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San Francisco

Oakland residents push back on elite private school expansion

Neighbors say area can’t handle its impact

Crystal Land, Head of School, Head-Royce School (Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, LinkedIn/Crystal Land, Head-Royce School)
Crystal Land, Head of School, Head-Royce School (Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, LinkedIn/Crystal Land, Head-Royce School)

An elite Oakland private school is facing pushback from neighbors over its planned expansion, mirroring a similar real estate battle not far away at UC Berkeley.

Head-Royce School, a K-12 preparatory school at 4315 Lincoln Ave., plans to expand its 14-acre campus by another eight acres and increase enrollment by almost 300 students, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Neighbors say the area, which is in a wildfire danger zone, can’t handle the impact.

“The noise, the construction, the traffic to get it done. We are stuck here, but they get to leave when they graduate,” Karen Young, a resident who’s been fighting the school’s expansion plans for 12 years, told the Chronicle. “It’s just too many kids… not enough space. You start complaining and then you’re the NIMBY girl.”

The school’s plans include a new performing arts center, a gathering space for students, a STEM center, outdoor classrooms, gardens, walking trails and an underground pedestrian tunnel.

It’s a familiar story in the Bay Area, where UC Berkeley was sued by a neighborhood group, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, over its growing enrollment, saying its environmental impact hadn’t been properly studied. While a judge ordered the university to freeze enrollment for next year, state legislators ultimately blocked that order.

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Head-Royce, which costs more than $48,000 a year for high school students, already owns the land where it plans to expand. It paid more than $10 million seven years ago to buy it from the city.

Head-Royce’s plans would let it increase enrollment to 1,250 over the next 20 years from 906. Crystal Land, head of the school, said the increase would also allow the school to offer more scholarships to its students who can’t afford to attend, leading to a more diverse student body.

“It’s going to allow us to think about the school not just today, but in 50 or 100 years for future students,” she said. “It’s a beautiful way, an important way, to serve our students more effectively both in terms of space and place.”

The city is conducting an environmental review of the project.

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[SFC] — Victoria Pruitt

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Oakland