Charter schools can choose to merge before a closure forces the issue, and Oakland has already seen it work. This year, Amethod Public Schools merged Downtown Charter Academy (DCA) with Oakland Charter Academy (OCA), giving OCA students enrollment preference at DCA, a school ranked in the top 10% of state middle schools by U.S. News & World Report. The merger increased DCA’s diversity and put the combined school on a more sustainable financial footing. Amethod made that call itself.
Families in Action believes the charter sector carries its own responsibility to build schools that are equitable and sustainable, regardless of what OUSD does with the 80 schools (not including preschools) it runs directly. Oakland operates twice as many schools as similarly sized California districts, and its schools serve 425 students each on average, far below Riverside (809) or Fremont (778). That imbalance strains every school in the city and is part of why so few Oakland families have enough quality options to choose from.
Photo credit: Amir Aziz/The Oaklandside
The DCA-OCA merger shows charter operators can respond to it on their own terms, ahead of a crisis, in a way that strengthens the schools involved instead of just closing one, and it is not the only network doing it. Aspire merged Triumph and ACA into Aspire Triumph College Academy (ATCA) for the 2025-26 school year, and AIMS merged its 6-8 program into its K-8 school in the summer of 2026.
More Oakland schools thinking this way would be good for the city. A proactive merger lets operators plan for where students land, protects the programs those students rely on, and keeps the relationships families have built with a school intact. That kind of thinking should guide every Oakland public school, charter and district-run alike.
Not every Oakland charter school gets the chance to make that call itself. Aspire Golden State College Preparatory Academy’s 2024 graduating class posted the highest graduation rate in Oakland, 100%, at a school where 95% of students were Black and Latino. The OUSD board still voted not to renew it, closing the school despite that record.
Luan Nguyen, a FIA student leader, faced the same kind of vote. He spent his senior year at Oakland High School after Oakland Charter High School closed following his junior year.
Luan reading an original poem as a 2026 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Honorary Finalist
During the renewal process, he testified before the OUSD, Alameda County and State boards. “As a student, you don’t expect to be asked to defend your school in front of people who have the power to close it,” he said. A merger planned well ahead of that kind of vote gives students a landing spot they help shape, not one that arrives after the fact.
The uncertainty is hard on families either way. Marlyn Lemus’s daughter had attended The Community School for Creative Education, a short walk from home, since kindergarten. When Marlyn learned last spring the school would close, she said that was the moment she really found out what stress is, as she scrambled to find a new school for her then-rising 7th grader.
“My daughter has an IEP and her previous school has the right programs to support her,” Marlyn said. “I also participated there a lot as a parent. They knew our history and we had trust. But then we had to start over.”
The more Oakland charter schools follow the DCA-OCA model, the fewer families will face what Marlyn’s did. “It’s been brutal to see how she was affected,” Marlyn said. “But it is not going to change our goal of getting her to graduate and go to a university, and look forward to her future.”
Over the last year, Oakland’s charter schools have shown what quality-driven action looks like: merging, redesigning and closing when it serves students better, not simply because a school happened to already be open. Oakland runs twice as many schools as similarly sized districts, competing for too few students. Proactive consolidation, the kind DCA, OCA, ATCA and AIMS all chose for themselves, is how Oakland builds a school system that works for every family it serves.
