The FREEdom School is both an independent community-empowerment organization born in Oakland, CA, and an approach, a way of seeing our community through our strengths. We began as a volunteer-run, youth-development after-school program at Fremont and Castlemont High Schools in Oakland in 2009, then evolved to teach Ethnic Studies and Leadership courses in various Oakland schools. We offered weekly Homies Unity Dinners across gang lines as well as programs where youth can stand up for their rights during our first four years of operation. We were awarded for our work the Jefferson Award for Public Service.
Now, 13 years later, we have evolved from focusing merely on youth to being a community empowerment organization overseeing a Learning Center, a Care Center, the People’s FREEdom Store, and a FREEdom Farm. Our vision is to go from surviving to sustaining to thriving here in The Town and beyond. We believe that we have the power to get ourselves free and that begins with a solid, empowering education.
As such, we are currently designing a new school, The FREEdom School. We seek to be a real alternative school of choice for youth who are transitioning from middle to high school, but may be having a hard time in school. It is in that time frame that many kids get lost, and our alternative schools are not able to receive them until they turn 16 or until they have “dropped out” or been “pushed out” of other schools. We can’t wait until that happens.
Youth don’t need to have had a hard time in school to be eligible to attend The FREEdom School, but we are unapologetically focusing on kids who have historically received the least amount of privileges in schools and prioritizing them.
We also don’t see kids as “far below basic” or as “remedial,” as they are often labeled in schools, but rather as warriors, healers, scholars and hustlers. We seek to re-root our cultures, re-attach to our families and re-connect to our identity as a scholar that has been taken from many of our youth. We provide what we call “revolutionary love” through a secure base that includes a big homie mentor who is part of their lives for a minimum of four years, an advisor and an advisory school family that loops together during their high school years, as well as a community-based therapist – all as a complete base of support to help me students’ socio-emotional needs. As part of the re-rooting process, in year 2 of their language learning, we will offer indigenous and home base languages including Mam, Nahuatl, Arabic, Vietnamese, Tagalog and others both on-site and through free concurrent enrollment in our local community college system, Peralta Colleges.
We submitted a plan called a blueprint for a school inside of OUSD in 2018 and even joined the autonomous schools movement inside of OUSD to try to be an in-district public school. However, the district is not in a position to welcome new schools. Realizing that, we looked into the charter route both locally and in Alameda County, but have ultimately decided to pursue the fully independent route. We have done so because the only way to truly serve youth on the margins is to be able to have the four freedoms that every school deserves: hiring, budget, time, and curriculum. We need the freedom to hire the people who can best connect with our young people. We need the freedom to make decisions about our budget that can best serve our youth. We need the freedom to determine how we use our time to maximize our support for youth. Finally, we need full control of the curriculum so that we can truly indigenize education and re-root in a good way.
We are choosing the independent and sovereign path, and we are doing so in the barrio, at no cost.
(March 26th, 2022 – HECHOS Board Meeting: Unanimous vote to become independent)
This route will allow us to have elders as teachers, a sweat lodge in the school, the people we know that can best serve youth as part of our staff, and be able to do so without the limitations placed upon by the government that decide who can and can’t teach our youth. Currently, the public school system makes it impossible not only to hire grandmothers as lead educators, but even our own founder, Dr. César Cruz, who has 27 years of experience and a doctorate degree in Educational Leadership, but couldn’t be the principal because he lacks “certain credentials.” Being independent gives us the best opportunity and freedom to do so, so we will follow in the footsteps of the Black Panther Community Learning Center, Black liberation schools, the Freedom School movement, tribally sovereign schools and other trailblazing schools movement both in the U.S. and abroad.
Our focus is not to take students from the public, public charter or private school systems, it is to serve the youth who are falling through the cracks of all of those systems. We seek to partner with local schools and be a sister school that can best serve kids that no one else is able to serve.
(March 25th, 2022 – Tabling at West Oakland Middle School: Dr. Cruz and Ms. Pelayo)
We have been fundraising to make this dream a reality. We have received funding from our parent organization, The FREEdom School, our neighbors, community members, educators, activists, and also a variety of organizations. What we learned throughout the journey is that we must pursue funders who are aligned with our mission and vision and who will not dictate to us how we can best serve kids. If that is ever compromised, we will not pursue that funding. We won some school design grants from organizations that primarily fund charter schools, but when they learned that we are pursuing a fully independent route we have lost some of that funding. We are seeking to pursue funders that truly understand our vision and will grant us the freedom to achieve it.
We need a healthy place to grow a new school and new ways to support our youth. There are very few spaces like that throughout the country. That is why we are proud fellows of the NACA Inspired Schools Network, which centers indigenous education, re-rooting and sovereignty.
We will continue to share the vision of our school far and wide. Now, we are on a campaign to raise enough funds for 10 years of operating costs so that when we open our doors in the Fall of 2023 we can focus on what is most important: working with our amazing youth in the community without splitting our time with concerns over funding or authorizers.
We welcome you to champion the kind of school that our ancestors fought for and that, we hope, would be proud to see it grow.