”

Fleisher criticized the board for what she sees as a lack of transparency, noting the opaque way Superintendent Johnson-Trammell was let go, the $30 million in additional budget cuts for this year the school board committed to with few details, and Superintendent Saddler’s interim contract being extended for a second year with few updates on the stalled search for a permanent hire. 

“I would love Denise [Saddler] to interview for the job, but I think what we really need at this moment in OUSD is a visionary,” Fleisher said. “That to me is really what this moment calls for: someone who can step up to the plate and is really able to understand school districts through and through and how to accomplish student outcomes. We’re at a tumultuous time and we need someone who’s going to lead us into the future.”

Stay tuned for The Oaklandside’s continued election coverage, which will include profiles of the races in districts 4 and 6 as well as a look at who’s funding the school board campaigns — and who’s endorsing who. And join The Oaklandside at a candidates’ forum on Sept. 29 at Oakland High School.

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